Could it just be a badly written search spider? The ad is simply an anchor tag around an image. If you didn't filter it out specifically, you would just "click" it to get to another page.
Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
31–40 of 381 posts
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#32Please explain to me why a bot would click on ads? (if anyone knows)
Is it crawlers crawling Facebook? Are they alleging that facebook is doing it to boost revenues?
Their hypothesis seems secure, given that you can't really use the facebook site at all without javascript enabled.
More alarming is Facebook holding their name for ransom for the sum of $24,000 a year!
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#33Take this with a grain of salt. The "company" has 400 likes. Not exactly GM leaving Facebook (and then quietly returning to Facebook).
The huge market represented by the "long tail" of small companies is the reason FB is valued so highly. It is (supposedly) much bigger than the GMs of the world.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#34I'd like to see the actual data from this.
How much traffic are we talking about? Where were the bots coming from and how were they detected?
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#35Wow, even if this is a little true the implications are big. Is this similar, or related to other ad space inflation? I'm reminded of Google (and others)(1) sending out free $75 adwords coupons to easily allow the costs of bids to inflate since it's not my own real money (thereby increasing the percentage of real cash being made on the ads)? (1)Edited and clarified
How come, everytime some company does (or seems to be doing) something shady, there is always a bunch of people like this saying "not as bad as Y doing something else that might or might not be true or related". This is not middle school anymore, pointing the finger at other kids is not proper discussion ...
Raising awareness isn't necessarily bad, even though its off topic.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#36Earlier 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?
Using Captcha on an ad landing page to determine whether someone is bot seems like a bad idea. It would almost certainly increase the bounce rate on that page and you couldn't just say that people who didn't choose fill out the captcha were bots.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#37Wow, even if this is a little true the implications are big. Is this similar, or related to other ad space inflation? I'm reminded of Google (and others)(1) sending out free $75 adwords coupons to easily allow the costs of bids to inflate since it's not my own real money (thereby increasing the percentage of real cash being made on the ads)? (1)Edited and clarified
How come, everytime some company does (or seems to be doing) something shady, there is always a bunch of people like this saying "not as bad as Y doing something else that might or might not be true or related". This is not middle school anymore, pointing the finger at other kids is not proper discussion ...
Because unfortunately logical reasoning and argument construction are not educational targets for most people. :(
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#38"We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots." How do you tell if it's a bot? Just by user-agent string or repeated slamming by IP address, or is there some other technique?
How do you tell if it's a bot? Just by user-agent string or repeated slamming by IP address, or is there some other technique? A combination of things. Off the top of my head: * IP address ranges. Are they all from, e.g., EC2 instances? * Are images and other content (e.g. CSS) linked from the page loaded? How long does the client take to do so? Are other pages being viewed in line with what you've seen from other us…
Is there a single tool that can take access/error logs and compile these stats? This sounds like something relatively useful ...
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#39Take this with a grain of salt. The "company" has 400 likes. Not exactly GM leaving Facebook (and then quietly returning to Facebook).
They are talking about ads, not "likes".
I think he didn't imply that. Obviously a company with 400 likes is not a big player in the Facebook ad space, it was just a measure of popularity.
Obviously the news here is not the loss of business for Facebook, but the fact that a click scam was taking place (if true).
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#40Please explain to me why a bot would click on ads? (if anyone knows) Is it crawlers crawling Facebook? Are they alleging that facebook is doing it to boost revenues? Their hypothesis seems secure, given that you can't really use the facebook site at all without javascript enabled. More alarming is Facebook holding their name for ransom for the sum of $24,000 a year!
Possibly other advertisers trying to push competitors away from facebook so BigDickPillz Inc can have it all to themselves?