One thing about Facebook ads, instead of buying clicks to webpages, you could buy likes to your Facebook page. This way you can at least look at the FID of the Like to get some confirmation that the Like you bought was from a real person.
Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
91–100 of 381 posts
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Happend to us too!! we first thought kissmetrics was wrong, so we built a logger that logged server side requests and a client side code that executes on load of the landing page, and we found that 70% of the server side hits had javascript disabled(or that hit the page and left it before the js executed, which seems improbable for such a large number - 70%).
What user agent was reported by those hits? This is fascinating.
It was a few months ago and we've already deleted the db table, we are soon relaunching with a new campaign, so once I get the data again I'll post it here.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
And here is a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/4hu66.png
Here's ascii of the screenshot in case they censor your picture of text. http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=HHeY5nP1
Here's the MD5 of your ascii version of the screenshot of the blog post just in case: 14e34998a7bc46174bccd981ad5f41f6
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#94Copying 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?
This is besides the point.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Possibly other advertisers trying to push competitors away from facebook so BigDickPillz Inc can have it all to themselves?
Yes. This used to happen a lot on ad networks, although I personally don't know how pervasive it is now. The game is as jiggy said. Force competing ad buyers to pay for what appears to be non-productive traffic by forcing ad clicks. Since the real views are dominated by false views, the conversion rate on whatever is being sold appears to be horrible. The competitor goes elsewhere, and the scammer maintains access to…
How does Google prevent this? Is it simply inherently not-problematic, due to their spread of advertising?
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#96Copying 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?
This could be a businessperson's interpretation of what happened.
Or they might have indeed reinvented it. Kids these days and their Heroku! Back in my day we'd process each HTTP request by hand. And we'd do it uphill both ways in the snow.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Happend to us too!! we first thought kissmetrics was wrong, so we built a logger that logged server side requests and a client side code that executes on load of the landing page, and we found that 70% of the server side hits had javascript disabled(or that hit the page and left it before the js executed, which seems improbable for such a large number - 70%).
> (or that hit the page and left it before the js executed, which seems improbable for such a large number - 70%). That's actually an interesting proposal-- 100% of the time when I click on an ad, I didn't mean to and I try to close it before it has a chance to annoy me. Probably doesn't make sense on a large scale, but it's something to consider.
I agree that some users might close the page or hit the "back" button before the $(document).ready() happens, but I can't believe that 70% of the people did that(taking into account that our ad was really targeted and highly relevant to the landing page).
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
This is besides the point.
Is it though? It seems they spent a lot of time throwing more and more javascript at the problem until they realized they couldn't figure out what was happening. If they had real logging from the beginning, it would have unconfused them much sooner.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
While I doubt malicious intent on FB's part there's certainly a financial incentive to ignore this problem. How would their earnings reports change if they stopped charging at least some advertisers for 80% of clicks?
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#100Could 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.
I was thinking about it too... but then again why don't we hear the same complain from other advertisers?
When you build an advertisement network, you end up spending a bunch of time figuring out how to isolate these fake clicks and verify that they are not real. As an example, the IP addresses running the bots are going to be clicking "way too many ads to be a human".