General Motors sure doesn’t think so…

Late yesterday, GM announced that it was pulling its $10M Facebook ad campaign. I believe the word that GM’s marketing chief used was “ineffective.”

I guess we can assume that GM knows if its own Facebook ads have been effective or not. The new Facebook analytics dashboard, along with any of the supplemental analytics tools GM may be using, makes it pretty easy to track campaigns.

The GM news was a huge surprise, especially two days before Facebook’s IPO launch. And especially after I had just read this report, projecting that FB and Twitter ad spending will double by 2016.

What gives? Are Facebook ads working or aren’t they?

That depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If your goal is to simply get more Likes or connections, extending your brand’s reach on social media, that’s certainly doable.

If you goal is to get Facebook users to click through and buy a car online…

Good luck with that…

What we do know is that advertising on Facebook is about a billion times more quantifiable than radio, TV, or magazines ads. It may not seem that way to old school advertisers who are comfortable with older, outbound marketing metrics, but it’s objectively true when you think about it.

CTRs, EPCs, and CPMs aren’t the absolute best metrics a marketer could ever hope for, but they’re much better than Nielsen viewership projections… way freaking better.

Perhaps that’s what made GM decide their Facebook campaigns were “ineffective.” To be fair to GM, maybe those ads were ineffective. Even so, shutting down their Facebook ads entirely seems a little radical. Could the ROI really be that bad compared with television?

With all of the analytics tools available through through the Open Graph, an abundance of useful pre and post-click information is now easy to get, even for small and medium sized businesses.

“Facebook opening its ads API to more partners, including those that work with SMBs (small and medium businesses), and Twitter’s self-serve platform will help to ‘democratize’ social ads, which will ultimately lead to more local growth,” says Jed Williams, BIA/Kelsey analyst and program director.

If SMBs can optimize their ads and increase their ROI, then why the heck can’t GM?