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

#331

Post by markrabkin » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 7:04 AM UTC

Hey, I'm an engineering manager on the Ads team at Facebook and have been working on our Ads Marketplace Quality team for a couple of years now.

We take reporting accuracy seriously and have a variety of systems in place that may filter out some clicks and impressions before they ever appear in charges or reports. For example, we may invalidate repetitive, incomplete, or otherwise abusive clicks, and we cap the number of times any user can see or click on particular ads in a day. We also monitor traffic and click patterns across the site and try to filter clicks that appear to be generated by bots or other automated systems. We work closely with our general spam and fraud fighting engineering team called "Site Integrity", which does great work trying to detect fake users, bots, and users infected with malware.

A lot of sophisticated advertisers use Facebook, and many of them perform all kinds of validation of the effectiveness of their advertising on our site. Many advertisers also use various analytics systems to monitor the clicks they receive through our ads platform.

We are constantly working with advertisers and partners to help ensure we deliver ads that are valuable to our users and advertisers. We care about this area of work a lot.

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

#332

Post by Tichy » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 7:12 AM UTC

I don't understand why the bots click on the ads? Of course an old school crawler would just "click" on any link on the page, but I would assume most ads are included by JavaScript and would therefore not be crawled by standard crawlers?

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

#333

Post by andrewfelix » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 7:24 AM UTC

Off topic; was any one else astounded by the misinformed and misguided comments on the FB post? Quite a contrast from HN.

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

#334

Post by simula67 » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 7:26 AM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #313

kirubakaran wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that it is challenging for a third party like you to identify the bots. But Facebook has more than enough signal on each user clicking on an ad (friends, posts, location, 'non ad-click activity' to 'ad-click activity' ratio) to determine if that user is a bot. Looks like they are choosing to not do anything with this information. "FB is turning a blind eye to keep their revenue" seems to stand up to Occa…

It's just as easy to invest in several fake profiles that act just like real users. Pay people to work from home maintaining fake accounts for you, posting stuff that seems real, interacting with your other fake accounts and celebrity/business pages, etc. Then, run bots with these accounts, click around on a subset of good links randomly, and throw in a reasonable ratio of ad clicks per account, then move on to the n…

I am unsure if Facebook provides a service like AdSense to motivate this kind of behavior. It would be interesting if to see how they could fight this type of behavior though.

1. Make the split uneven. For example for every dollar advertiser pays, only 30 cents goes to the page owner who received the "Likes"

2. Lobby to make these kinds of activity illegal. They are after all spamming activities

3. These kinds of fake account farms will usually have very few connections to outside world. That is, accounts that do not obey the "Six Degrees of seperation" should be flagged for human review.

4. Once reviewed enlist law enforcement help to track down the owners of the all the accounts in these farms.

Painstaking work, but I guess the point is that advantage can lie with Facebook as opposed to the spammer in this game. I am not sure about the ethical implications though.

Maybe this is why Google wants to succeed badly in the social space : extra spam fighting abilities.

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

#335

Post by roel_v » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 7:32 AM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #313

kirubakaran wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that it is challenging for a third party like you to identify the bots. But Facebook has more than enough signal on each user clicking on an ad (friends, posts, location, 'non ad-click activity' to 'ad-click activity' ratio) to determine if that user is a bot. Looks like they are choosing to not do anything with this information. "FB is turning a blind eye to keep their revenue" seems to stand up to Occa…

It's just as easy to invest in several fake profiles that act just like real users. Pay people to work from home maintaining fake accounts for you, posting stuff that seems real, interacting with your other fake accounts and celebrity/business pages, etc. Then, run bots with these accounts, click around on a subset of good links randomly, and throw in a reasonable ratio of ad clicks per account, then move on to the n…

You're basically saying 'there is a point where the line between actual user and paid click-frauder becomes blurry'. Which is true, but that point is way beyond what is profitable, which is enough - you 'only' need to make your system hard enough to beat to make it not worth the effort.

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

#336

Post by cookiecaper » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 7:38 AM UTC

roel_v wrote: post #335

cookiecaper wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just as easy to invest in several fake profiles that act just like real users. Pay people to work from home maintaining fake accounts for you, posting stuff that seems real, interacting with your other fake accounts and celebrity/business pages, etc. Then, run bots with these accounts, click around on a subset of good links randomly, and throw in a reasonable ratio of ad clicks per account, then move on to the n…

You're basically saying 'there is a point where the line between actual user and paid click-frauder becomes blurry'. Which is true, but that point is way beyond what is profitable , which is enough - you 'only' need to make your system hard enough to beat to make it not worth the effort.

Sure, I agree that your summary is correct. I don't really think the system I described is necessarily untenable, though. If you make 10k+/mo from ads I think it could be plenty profitable.

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

#337

Post by mojowo11 » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 7:41 AM UTC

mattmaroon wrote: post #190

mojowo11 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also none of this explains why they're taking down their Facebook page. I think it pretty clearly explains why they're taking down their Facebook page. Just because you don't agree with them doesn't mean it's not explained. They're shutting down their Facebook page because (according to them) it's sitting around with outdated branding but they can't change the name unless they spend $2000/mo. Also because their use…

Couldn't they just make another page with the correct name?

They could, but a) that's a pain in the ass, they'd have to build all the content out from scratch and b) they'd lose a ton of their Likes in the transition.

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

#338

Post by aidos » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 7:57 AM UTC

freeall wrote: post #321

zburt wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you start a new Amazon EC2 spot instance (netting you a new IP address), start up Chromium in headless mode (say, using Xvfb), navigate to the website of choice, use mouse automation to start clicking around, click the ad, spend 5 minutes clicking around in a semi-choreographed pattern on the advertisee's website, and then shut down the instance -- only to repeat? Moreover, Amazon is always buying new IP subn…

But why would you go through all that to click on ads? If I click on an ad for "Some Record Company" how does that make me money?

It doesn't always need to make you money, sometimes you might just want it to cost your competitor money.

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

#339

Post by normanf » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 8:06 AM UTC

Well, I have also tried to advertise on Facebook and saw the numbers of clicks shown in Facebook reports are much higher than the number of visits shown in the Google Analytics. It was rather strange. Besides, the support team has just ignored all my letters where I tried to define what goes wrong. As a result, I just stopped advertising campaign and wrote this article http://blog.britainloans.co.uk/2012/06/our-ambiguous-experie...

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

#340

Post by publicfig » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 8:17 AM UTC

monkeypizza wrote: post #302

rapind wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I do have at least some data to back that up. I know that they are a walled garden that keeps a ton of user data for every account (even the subset represented in Open Graph is significant). And it's with this knowledge that I make my conclusion. * Accounts subsisting of an unusual proportion of ad clicking activity compared to their other activities are likely bots. * New accounts with no history but high ad cl…

Compare it to google's problem filtering out automatically generated splogs, though - it took them years to make progress against that. Real human social activity is a lot more random than real informational content in blogs - so fb's problem seems harder. Also, facebook banning accounts is a much stronger action than google just lowering the pagerank of suspected splogs. So overall I think fb's problem is harder tha…

But in the same respect, the fact that real human social activity is much more random is a reason why this should be easier. Bots are inherently pattern based, and while there are bots that could work to maintain fake interactions in order to pass a wide-sweep analysis of low-socializing accounts with a high ad response rate, it would do quite a bit to take a first attack on some of the more obvious bots, which are the ones that many of the people who had these problems noticed.

Now of course I'm simplifying this to a nearly absurd degree, but I do think there are reasons for Facebook to want to ignore these issues and that even a minimal step up in bot-prevention could go a long way when it comes to their advertisers.