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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

#121

Post by fchollet »

Very unlikely to have been bots from FB, they're not yet quite that desperate. They would be 90% sure of getting busted, and it would be a huge deal breaker for a lot of their clients. A suicide move.

The more plausible reality is that there are just a lot of bots crawling FB fan pages, poorly programmed bots that will just follow every single link they come across. That's very much in line with my personal experience of FB fan pages.

But FB is certainly to blame for not detecting these as bots, and putting ads on the pages they serve them. Hopefully they'll take care of this issue soon.

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

#123

Post by spaghetti »

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).

Would be nice to see some actual numbers. If "80% of clicks" is only eight clicks then the OP's post doesn't carry much weight.

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

#124

Post by tlrobinson »

seiji wrote: post #89
reustle wrote: post #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…

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?

I assumed this just meant they built something on top of access logs that told them what percentage of page loads also loaded JavaScript. I don't know about your webserver, but mine doesn't tell me this kind of thing out of the box.

Anyway, it's pretty irrelevant whether they added logging in their app (one line of code?) or enabled their webserver's built in logging.

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

#125

Post by phenom »

TomGullen wrote: post #44
nirvana wrote: 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…

FB does not need do that shady stuff. Here some facts.

[1] Bot registration on FB is really easy. If you try register 100 fake users in direct way you need to deal with javascript and web forms with strange ids, cookies and so on in your script. But if you enter fb.com without enabled javascript, they ask you change browser or use mobile version, which is not require* js at all.

[2] You can register number of accounts from one ip without CAPTCHA

[3] Only one "difficulty" is to find batch of emails, it is not that big issue since we have services like mailinator.com.

So 15 -25 loc script on python do all your job. It is not required use any tools like selenium or special skills , only basic understanding how http get/post works.

Why fb doing all this super easy bot registration stuff? I think we all know why.

Edit: spelling. Sorry non native English speaker here

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

#126

Post by flexie »

Cushman wrote: post #80
eytanlevit wrote: post #56

Earlier 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.

If that is true and 70-80 percent hit the back button before the js files load, it still says a lot about the quality of the clicks from the perspective of someone considering advertising on FB...

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

#127

Post by veyron »

pandog wrote: post #63
veyron wrote: post #3

"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?

From the article it would appear that their definition of a bot is a client with JavaScript disabled

"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."

Later:

"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"

I think they use a different definition of bot. Otherwise they wouldn't have to use a second logger ...

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

#128

Post by FSEA »

logn wrote: post #93
RobotCaleb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Here is a WebCite copy of this HN page with all aforementioned information: http://www.webcitation.org/69Y3G0hvA

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

#129

Post by scribblemacher »

wpietri wrote: post #96
seiji wrote: post #89

Earlier 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 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.

Using butterflies: http://xkcd.com/378/

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

#130

Post by jeffbarr »

wpietri wrote: post #96
seiji wrote: post #89

Earlier 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 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.

With VB6 you can check IP Addresses.
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