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The global boycott of Facebook this summer gave us the perfect opportunity to test the true incremental value of paid social marketing spend &#; with surprising results.

This July, more than 1, companies boycotted Facebook as part of #stophateforprofit. The campaign called on businesses to pause advertising for a month, and major brands &#; including some of our clients &#; did just that.

This presented the perfect opportunity for us to A/B test whether Facebook ads actually make a difference on underlying revenue. To find out, we compared sales for the month of the boycott with a prediction of what sales would have been had brands continued to spend with Facebook. We used the last three years of Google Analytics data to produce a prediction. 

And the results were so surprising that we had to run the numbers several times to prove it to ourselves:

Incredibly, switching off Facebook had no discernible impact on bottom line revenues for the brands in the dataset.

So could the money they&#;re spending on Facebook (globally, in , brands spent nearly $70billion on Facebook ads) be pointless? Could they have earned exactly the same money without wasting this budget?

To find out &#; and to discover why &#; download our free whitepaper now.