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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.'"
Don't go there, porno image.
Since the ads require Javascript to be visible, yes. If you don't believe me just disable Javascript on Facebook and watch as all the ads disappear until you reenable it.
The percentage of real users with javascript disabled is much lower than 80%... so if these numbers are real It seems reasonable that the bulk of them are bots.
No, but you also won't be clicking on the ads since they are no longer visible without Javascript.
RTFA. They did the analysis. 98-99% of their direct-clicks had javascript. 0nly 20% of the ones from Facebook had javascript.
Sorry if I RTFA. I'll try not to next time.
Upshot: Facebook stock tanks again.
Facebook is a TERRIBLE advertising platform. I've tried it, and had nothing but rubbish. In fact, I read an article about it not long after I tried it, saying that Facebook Advertising just doesn't work, and the only way they keep it up is by new people going 'Well, all these other people are advertising, I'm sure I can try that too'. Then they give it up as a bad job, but not before someone ELSE sees it and goes 'Hmm. FB Advertising'...
So, basically, I wasted $50, and learned that trying to appeal to the facebook crowd with something they have to pay for just doesn't work.
Schlock Mercenary.
It's easy to confirm. Disable Javascript on Facebook and the ads disappear. It's pretty unlikely most people are disabling Javascript then finding alternative means to click the ads anyway unless they're a bot.
Why? What are you trying to hide?
Murderer!!!!
rewriting history since 2109
Obviously that he's a mass murderer.
Simple. Go to Facebook and disable Javascript. Ads are now no longer visible. How else other than through a bot or some extra effort do you guess that these ads are being clicked when the ads aren't visible?
on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on
You (a human) wouldn't be able to click on the ads if you couldn't see them in the first place.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Or vagina?
LOL. I wasn't going to click until I read your comment.. i saw porno and clicked. you should have been more specific.. its gay porno... not my thing.
"For the past week, I've been running a very successful small business via Facebook. It is called VirtualBagel and more than 3,000 people from around the world have decided they "like" it - despite the fact that it does, well, absolutely nothing. But in running this non-existent firm I have learned quite a bit about the value of those "likes" prized by so many big brands, and the usefulness of Facebook's advertising".> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18819338
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
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.
Maybe the bots are genuinely interested in Mom's Old Fashioned Robot Oil.
I google for "whiplash" or "loans" and click on all the ads.
Since the ads require Javascript to be visible, yes. If you don't believe me just disable Javascript on Facebook and watch as all the ads disappear until you re-enable it.
So, that's a feature, right?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
you've never used wget have you?
1. Download the page the ad appears in
2. Download the javascripts using the referral page
3. grep the javascripts for links
4. hit all the links
Repeat.
So if you want to burn a specific company, you only click their ads. Since Facebook is the beneficiary of the ads, this is clearly facebook's problem. Go back in time to the ad scam eFront ran"
http://www.echostation.com/efront/
http://news.cnet.com/A-question-of-numbers/2009-1023_3-255030.html
There's a pretty simple fix for that issue. Don't click on random links while at work. Geeknet doesn't give two fucks that you did something that stupid.
Each user, by using Geeknet Sites, may be exposed to Content that is offensive, indecent or objectionable. Each user must evaluate, and bear all risks associated with the use of any Content, including any reliance on the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of such Content.
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Either a bot, or an intelligent user who won't read the adverts. Same result for the advertiser.
You're saying 80% of Facebook users are that intelligent?
If this gets attention from other companies who pay facebook for advertising placement, it could make facebook's advertisment revenues fall quite a lot. Click fraud is a really big deal.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Except FB charges for clicks.
So they are charging for fake clicks, which means they are engaging in fraud if FB is behind the fake clicks.
And even if FB is not behind the fake clicks, FB will have to severely reduce ad rates because they cannot deliver true clicks.
I stand by my assertion that FB will tank.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Facebook community when Limited Run confirmed that Facebook ad effectiveness has dropped yet again, now down to less than 20% legitimate clicks. Coming on the heels of a recent stock crash which plainly indicates that Facebook is losing investors' confidence, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Facebook is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sure you could, but you are part of a small minority of users. A far cry from the 80% they are seeing.
Exactly.
Click fraud has been a huge problem. Even Google has had to put mechanisms in place to detect it and control it.
But none of these ad companies have a real strong incentive to do so, other than to maintain a reputation for fairness
among advertisers. Facebook? Fairness? Reputation?
In my day job we were a Google advertiser, and on more than one occasion we started seeing huge spikes in clicks
when we did nothing different on the web site or in commerce to warrant such an increase.
I called Google about it, and they ran a review of the clicks and dropped the actual click count to below what
it had been prior. They do respond, but you have to complain some times.
