I've been lured to more local businesses with radio spots and coupon booklets in the mail than Meta/Google ads. Probably an outlier, but still.

Edit: Oh, also comments on reddit r/$cityname recommending a local business are quite useful/effective. They might be botted to hell at this point, but I've never had a bad experience.

So, Meta are certainly happy to take advertiser money (except when they aren't, apparently), and demonstrably triple-digit-billion-dollars worth of people are happy to pay them, so something somewhere must be working, but I still don't understand...

...who the hell buys anything from Facebook ads? I never have, no-one I know ever has. Is my bubble seriously that strong?

I admit, I do click on Facebook ads every so often. This likely means Meta gets paid, and also some number somewhere goes up which means I get shown more of the kind of things I click on. This is how I end up seeing adverts for hi-vis vests for poultry, radioactive pendants (sturdy titanium, reliably glows for 25 years!), tungsten cubes and so on; because I see them and I think "what the actual..." and I click, because you can comment on Facebook adverts and maybe there is some kind of sanity to be found; and, as expected, the comments are full of confused people saying "what the actual..." none of whom are any more likely to buy the product than me.

Has anyone here, but especially of the people considering using Facebook to advertise their product/service, ever bought anything from a Facebook ad? What was it?