Are Facebook and Twitter Advert Results Just Guestimates?

I have been advertising on Facebook, Twitter and Google for many years now. One time I set up an ad, which directed people to an Ebay page. When the short campaign was over, I had 23 link clicks, costing £5.18, reaching 1,195 people. However, Ebay registered only 2 visits. I contacted Facebook and they said it was because Ebay registered visitors in a different way. I was still charged for these clicks though. I also did a campaign on Twitter and Facebook for my book in the last couple of days. These ads go to Amazon.co.uk. Twitter registered 27 clicks and Facebook 38 clicks. I had no sales at all. I don't even know whether anyone actually visited my book page. No idea. Having used these services a lot over the last ten years or so, I believe that social media advertising results, are a guess, based on what the algorithm thinks it should be. I know from my days as a marketing administrator, that you can only expect 1 or 2% of your adverts to lead to a customer enquiring about a product, who will buy, at a rate of 1-2% of those that enquire. This means that Twitter is claiming that out of a reach figure of 254 impressions, it has registered 27 clicks, which is a conversion rate of about 10%. This is a huge conversion rate.

Whether or not social media marketing platforms are guessing what the amount of clicks should be, or whether these are actual real clicks, is of course unknown. But should they have done this, across many platforms, not only is it a huge scandal, is would also mean that these firms would have to refund billions of dollars back to their big and small advertising clients. It may even bankrupt them.