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Company Claims 80% of Facebook Ad Clicks Are From Bots

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the where-are-all-the-people dept.

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.'"

2 of 402 comments (clear)

  1. Or, You Know... by Greyfox · · Score: 0, Troll

    We could be running noscript set to trust facebook but not any random page we click on. Most people with that configuration will trust pages they spend a lot of time on. 'Course then we're probably also running adblock and still don't see ads.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  2. Re:If you don't have javascript, you're a bot? by blind+biker · · Score: 0, Troll

    Actually, they have a strong incentive: staying in business. My wife runs her own business, and I help her with advertising. We track the source of every click through to a sale. Then we calculate the ratio of (ad expense)/(profit generated). For Google ads, this is about 1.6. For Facebook ads, it is about 0.2. Guess where we no longer buy ads?

    You no longer buy ads from Google?

    Sorry, are you trying to prove that one doesn't need any math skills to run a successful business?

    --
    "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.