Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by spaghetti » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 5:36 PM UTC

huggyface wrote: post #116

spaghetti wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It would be a very, very short term financial incentive. Advertisers monitor to see performance on the other end, and when the campaigns don't yield actual success they move on. The only real exception to this are mega-brands that advertise just to build namespace. Everyone else expects direct action from some hefty percentage of their ads.

Are you saying it's short term because advertisers would notice? Sure some advertisers would notice. However I doubt the majority are capable of performing the OP's analysis (which could use some scrutiny).

Imagine a 100 person company with 5 people dedicated to advertising. Leadership says to increase on-line presence. Some recent college grad on the advertising team buys FB ads. Next month leadership is pleased that they're advertising on Facebook. Also leadership is pleased that sales increased x%. The FB ads could be completely worthless. Some non-trivial percentage of clicks could be from bots and no one would notice.

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

#132

Post by mattmanser » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 5:37 PM UTC

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?

Access logs can't record if javascript is enabled. There are other things I would be interested in if I were doing this too, I'd check the browser's TZ, check if flash was enabled, etc. and do it across sessions.

Depends how far they went profiling their visitors, it clearly says in the article they were tracking if js was enabled, so yes, you'd need to roll something or another by hand. GA relies solely on js for example.

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

#133

Post by rviscomi » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 5:38 PM UTC

logn wrote: post #93

RobotCaleb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Here's the MD5 of your ascii version of the screenshot of the blog post just in case: 14e34998a7bc46174bccd981ad5f41f6

I acknowledge receipt of the MD5 of the ASCII of the screenshot of the blog. Please acknowledge receipt of acknowledgement.

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

#134

Post by bigdubs » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 5:38 PM UTC

fchollet wrote: post #121

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 experienc…

In my mind having an in-house bot network and being totally ignorant that you're charging for bot traffic via ads amount to the same thing.

This is very, very bad.

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

#135

Post by taligent » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 5:43 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #112

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…

That escalated quickly! And so it seems that Facebook could be proven to be the new groupon. I would absolutely not be suprised if the hits were FB bots - however I'd expect they wouldn't be that directly stupid so as to have an Ad-bot net in house. Surely this is some service they outsource for plausible deniability. Something they would have learned from their relationship handing all user data over to the NSA/CIA.…

So without ANY facts your conclusion is that Facebook is fraudulently deceiving advertisers.

And that they are doing this using experience from working with the NSA/CIA in order to cover up the fact that $800 million dollars of Facebook's yearly profits will disappear overnight once people realise the truth. And as such they are willing to pay out the ad-bot companies in order to hide this conspiracy.

Right.

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

#136

Post by AznHisoka » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 5:43 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #112

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…

That escalated quickly! And so it seems that Facebook could be proven to be the new groupon. I would absolutely not be suprised if the hits were FB bots - however I'd expect they wouldn't be that directly stupid so as to have an Ad-bot net in house. Surely this is some service they outsource for plausible deniability. Something they would have learned from their relationship handing all user data over to the NSA/CIA.…

All this happening as employees in FB are itching to cash out their options in a few months.

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

#137

Post by Cushman » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 5:43 PM UTC

flexie wrote: post #126

Cushman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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...

To be fair, that pretty much matches what I've heard about Facebook's click quality.

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

#138

Post by spaghetti » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 5:50 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #112

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…

That escalated quickly! And so it seems that Facebook could be proven to be the new groupon. I would absolutely not be suprised if the hits were FB bots - however I'd expect they wouldn't be that directly stupid so as to have an Ad-bot net in house. Surely this is some service they outsource for plausible deniability. Something they would have learned from their relationship handing all user data over to the NSA/CIA.…

We need to see some real numbers before making these kind of predictions. What was the volume of clicks that OP couldn't detect? 10, 1K, 1M? It makes a big difference.

Also given FB users' aversion to ads this whole issue could be explained by users just clicking the back button. Ad supported sites have trained users to do three things very well: install adblock, habitually ignore ads, quickly click away from any interstitial or unexpected ads like on Hulu.

Another note on the "back button": I recently discovered the awesome power of "three-finger swipe back button" on Macbook trackpad. So it's possible users can "click" back even faster than before. I can and before the swipe I was well-trained in the art of "CMD back arrow" :-)

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

#139

Post by pawelwentpawel » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 5:50 PM UTC

timdorr wrote: post #55

sanxiyn wrote: post #10

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

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).

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.

Well, apparently there is an exception from this rule. Obviously there is a huge potential for abuse when changing name of a page that has plenty of users. However, allowing only the "money making" pages to do so is a bit of an unfair move in my opinion. Reasonable but unfair.

I wonder if this situation will escalate and fb will publish some explanation. Nevertheless, it is still hard to believe for me that a company with such value would fake clicks at all or in a way that is easy to detect.

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

#140

Post by fsniper » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 5:54 PM UTC

jeffbarr wrote: post #130

wpietri wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please guys. This is not Reddit.