It depends a lot on the product and the audience, but from my experience, you are never going to get results with your first $500 or $1000 on Facebook Ads, regardless your background. It takes a lot of trial and error just to understand what works, and then some more to drill down, get better, lower costs, etc. I'd say you are looking at three months and several thousand dollars of experimenting at least to start getting decent results, even with a strong PPC background. Facebook is just a completely different beast.

You can most definitely not set up your first campaign, pick the first targeting criteria that comes to mind, and expect good results with a positive ROI within the same day. If you don't keep at, it of course you are going to walk out with the idea that Facebook Ads don't work.

Source: Spent a six figure amount on Facebook over the course of two years.

>You can most definitely not set up your first campaign, pick the first targeting criteria that comes to mind, and expect good results with a positive ROI within the same day.

I have actually literally done this. Just took a stab at an audience, got sales that justified the ad right away.

But we're in a great position with profit margins. They're hand assembled craft items that people generally buy for gifts or weddings, so cost to make is low and sell price is pretty good. Businesses that require high volume on low margins would have a much worse time.

I have a suspicion that artisan products might also work better on Facebook in general, given the context that the users are in when they're on Facebook?

I have done this as well, but it really comes down to the product you're selling. We're an ISP and our market is extremely under served, so people are literally desperate for a better option. Easy sell, IMO. I imagine we'd have a hard time trying to sell literally anything else locally on FB.

Soecifically for weddings, what was the demographic / criteria that you targeted ?

Women, 24+, interested in family, weddings, gifts, babies, family photos, etc. We kept it to Australia for now, but I'm working on going international.

Since the items integrate the buyer's photo, people also often use them as memorials of dead people, but we didn't specifically target that. Yet.

We have just completed a profitable FB campaign (5.5x ROI), after many attempts. The key for us was:

(1) Audience. We created a lookalike audience based on the attributes of our high spenders, which outperformed all previous attempts by a significant margin. I appreciate this option is not going to be available to businesses with no existing customer base.

(2) Tracking. Given the majority of our ads are served on mobile, but convert on desktop or iPad, only Facebook is able to join up the impression and transaction. Previously we had expected to be able to see the attribution in Google Analytics.

This. I also rarely see mentions in comments like this about how they did some basic statistical significance checks. Depending on the conversion goal, sales cycle, and revenue, you might be looking at spending a large sum over a period of months to get proper benchmarks for efficacy.

This was my impression as well. But, from our graphs, you can see we didn't have much to work with in terms of advertising budget.

Further, I think this is true of all advertising to some degree. I doubt the first print ad or billboard you buy has positive ROI.