The effectiveness of an ad should be measured by its price - or conversely stated, by the revenue it generates. Search advertising generates somewhere between $50 to $100 for every thousand impressions (RPM) for US traffic. Content/ display ads on a well optimized site will generate somewhere between $1 and $3 RPM. FB ads, according to their numbers, generate around $.35 RPM.
So in the advertisers mind, search ads are literally orders of magnitude more effective than FB ads.
W/r/t FB as a business however, it's all well and good becuase, even at $.35 RPM, with billions of page views /day or month, the numbers start adding up pretty quickly. As long as they continue to crank billions of page views, justoptimizing the site to move from $.35 to, say, $.40 RPM will have a massive effect on the growth...provided they keep cranking the page views.
So in the advertisers mind, search ads are literally orders of magnitude more effective than FB ads.
W/r/t FB as a business however, it's all well and good becuase, even at $.35 RPM, with billions of page views /day or month, the numbers start adding up pretty quickly. As long as they continue to crank billions of page views, justoptimizing the site to move from $.35 to, say, $.40 RPM will have a massive effect on the growth...provided they keep cranking the page views.