They are especially good at catching bots.
We've put a ceiling on the amount we will pay for these clicks, and when ever that ceiling is reached we get
a notice from Google. Unless we just started an advertising campaign in the trade rags (or something to generate that
increase in traffic), we usually just file another click fraud complaint to them and they invariably
we are the target of another E-Gold "get paid to click ads" scam.
(We always suspect, but can never prove that one of our competitors is behind this click fest to drive my ads off the
search results by over-running our limits, because they always seem to happen when they launch a new product).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
just a murderer... for mass murderer i think the requirement is no FB page at all.
They then decided to put a logger on the site to track where the users were coming in from and what they were doing. From this, they determined 80% of the clicks from FB were bots.
Others have also done these types of analytics in regards to Facebook, with results in the 70%-are-bots range.
Here's a quote from the LA Times blog article (admittedly, it is pretty poorly edited):
In a Facebook status post as well as a blog posted Monday, Limited Run said it built its own analytics program, which found that 80% of its ad clicks were coming from users with JavaScript turned off, which makes it difficult for analytics software to verify clicks. The company added that in its staff's experience, only about 1% to 2% of clicks typically come with JavaScript turned off. As a result, the company built a page logger on its site, and that led the company to find that all those clicks were coming from bots.
I suppose all of this could be bunk, but it sounds pretty reasonable to me.
What happens when an antivirus scanner "pre-scans" the page at link to the Ad, in case the user clicks on it, in order to speed up their browsing experience?
Technically, it's not a bot causing the page to be requested, it can just as well be a real person's user agent
*psst* you missed the part where he's not a consumer, he's one of the people that actually gives Google money. They like money. They pay attention to the people who give them money. It's just the rest of us who are SOL.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
But none of these ad companies have a real strong incentive to do so, other than to maintain a reputation for fairness
among advertisers.
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?
Just to confirm: you're saying that for your wife's business, Facebook ads are 8 times more effective than Google ads.
Gack! Sorry, I got the ratio reversed. They are eight times less effective. Thanks for catching this.
Stretching exercises and a huge cork.
80%? you are gonna honestly claim that 80% of the visitors to a single site had that exact highly unlikely set of circumstances? I'm sorry but that just don't jive, I don't care how damned geeky the FB page was. Hell ask /. how many of their users have JavaScript disabled, this site is geek city and I seriously doubt you'd get even 45% with no JavaScript at all.
And don't forget they were being charged for AD clicks which most folks that are running some kind of blocker are running ABP and aren't whitelisting shit, hence why you have sites that say "Please, we need the money, please whitelist us" because the default behavior (which all here know most users stick with defaults) is block everything and you have to actually go out of your way to change that.
No something smells here folks, and I only hope that company makes the software they developed to find this out free and available for others to use so we can see how widespread this really is on FB. Be a nasty bit of new to FB stockholders if it turned out 80% of their "revenues" were just clickjacking bots.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
There is another option, FWIW. Whenever I see an advertisement on Google for a company I don't like, I click on their link. It's probably unethical, but it's oh-so-tempting.
So over the years, I've probably transferred like $1.35 from Microsoft to Google as a result of my actions. Yay!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think you can have a page, the key is not to use it. I mean, how much 'mass' are you going to achieve if your updates look like:
Just stopped at the Hillsdale Mall.
Picked up a Wetzel's Pretzel Dog. Tasty!
Killed this guy and his kids in the Nordstrom's bathroom.
Checked out Victoria's secret. Do we really want our children to see the models they display in the window?
It'll be hard to keep that up long enough to rack up a really good score without getting caught.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Sorry, no. What percentage of real users do you imagine even knows there's an option to turn off javascript?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Disabling Javascript doesn't eliminate FB ads. Try it. Turn off Javascript for all sites, clear cache, and load www.facebook.com.
I see ads, clickable ads that reach their destination. Looking at the page in the developer tools, there's no JS being executed (pause does nothing), and neither the Scripts nor the Resources tabs reveal anything resembling a script.
Further, all the ads link through the same base URI, what is likely a FB redirector script: https://www.facebook.com/ajax/emu/end.php. I've written ad software for websites that doesn't use a bit of JS, and it appears that FB is capable of doing the same.
Reenabling JS shows the ads have both the base URI AND a mousedown handler with function reference of a similar name: a.emuEvent1.fbEmuLink.image.fbEmuImage
Finally, advertisers and the agencies that put their ads on FB don't have to rely on FB for click metrics, it's normal practice to redirect through a third-party agency that counts ad clicks.
It's possible that this company didn't understand the incoming requests. I'd love to see their analysis of User-Agent signatures and client IP addresses.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
The first thing I did after installing no script, was to white list all the ads... the internet is so bland without them.