Gab Ads Vs Facebook Ads – A Review

TLDR

Gab Ads are currently not a replacement for Facebook ads, however, they could possibly be profitable if one seeks to sell a general-purpose item that resonates with a politically conservative demographic.

Facebook is innovating in ways that is harming advertisers, leaving an open door for a competitor to step in. Gab needs to focus on optimizing its ad delivery and profitability for advertisers before continuing other developments if this transition from Facebook to Gab is to be advantageous for small businesses.

Doing A Side By Side Comparison of Gab Ads & Facebook Ads

How effective would each platform be at encouraging Christian nerds (a very niche demographic) to join the TheoNerds mailing list to receive articles and podcasts?

The goal was to get the lowest cost per email sign-up/lead (CPL) using identical budgets, ads, and landing pages. The only difference would be the respective advertising platforms.

Two landing pages were created, one exclusively for Facebook ad traffic and the other for Gab ad traffic. Submitted emails were tagged in the backend to independently verify the legitimacy of submissions.

For the purposes of this test, a throwaway landing page on a new domain was set up so that a Facebook pixel could be utilized (we don’t use Google or Facebook spyware on Theonerds.net).

Bots & Fake Accounts

Both Facebook and Gab charge users per ad impression which is the display of an ad on a screen (CPM – Cost Per 1000 Impressions). Bots or fake accounts, which illegitimately load ads and count as impressions, can therefore quickly obliterate one’s ad spend on each platform.

By excluding everyone who had ever visited the landing page in the Facebook campaign, multiple fake/bot clicks can be deterred, meaning that bots can only click through to an ad once and will therefore never see the ad again on Facebook. It also ensures that Facebook is constantly seeking new people to show ads to.

Gab uninformatively lacks such features to mitigate bots (which is a huge problem on the platform). Therefore when running Gab ad campaigns it would be advantageous to only target mobile devices. This method assumes that the process of running bots via mobile devices or faking mobile devices would be a greater challenge for bad actors, therefore ensuring that mobile traffic would have a higher likelihood of legitimacy.

Both landing pages had double opt-in features and a CAPA system to prevent fake email submissions.

Facebook’s New Interest Target Changes Harm Christian Advertising

As this side-by-side test was started, Facebook rolled out its update on ad targeting. This update removed the ability for anyone to target or exclude individuals with direct interests in religious or political subjects (You can still target some religious interests, however, such as Richard Dawkins’ Foundation for Reason and Science which espouses the religion of scientism).

This is particularly challenging as our test sought to target Christian nerds to join an email list.

By targeting Christian films like “Amazing Grace” and “The Passion of The Christ” this demographic can be indirectly reached.

Such broad targeting meant that ads were being displayed to people who are not Christian, who responded negatively to the messaging which in turn drove up the CPM on Facebook.

The average CPM for a well-targeted Facebook campaign is around $5-$10. This Facebook campaign had an average CPM of around $20 which means that it now costs 2/4 times more than the standard campaign to reach Christians on Facebook.

Gab’s Flattery Culture

Unlike Facebook, Gab lacks such algorithmic social credit systems on the news feed. The advantage of this is that your news feed is not being manipulated by a shadowy big tech agenda. The disadvantage is that this tends to leave quality posts buried among spam and low-quality posts, resulting in little-to-no post engagement on the site.

This has resulted in the power of the magnificent “repost” on Gab.

Individuals with large follows garner huge control of what is popularised on the platform.

Businesses, therefore, seek to leverage the CEO of Gab, Andrew Torbas’ “repost” which syndicates their messaging to his entire following of 3.5 million people.

This has led to a culture of Gab flattery on the site, where businesses leverage this as a means to market themselves. This was particularly true when Gab Ads was in beta and only open to a select number of businesses. Andrew Torba was seeking to promote and excite prospects of the new endeavor and would often repost praise about Gab Ads.

None of these praise posts include any real data like CPMs, Cost Per Clicks (CPC), or Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), however.

To combat this, the data shared below are all the important details of both campaigns, warts and all.

Gab Ads Results

Total Ad spend – $153.72
Total leads – 14
Cost per lead – $10.98
Clicks – 305
Cost per click – $0.50
Click through-rate – 0.33%
Landing page conversion rate – 4.59%
Impressions – 91,499
Cost per 1000 impressions – $1.68
Average Frequency – 1.86

Facebook Ad Results

Total Ad spend – $153.20
Total leads – 32
Cost per lead – $4.79
Clicks – 119
Cost per click – $1.29
Click through-rate – 1.45%
Landing page conversion rate – 26.89%
Impressions – 8,007
Cost per 1000 impressions – $19.13
Average Frequency – 1.26

Making Sense Of The Results

The cost per impression was nearly 20 times cheaper on Gab than on Facebook, however, the ad click-through rate on Facebook was four times better than that on Gab. Traffic coming from the Facebook ads was 5 times more effective in getting email sign-ups compared to Gab. This substantial discrepancy is most likely due to the prevalence of bots and fake accounts on Gab.

