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Company Claims 80% of Facebook Ad Clicks Are From Bots
pitchpipe writes "A start-up company, Limited Run, claims that 80% of its ad clicks on Facebook have been coming from bots and will be deleting their page. Their Facebook page reads: 'Hey everyone, we're going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do ... We built our own analytic software. Here's what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on ... The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That's correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs.'"
If you don't have javascript, you're a bot?
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With some Facebook bots starting at $30 to $50 to build, of course people are doing that. Facebook has bigger problems than giving a crap about this company's complaints or requests. If our SEC wasn't a toothless corporate captive, the company would already have been halted for securities abuse.
And only an idiot clicks on random image links when they are at work...
We use adwords from time to time and had similar experiences a few years back with the "content network".
We analyzed our stats and even went as far as manually browse access logs. The hits we got were crap just like the sites most of the referrals came from.
There is a huge sesspool of scum on the Internet funded by leeching off ad revenue wherever it exists.
If companies are not on top of it and not careful about how they are spending their advertising dollars this kind of fraud could easily eat into a sizable chunk of their budgets and they might not even know it.
Do your homework before you throw your money away.
Advertising on the Internet is based on click-fraud. Where have you been for the last 10 years?
Who profits from BOTS pumping the FACEBOOK advertising system?
In practice it will be effectively impossible to identify the person-or-company who is *originally* responsible for this clickvertising pumping scheme.
But I know who I'd be betting on.
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However much truth there is in this story, there's one notable thing about Facebook's advertising. It's that they don't- or at least didn't the last time I looked into it (late 2011 IIRC)- provide any proper tracking or analytics service that you can easily integrate into your own website. Yes, they'd tell you how many clicks you got on your Facebook page, but so what?
IIRC apparently they'd had some analytics/tracking code available at one point but *supposedly* they were worried about the data it provided being misinterpreted, so they withdrew it. They were still providing it, but only to their large corporate customers. Hmm.
One could still use specialised third-party tracking solutions, but (e.g.) getting it to work properly with Google analytics proved more complicated than it might at first have appeared, involving faffing about with funnels and the like (which I still don't think I got working properly, as I was distracted by more important things shortly afterwards).
Given that this was around the time stories were starting to come out explaining how Facebook- which everyone had assumed would be the holy grail of targeted advertising- was in truth delivering very poor results for advertisers, a cynic might assume that it really wasn't in Facebook's interest to make keeping close tabs on the effectiveness of its advertising easy for customers. This might or might not have been the case, but I'm pretty sceptical.
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Sure you could, but you are part of a small minority of users. A far cry from the 80% they are seeing.
I've advertised on quite a few platforms (although have yet to try Facebook), and this is a common problem. In 2006, there were lawsuits against Yahoo and Google for click-fraud.. both were settled (I was included in the settlement for both.... got virtually nothing.. something like $20 refund for $100k in clicks.)
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/10294.asp
Google does a pretty good job, which is probably a large reason why they control such a large portion of the online ad market. Yahoo, depending on their platform of the week, can be hit-or-miss. They usually do a good job, but there have been a few times when it is just terrible. When Yahoo announces a change to their search.. watch out. (Bing's ad performance has been pretty good over the past couple of years at least)
I've seen some ad platforms that just ignore the problem, and it's easy to spend several thousand dollars and not get a single customer from it on those platforms. If facebook does nothing to control the problem, I'm sure there will be another class action.. probably won't cost them much to settle it, but might destroy the trust they have with advertisers, their stock price, and business.
I always considered goatse, tubgirl and lemonparty to be some kind of initiation rite. Once you learned NOT to click on any link presented (or to deal with the consequences) you were considered a member of the internet and not just a tourist anymore.