Edit: When you say you know lots of "marketers and advertisers" that are making money from ads, are you referring to resellers and providers of ad inventory and/or analytics, or are you referring to people who actually sell goods and services other than marketing and advertising inventory?
net present average customer lifetime value acquired per unit of advertising cost
If it's over unity, you're making money with advertising, if it's not, you're wasting money on advertising or need to increase your CLTV or decrease your discount rate.
What difference does it make? If it’s profitable, it’s profitable.
> And are you able to demonstrate definitively that a visitor from FB concluded a sale? If so, how?
Through the variety of existing measurement solutions, or a custom solution.
Twitter: https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-measurement-an...
Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/pixel-wi...
Google: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722054?hl=en
I don’t understand why you seem to think that companies are throwing tens of billions of dollars a year at Facebook (and Google, and Twitter) with not only no returns but also no ability to measure that lack of returns. It’s just such a ridiculous viewpoint to hold.
For some extremely simplistic e-commerce conversions, such as for referrals to SaaS, it is easy to measure. For entire swathes of consumer products, the game is brand recognition and other soft metrics that drive huge ad spends. You can pretend it’s a science, but the incentives are all upside down for a true end-to-end ROI determination.
It's trivial easy to add a tracking id to this (in-fact I think it is on by default)
And are you able to demonstrate definitively that a visitor from FB concluded a sale? If so, how?
I think people are a little confused about if you are trolling or you genuinely don't know.
Anyway, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/pixel-wi... (and plenty of other methods)
It's really, really easy. And that is why Facebook and Google are printing money - vendors know it works and can measure exactly how well, so they throw money at them.
There's hard, direct evidence involved in every step of the way.
