I am not surprised at all. But the numbers you have posted are indicative of nothing. $500 is not statistically significant to show any results on Facebook. Most of my customers spend at least $10K for tests like these.

Paid $200+ for e-mail marketing? What does that actually mean? You bought someone's mailing list?

Or paid for an email delivery service? (such as MailChimp)

Or paid someone to create content.

I'd want to see the ad copy to believe this. The remnant inventory may have cost $2.00/$4.00 CPM but if the ad copy is highly relevant to the readers of the particular site (i.e. listen to our CTO talk about digital marketing) this is quite deceptive to draw industry wide conclusions based on this - some other readers have questioned the sample size which I agree with.

$500 is not enough or a serious test, esp if you divide it up between multiple channels.

tldr?

Fta:

"What the ROI chart says is that the return for the social ads was zero. They were a complete waste of money. They generated a lot of “action” but it was at best the wrong group of people, and at worst some type of fraud. This held true for facebook.com and its audience network. Ditto Google search ads, display ads and the Twitter campaign."

"Ditto Google search ads" checks article He spent less than $5 on Search ads... Hard to be drawing conclusions with that data set.

Nice summary, thanks for sharing!

This is some incredible data. It's really refreshing to see someone share it.