Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh no!
Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
81–90 of 381 posts
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#82Please 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?
As pathdependant said, this is a very common shady tactic in the ad business. You drive up your competitors costs with bots in order to drive them away from your keywords or make them think their conversions on those keywords are awful and then abandon them.
By far the most likely explanation in my opinion. Even if it's not the correct one, some of the traffic is almost certainly these kinds of bots.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
They refused to overtly accuse them, but the subtext seem to argue exactly that.
I don't think so, there's lots of reasons that would be a stupid idea for Facebook. But there's clearly something shady going on, and Facebook is being dicks to them in other ways, so they're out. That's the subtext.
They end the bot section with "But let's move on, because who the bots belong to isn't provable." after saying that they weren't accusing Facebook of running the bots. The subtext is screaming out.
Does me pointing out the barely shrouded subtext mean that I believe what they are saying? Of course not. It's just as likely, it seems, that their test is simply flawed (as others said, let's see the technical honey trap), that it's some other technical fault, etc. I highly doubt, just on intuition, that Facebook is running such broken bots: Come on, they'd do a better job than make something so easily detected.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#84Could FB do something like this to detect click fraud/misbehavior: FB's ad system only counts a click as valid and charges the advertiser when the browser from which the click originated has js enabled.
OP says only 1-2% of users have js disabled hence FB would only miss out on a relatively small amount of ad revenue instead of massively over-charging.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#85Please 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…
Facebook does analytics...they aren't some tiny startup...surely they track the quality of their traffic...so they know that 70-80% of their ad traffic comes from bots.
So Facebook is knowingly profiting from this, and they have the resources to fix this...but they don't since this is making so much money for them.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#86Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your name becomes locked after 200 likes: https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=271607792873806 For the username, everyone (including users) is allowed one name change. Presumably, Facebook can bypass these seemingly arbitrary limitations, but will essentially charge you for the right to do so (by requiring you to have purchased a certain amount of advertising with them).
This seems pretty reasonable, as the potential for abuse for arbitrary name changes is very high.
But at the same time is very normal a change of name, because companies adquires other companies, products can change the name too[1], etc... The Facebook page is supposedly owned by the creator, not Facebook and if a change of the name is needed, IMO it does not make sense to try to charge money from it.
I'm with you that F must have some restrictions on name change, but it does not seem reasonable to charge money for it.
[1] Imagine a page called "Sun Microsystems - Java" before being buyed by Oracle with a fer thousands fans. I'm sure a hight percent of the fans would not care of have a name change to "Oracle - Java" for example.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#88Wow, 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 ...
If genuinely curious: I'm drawing a direct comparison of the potential inflation of ad costs in one playground (google) with another (facebook) through both common and unique means. Another common issue to both is click fraud and it's effects on the said cost of ads. My mistake for assuming this was obvious and known.
The relevance of such a comparison? It's not a one off, as uncommon as we think. Has nothing to do with pointing fingers.
Didn't mean to come across as off topic. To me, if someone upstream and in the past was doing this, chances are it might happen later in time downstream too, and there might be something to see in the forest instead of pointing at one tree or another.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#89Copying 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…
We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it.
They reinvented the access log? By hand? Are people really that detached from how servers work?
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#90FB just gave him the best advertising ever through this publicity.