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Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

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Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#51

Post by ethanbond »

radicalbyte wrote: post #27
madeofpalk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the case for this is to be robust for the many legitimate ways that online marketers use ads and create landing pages. Often marketing platforms (like Hubspot or whatever) lets you create multiple landing pages which might all be on a subdomain(s) to rather than handing full control of the root domain to the platform. In these cases, you wouldn't want pages.ctvnews.com to appear as the display domain. Also no…

I think you're right. It looks like Facebook host a lot of ads themselves, so I guess that advertisers use URL shorteners as a way to verify click throughs from Facebook. For unsophisticated advertisers (i.e. with no referrer log analysis) I guess it's pretty easy and effective.

I guess it'd be just downright impossible for one of Facebook's 10,000 employees to handle some bitly level analytics in order to counter rampant fraud.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#52

Post by ethanbond »

Lxr wrote: post #12
sleazebreeze wrote: post #4

Considering that Facebook lets you set the display domain separately from the actual link domain, this behavior seems entirely intentional. Convincing people to click on ads (by lying wholesale, in this case) is a crucial element of Facebook's business model. This does seem like they're trading long-term trust for short-term profits - users will click on fewer and fewer sponsored posts as the number of deceitful post…

Sadly this is likely the truth. Advertising is a unique business model that relies on thinking up increasingly creative ways of tricking users. When linkbait no longer works, lie about the source.

"Unique?"

Bait and switch scams have existed since the dawn of time.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#53

Post by stevoski »

red_admiral wrote: post #49

Here's another "bug" I noticed today: if your browser window is "too narrow", for example because you're using that widescreen to have two windows open at once, you get a horizontal scrollbar and ads display like this: http://chunk.io/f/d1c9168e2f0c41edb8ea4bf3d29ddadc.png scroll to the right and you get this: http://chunk.io/f/f6020ad14aa84a6c9a3415291cfbb920.png Yes, someone's being charged for an ad where even if…

> someone's being charged for an ad

When I advertise on Facebook, they charge me per click, not per impression. I assume this poorly displayed ad also is charged per click.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#54

Post by Fiahil »

mrweasel wrote: post #38
radicalbyte wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right. It looks like Facebook host a lot of ads themselves, so I guess that advertisers use URL shorteners as a way to verify click throughs from Facebook. For unsophisticated advertisers (i.e. with no referrer log analysis) I guess it's pretty easy and effective.

>For unsophisticated advertisers (i.e. with no referrer log analysis) In that case most advertisers are unsophisticated. Even the biggest ad-networks/retargeting/tracking solutions all depend on redirect via their servers to their end customer. I am constantly disappointed with the technical knowledge and understanding display by our advertising partners. A large number of them have almost zero understand of how the…

I've worked with multiple retargeting company and advertisement departments in the past, and I got the exact same conclusion. Most of the time the people in charge of "digital innovation" or "e-marketing" have absolutely no idea of what's going on behind the curtains. Even worse, their whole pricing model (ctr, conversions, ...) is hanging on broken solutions that "work most of the time". So, needless to say you often have to alter numbers/rates manually in AB testing reports to let them have clean numbers they can sale. Even if every tech knows how much bullshit is flowing in this industry, it's way easier to let the big ones have what they want than argue about how everything is broken (especially when you don't necessarily have a way to fix it).

I secretly suspect they -at least- know, but prefer to sweep these issue under the rug and that's why they prefer to involve as little technical people as possible. And that's why I don't work in this industry anymore and I won't come back to it until they've all burnt to the ground.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#55

Post by stevoski »

When Google got into advertising, they were relaxed about what ads they accepted. They happily ran just about any advert. But then two things happened.

1) the scammers came.

2) governments started holding Google accountable for running ads for online gambling and prescription medication. Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) had to pay large fines for running ads for products and companies that governments saw as illegal.

As the years passed, Google has become ever more restrictive in what ads it will run. To the point where trigger-happy Google Adwords staff whose job is to approved ads reject many ads that are actually fine.

I think Facebook will go down the same path.

My main product is software used by poker players to track and analyse their winnings and losses. I haven't been able to advertise on Google for years, because the ad reviewers see the word 'poker' and demand proof that I am certified to running a gambling company in the locales I'm advertising in. I've given up trying to argue my case to Google that just because my product has the word 'poker' in the title doesn't mean I'm running a casino!

Facebook, however, still approves my adverts within a few hours. I'm expecting this to stop as Facebook tightens up after a few large government fines.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#56

Post by mrweasel »

Fiahil wrote: post #54
mrweasel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For unsophisticated advertisers (i.e. with no referrer log analysis) In that case most advertisers are unsophisticated. Even the biggest ad-networks/retargeting/tracking solutions all depend on redirect via their servers to their end customer. I am constantly disappointed with the technical knowledge and understanding display by our advertising partners. A large number of them have almost zero understand of how the…

I've worked with multiple retargeting company and advertisement departments in the past, and I got the exact same conclusion. Most of the time the people in charge of "digital innovation" or "e-marketing" have absolutely no idea of what's going on behind the curtains. Even worse, their whole pricing model (ctr, conversions, ...) is hanging on broken solutions that "work most of the time". So, needless to say you ofte…

We currently have an issue where the company that handle our ad-tracking/referral payout track and want payment for the same orders multiple time. They honestly doesn't seem to understand the issue, customer will, sometimes, return to the conversion page (checkout-success page) multiple times, because people are just weird like that.

The fix is super simple: Their tracking pixel receive our order number, all they need to do is accept that it's unique and just tracking the first occurrence. Part of their problem is of cause that they switch to a new platform and didn't migrate any data.

Because many of the amount are so small, they just accept a ton of errors and as you say: "sweep these issues under the rug" because it's just a few cents so who cares. But it adds up.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#57

Post by _ak »

stevoski wrote: post #55

When Google got into advertising, they were relaxed about what ads they accepted. They happily ran just about any advert. But then two things happened. 1) the scammers came. 2) governments started holding Google accountable for running ads for online gambling and prescription medication. Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) had to pay large fines for running ads for products and companies that governments saw as illegal.…

Ha, that reminds me of the cas where one of our advertiser's creatives kept getting disapproved by Google's creative approval process. The ad was for a family hotel somewhere in Germany. It took a while to find out why the creative got disapproved. After quite a bit of back and forth with our technical account manager, they finally told us because the landing page contained the word "casino". Except it's a German-language website, and in German, that word can have different meanings than just being gambling-related. And that family hotel most certainly did not provide any gambling facilities.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#58

Post by scottmf »

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #6

Not to defend Facebook for not doing their due diligence, but this article is really underselling the complexity of the problem. The pseudocode given: if (display_domain == landing_page_domain) { approve_ad = true; }else{ approve_ad = false; } is, for one thing, not robust against cloaking (if malicious advertisers see the request coming from a Facebook IP, they might actually redirect to the displayed domain).

Why not simply verify domain ownership? You could select a display domain from your list of verified domains.
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