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Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

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Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#21

Post by sulife »

gllen wrote: post #11

What benefit could a 3rd party conceivably get out of faking clicks on Facebook ads? Is there a rev share at all with publishers, like with adsense?

Tons! Charge their competitors to run out of budget and/or give up advertising on FB.

A lot of people also have bots to see who/what is advertising on FB to see what is working, what ad text people are trying, etc. Mostly aff marketers trying to stay ahead of the game. There are also SaaS companies scraping ads and landing pages and selling that data.

I'm sure there are other reasons as well...

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#22

Post by imrehg »

sanxiyn wrote: post #10

I didn't know Facebook charges businesses for changing the name of Facebook Page. Is this a well known fact?

According to the FAQ, one cannot change the name of the page once it is set. This can be a real problem that I run into quite a few times, even with a couple of small pages, and even more as every website that has "like this page on facebook" has an automatic facebook page, where the name is determined by them, automatically, once, by the element at that time. Talk about stupid.

Anyways, I don't mind since I'm a small fish, but the longer this goes on, the more it will (hopefully, i might say) blow up into their face(book).

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#24

Post by ecrotty »

The other thing to keep in mind is if their page has any "accelerated fans" (read : purchased bot page likes), any time they promote a post, they would be promoting to the same bots that liked the page in the first place.

No accusations, but, just food for thought.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#25

Post by vladd »

veyron wrote: post #8
vladd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main technique is to notice a pattern that is only explainable by bot activity. Generally speaking, in addition to the patterns you mentioned (invalid user-agent strings, rapid succession of same-IP access) there are also other patterns, such as failure to load referenced CSS or image files, or 100% failure on Captcha challenges.

"failure to load referenced CSS or image files" -- is there a way for bots (in particular, mechanize in perl/python) to also download those files? "100% failure on Captcha challenges" -- are captchas generally deployed on click-through ads?

> "100% failure on Captcha challenges" -- are captchas generally deployed on click-through ads?

Cloudflare has a mode (used in general for DDOS protection) which you can turn on and get stats on how many users pass a Captcha test.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#26

Post by nekitamo »

patrickmclaren wrote: post #2

Has anyone else analyzed their referrals and also seen a significant proportion of bots?

Yes but only in certain US demographics. Most of these bots are ad scrapers/landing page scrapers run by people gathering and stealing the ads/landing pages of their competition. Facebook has known about the problem for a while (years), and have gone so far as to ban some accounts that the scrapers were running out of, but lately it seems the scrapers have been given free reign.

This is not a case of Facebook using bots to deliberately drive up ad spending. It's merely scummy internet marketers at work, with Facebook failing to detect and prevent them. The phenomenon is mostly present in the US 18-30 male demographic (where all the dating ads are, and where creatives can make or break you).

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#27

Post by sk5t »

We dropped the Google Display Network about a year back out of very heavy suspicion of bot malfeasance... lots of clicks from frivolous, consumer-oriented, no-name sites with obviously nothing to do with our somewhat technical, LDAP-focused product.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#29

Post by crazygringo »

unreal37 wrote: post #23

Take this with a grain of salt. The "company" has 400 likes. Not exactly GM leaving Facebook (and then quietly returning to Facebook).

I don't see what their number of likes has to do with bots clicking on their ads.

If true, Facebook should really have anti-fraud measures in place for this kind of thing already, and if they don't, the size of the company in question has no relevance to that.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#30

Post by slig »

veyron wrote: post #8
vladd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main technique is to notice a pattern that is only explainable by bot activity. Generally speaking, in addition to the patterns you mentioned (invalid user-agent strings, rapid succession of same-IP access) there are also other patterns, such as failure to load referenced CSS or image files, or 100% failure on Captcha challenges.

"failure to load referenced CSS or image files" -- is there a way for bots (in particular, mechanize in perl/python) to also download those files? "100% failure on Captcha challenges" -- are captchas generally deployed on click-through ads?

> "failure to load referenced CSS or image files" -- is there a way for bots (in particular, mechanize in perl/python) to also download those files?

Use http://phantomjs.org/ and the page will loaded by webkit.

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