Invisible ad on Facebook

I'd do two things, in this order:-

- explain your problem and the checks you've already made to the local Trading Standards department. Ask their advice on how to check whether you're getting what you paid for and whether they have any knowledge of similar problems experienced by customers of your supplier.

If there is anything dodgy, they may follow things up themselves. As a by-product you may get your money back - if the supplier's not legit or the work they've done for you is unsatisfactory, they may hope paying you off will minimise hassle from Trading Standards.

- with a witness to hand taking notes of the conversation, tell your supplier about each of the detailed ad verification checks you've made and ask them to account for the results of these checks. Probe each apparent discrepancy until you get a satisfactory answer.

I'd suggest you act on this as fast as you can. Good luck, Linda

Something sounds fishy, as you say you would see traffic from FB to your site, and it would clearly show in your Google analytics.

I only had a brief play with FB adverts a while ago, and I can't remember if you get any analytics, such as facebook insights, like you do with FB fan pages.

If there is insights, then this will clearly show clickthroughs to your site (or not). I'd be surprised if FB didn't provide any stats for their adverts

Just checked the insights analytics for our FB fan page, and compared it to google analytics, for traffic from FB to our site, and they are pretty close, so I cant see why Google Analytics wouldn't reliably track traffic from a FB ad.

You seem pretty marketing savvy Lina, I don't know why just don't run a campaign yourself.

I could do practically, however what they sold me is a far better option. For a fixed price I was supposed to get at least 50K impressions with unlimited number of clicks.
They said from their experience I should get at least 1% of clicks which comes to 500.
If I did this myself directly with FB, I would pay per click which would result in a higher price by far.

What if I open a dispute with my credit card company?

Hi guys, just to give an update on this...

I have contacted the local Trade office and they actually were quite helpful, however their help seems to be finished by the time you reached the point when you have no choice but to go to Court. Fortunately I did not need to do it.

I did the following:

Opened the formal dispute with my credit card company.
Sent quite a few emails to EBS marketing with a bunch of evidence showing that my ad is not live.
Finally I wrote a two page letter, structured it according to the local trade office's guidelines and sent it with the recorded delivery to EBS.
I then got the refund back to my credit card within 7 days.

Thank you all for your great support

Great feedback Lina and glad it's worked out well for you

This is really surprising! I have never heard of invisible ads before. Very frustrating. Happy to know you have finally come up with a solution.