The Facebook cost-per-lead was nearly half the price of that on Gab even though the campaign was hindered by a ridiculously high CPM without being able to directly target key Christian interests, something of which most advertisers will not have to face.

Gab Ad Pros

• Gab Is Not Woke – And therefore not perverting and indoctrinating the masses via behavior modification/social engineering to embrace a technocratic, anti-god, and transhuman ideology that pushes for globalism.
• Approves Ads About Crypto – As a separate test, we ran an ad about Nexo without any issues. This would have been near impossible on Facebook and would likely result in a permanent ban on the account without recourse.
• Paying With Crypto – The Gab Ads campaign was paid for using Bitcoin (Would love to see them integrate a non-surveillance cryptocurrency like Monero, however).
• Gab Innovates & Is Getting Gradually Better – Within the past year Gab has released Gab TV, Ads, and Marketplace while generally improving its infrastructure with no signs of slowing down.
• Great Customer Support – When you reach out to Gab’s customer support you are getting a reply on the same day by a real human, not a bot pretending to be a human as you will experience with Facebook’s support.

Gab Ad Cons

• Pro Accounts Can Block All Ads – This is one of the most damaging aspects of Gab to advertisers. Gab users who have disposable income, enough to purchase Gab Pro, can hide all ads. This leaves little to no incentive for Gab to optimize its ad platform but instead allows advertisers to annoy users and push audiences toward Gab Pro subscriptions.
• Lack of Meaningful Targeting – Without being able to target individuals based on interests, a lot of ad spend is wasted on irrelevant audiences or bots (interest-based targeting is in the works, however). Gab is currently mitigating this by offering a very low CPM, however, the likelihood of annoying users with your ads, and therefore harming your brand, is very high through this method of advertising.
• Allows Affiliate Marketing Ads – Gab allows affiliate links, such as our Nexo test. This opens a door for low-quality spam-like ads being displayed on Gab that could see an increase in overall CPMs.
• Bots– This results in horrid click-through rates and unnecessary depletion of ad spend.
• Lacks Auction Transparency – When an ad is being displayed there is a private auction that will determine which ad is prioritized for display versus other ads. Gab should make this public and allow advertisers to pay a true market value price to display their ads on the platform instead of secretly bidding on your behalf as other tech companies do.
• Lacks The Ability To Schedule Ads – Since there is no AI promoting your ads on Gab, it is best to have them only run when the site is being used the most. Currently, this has to be manually done as there is no way to automate ad schedules.

Facebook Ad Pros

• One of The Most Effective Means of Digital Marketing – Having lots of data points on user behavior to leverage for relevant and cost-effective advertising, the Facebook news feed is designed to show your ads to users at a time and place which is most likely for them to take action. Facebook wants users to enjoy the ad experience.
• Scalability – With the use of the Conversion API and Pixel, users can easily track and integrate meaningful events from their websites into the Facebook Ads Manager. This allows advertisers to make informed decisions when seeking to increase or decrease their ad spend.
• Audience Market Share – Most likely, your target audience is on Facebook or Instagram and is there in abundance.

Facebook Ad Cons

• Morally Bankrupt – Facebook unashamedly promotes sexual perversion, shuts down any open discourse on the efficacy or necessity of all vaccines, seeks to socially engineer public options to suit their technocratic agenda, sells user data to 3 letter agencies, spreads Covid-19 misinformation through their manipulative “fact-checkers” notifications, alongside a host of other detestable practices that should have Zuck behind bars or worse.
• Facebook’s Innovations Appeal Only To Globalist Elites – Mark Zuckerberg is in bed with the World Economic Forum and is listed as a Young Global Leader. Their push toward a Metaverse is not resonating with their customers, as a result, the platform is gradually getting worse.
• Facebook’s Ageing Population – Failing to attract younger audiences, Facebook is at a high risk of becoming irrelevant within the decade.
• Unacceptable Customer Support – It can take 2-4 weeks to reach the internal team of Facebook to address an issue in which they are often times very unhelpful and copy and paste pre-written responses (with typos).
• Private Auction – You are at the complete mercy of Facebook and they can charge you whatever they want to display ads with no accountability.
• Woke Advertising Policies – Facebook heavily utilizes AI content approval, meaning that advertisers have to be very careful when creating ads that could permanently ban advertising accounts with zero recourse.

Final Thoughts

Gab is definitely a platform that businesses and creators should be leveraging. As for using their paid advertising, it would be best to hold off till this is further developed to maximize the profitability of your campaigns. It possibly would be more profitable to partner with a Gab influencer than use Gab Ads to promote your products or services.