The Collapse of Facebook & The Rise of X for Advertisers

Facebook has suppressed and throttled Ad Crucem, but X is the viable alternative. Ciao, Facebook.

Facebook was once critical for Ad Crucem’s growth. Using its finely segmented targeting options, we could burrow into Lutherans’ awareness when we were restricted from advertising through Synod publications. Facebook engagement and sales results were excellent value for money until 2017-18, when things started to change dramatically. It is now a hopeless and expensive relic that we are happy to discard, especially with this year’s results.

Facebook-sourced traffic has declined 36% for the year and 72% in November alone. Attributable sales have fallen 78% and 76%, respectively. Meanwhile, the price of converting eyeballs to checkouts has risen geometrically.

Image generated by Grok 2

No thanks, but it has been a helpful analytical exercise. Overall sales are pacing with 2023, a record year for Ad Crucem, so Facebook has made itself irrelevant. Secondly, we are tired of Facebook’s good-enough-for-government-work behavior and attitude.

The company has fiddled, throttled, and suppressed our follower count ever since Ad Crucem broke 4,000. Since then, it has been a slow crawl to 5,000, where the count has remained virtually unchanged until reaching 8,000 quite recently. We have been unfollowed by many people who said they never took the action. The wrong audiences engage with our Facebook campaigns, for example, cultural Roman Catholics who compulsively respond, “Amen” to everything because of superstition. That probably corrupts Facebook’s algorithms, but why remove the fantastic segmenting initially offered, especially for niche advertisers like Ad Crucem?

More egregiously, Facebook has declined advertisements with crucifixes for being “too graphic.” On one occasion, when we were foolish enough to build an advertising campaign on a weekend day, the entire account was blitzed without warning. It was eventually restored on the Monday during American work hours, leading us to surmise that an outsourced foreign worker was offended by the campaign content.

An Ad Crucem customer had a contact at Facebook, but she was singularly unhelpful, and the company maintained that everything was functioning as it should. You cannot call a central number, and e-mail responses have no human touch or identity. It’s an odd way to run a business. The tech giants have replicated government lassitude and unhelpfulness regarding customer service—everything has the appeal of an East Coast DMV.

By contrast, X has been hyper-responsive and helpful even though Ad Crucem has only recently begun advertising on the media channel. Initial campaigns are already showing far better results than Facebook and Google, and it is evident that there has been a significant shift in audience attention to the X platform.

Ciao, Facebook. We will not miss wasting money on your habitual overpromise, underdeliver model. We may be a tiny dot on a pimple for Facebook, but Ad Crucem’s experience is probably echoed across the market. Investors should take note of what’s happening.

Image generated by Grok 2.