Advertisers on Facebook are re-examining their ad spend commitments to the platform as average price per ad goes up and ad targeting gets harder after GDPR
Advertisers are more concerned that they are wasting money on Facebook than they are about the platform's privacy lapses. Tweets: @grightford Tweets: Gillian Rightford / @grightford : Overwhelming message appears to be a lack of good ol' fashioned media evaluation & unrealistic objectives from the start -> Facebook's big threat isn't Cambridge Analytica, it's advertisers questioning ROI http://digiday.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The ROI question predates the privacy scandal: months earlier, Facebook's Adverts Manager reach estimates exceeded census figures in the US, UK, and Canada, putting its measurement on the defensive before Cambridge Analytica made headlines. This piece adds the demand-side turn — advertisers like those Gillian Rightford surveys say wasted spend and weak media evaluation worry them more than the privacy lapses themselves.
What follows in the coverage validates that anxiety as structural rather than episodic: Facebook's CPMs collapsed to record lows during the 2020 pandemic before rebounding from roughly $1 to nearly $5 by November, and by 2022 advertisers were shifting budgets to Google, Amazon, and TikTok as Apple's ATT compounded the targeting squeeze GDPR started.
First-order effects
- Facebook faces advertisers actively re-examining spend commitments at the moment prices are rising and GDPR has degraded targeting precision — a squeeze on both sides of the ROI equation.
- Agencies and media evaluators like Rightford's audience become the arbiters: the complaint is unrealistic objectives and poor evaluation discipline, not brand-safety panic.
Second-order effects
- Rising prices plus weaker targeting push advertisers toward platforms where intent is easier to buy — a pattern the later coverage confirms with budget shifts to Google, Amazon, and TikTok after ATT.
- Measurement becomes the battleground: once reach estimates are questioned, every subsequent price increase gets audited against demonstrated return rather than promised audience.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Facebook's pricing power decouples from its audience size and attaches to provable performance — forcing the platform to defend CPMs with attribution quality rather than scale.
- Regulatory constraints on targeting (GDPR first, ATT later) convert ad buying from a data advantage into a measurement contest, reshaping how all social platforms must justify their rates.
The trend: Social advertising is moving from scale-priced reach to accountability-priced performance, with each regulatory hit to targeting raising the bar for what advertisers will pay per impression.