A spokesman for Facebook said Forrester analyst Nate Elliott’s report, ‘Why Facebook is failing marketers’, is at odds with reality.

“The reality is that Facebook advertising works. That’s why we have more than a million active advertisers including all of the Ad Age 100. And, countless studies have demonstrated the significant return on investment marketers see from Facebook,” the spokesman said (via Business Insider).

Elliott’s report is based on a survey of nearly 400 marketers in the US, UK and Canada. On several measures, including business value achieved, Facebook marketing is ranked below many – if not all – of its main digital marketing competitors.

In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Elliott said: “Your company focuses too little on the thing marketers want most: driving genuine engagement between companies and their customers. Your sales materials tease marketers with the promise that you’ll help them create such connections. But in reality, you rarely do.

“Everyone who clicks the like button on a brand’s Facebook page volunteers to receive that brand’s messages — but on average, you only show each brand’s posts to 16% of its fans. And while your company upgrades its advertising tools and offerings monthly or more, you’ve done little in the past 18 months to improve your unloved branded page format or the tools that marketers use to manage and measure those pages.”

Elliott also claims that Facebook is failing to properly leverage its “ever-growing cache of social data to target relevant audiences”.

But as Elliott was outlining his criticisms, Adobe was publishing its own report – its first Social Intelligence report, which it plans to publish annually – in which it said that Facebook was becoming “increasingly attractive” to brand marketers, with ad click volume up by 29% year-on-year, ad impressions up 85% and cost per thousand impressions of an ad (CPM) increased by 120%. Adobe also claims that Facebook’s advertising ROI increased by 58% year-on-year.