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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

#41
post #24

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.

I don't really know how purchased page likes work, but why would that matter? Bots / fake accounts used to generate likes have no reason to keep running and click on ads?

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

#42

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.

Facebook is relatively new to the advertising game and probably doesn't have the sort of experience that Google, MSN and Yahoo have in dealing with the immense amount of click fraud out there.

Worked 3 years in online advertising, dealing with billions of impressions and millions of clicks daily. 80% fraud rate isn't unsurprising, probably is actually higher. Most mature ad networks can easily filter and reject a substantial portion of the fraud, or at least not bill the client for it.

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

#43
post #10

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

The only well known fact when dealing with Facebook is that if you want to manipulate their documented rules you need to either have deep pockets or a lot of influence.

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

#44
post #32

Please 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!

The biggest conspiracy theory would say that a bot clicking ads would help earn FB money.

I don't really suspect this to be true, Facebook CTR are incredibly low so if they are faking it they are doing it badly.

I suspect the most likely reason is some sort of spam scraper thing that visits every url or something. I would have assumed Facebook would be well protected against this sort of thing in regards to charging advertisers.

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

#45
post #22
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 smal…

Why not open a new page, and delete all content (but a link to the new page) off the old page?

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

#46
post #32

Please 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!

The OP says that they are not accusing FB of using bots to drive up revenue.

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

#47
post #32

Please 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!

The OP says that they are not accusing FB of using bots to drive up revenue.

They refused to overtly accuse them, but the subtext seem to argue exactly that.

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

#49
Copying the text just incase FB decides they don't like it

---

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. A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn't verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would 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. And if the person clicking the ad doesn't have JavaScript, it's very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What's important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. 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. That's correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn't reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes. But let's move on, because who the bots belong to isn't provable.

While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we're not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month. That's correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage. So we did what any good hardcore kids would do. We cursed that piece of shit out! Damn we were so pissed. We still are. This is why we need to delete this page and move away from Facebook. They're scumbags and we just don't have the patience for scumbags.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this page and liked our posts. We really appreciate it. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, where we don't get shaken down, you can do so here: http://twitter.com/limitedrun

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

#50
post #45
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 smal…

Why not open a new page, and delete all content (but a link to the new page) off the old page?

You lose all your Likes.
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