Interesting. I just tried browsing facebook with Javascript off and pretty much nothing works. I can't comment, can't share, can't like. But guess what, ads show up and they can be clicked.
Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
351–360 of 381 posts
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#352Earlier 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…
It's much easier to guess a weak password than create a fake profile. As for everything else, I totally agree with you.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#353Is it actually necessary to weed out bot-clicks? If all sites have equal amounts of bot-clicks, then you can just charge 80% less per click (compared to the situation where all clicks would be human). Perhaps in practice the bot percentage changes widely per-site, so it's still important to have statistics on bot-clicks.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not saying that's not the case, but you have no data or knowledge to back any of that up. I wouldn't assume a problem is easy or hard until I've got sufficient info on it. Too often I've heard "how could XYZ not have done this, fixed that?" Then have that same party sign on board to fix this "easy" problem and get themselves in a world of hurt.
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…
The bot masters then just have to figure out roughly what your activity/ad clicks rate is. They can do this over time by looking at statistics.
Then they make some bundled crapware browser plugin that gets installed by legit facebook users that will click ads at that interval + some random time. Possibly do the ad clicks in background so that the user does not know.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just as a thought - facebook must be in a unique position to provide almost unbeatable captchas - just put up images of a known friend and four / forty random pictures - the one who chooses correct is likely the person logged in ignore this is fb already does it
They do in fact do that (or something like it) when you need to recover an account/password.
They also did this the first time I logged in from a foreign country.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#356Earlier 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…
The bot masters then just have to figure out roughly what your activity/ad clicks rate is. They can do this over time by looking at statistics. Then they make some bundled crapware browser plugin that gets installed by legit facebook users that will click ads at that interval + some random time. Possibly do the ad clicks in background so that the user does not know.
How exactly are they going to know they're being flagged as bots? When all you're doing is discounting those bot clicks to the advertiser it becomes far more difficult to test your limits as a bot (you would need to be a paying advertiser, just to analyze the human to bot threshold). It's similar to hell-banning, in that the user's generally unaware they've been hell-banned.
Take a minute to think about the effort a bot account has to go to in order to even come close to gaming a system that tracks their behaviour.
Let's assume that in order to be deemed human you need at least a few characteristics like "account older than 1 day", "friends from other non-suspicious accounts", "a photo or at least comments on a friends photos", and a "certain amount of click activity".
Now let's take that criteria and make it difficult for a bot to even know if they're being flagged as a bot where the only indication is a reduced bill at the end of the day / week / month to the advertiser. So bot makers would have to pay to test and would at best receive delayed feedback on their success.
Isn't this starting to seem extremely difficult, and generally unscalable from a bot perspective? It doesn't have to be impossible, there just needs to be lower hanging fruit, of which there are plenty should FB implement a system like this.
And should this fairly simple solution still have a few holes that a very elite few bot coders are able to game, you've still got tons of data and time to use to tune your algos.
It just doesn't make sense that one of their advertiser's is being charged for 80% bot clicks, until you start to question Facebooks motivations.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#357I work in the digital advertising industry, more specifically on ad exchanges and various behavioral targeting platforms. Facebook is scrambling to monetize their traffic like never before, as a reaction to fallout from their horrifically botched IPO.
They recently announced the launch of a beta ad exchange, FBX, that for the first time will allow outside advertisers to access Facebook inventory for behavioral targeting. So if you are researching a flatscreen TV on Best Buy, you could start seeing TV ads on Facebook. This is common practice across all e-commerce websites, but until now FB has been a closed inventory platform.
This means that the clicks and actions from the Facebook audience are being scrutinized more than ever, and those have to be quality clicks (not bots). General Motors recently announced their complete withdrawal from FB because of poor advertising performance (again, bots).
Facebook is fucking up royally on the business side of things, so for the sake of sustainability I hope they are still laser-focused on product.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bot masters then just have to figure out roughly what your activity/ad clicks rate is. They can do this over time by looking at statistics. Then they make some bundled crapware browser plugin that gets installed by legit facebook users that will click ads at that interval + some random time. Possibly do the ad clicks in background so that the user does not know.
How exactly are they going to know they're being flagged as bots? When all you're doing is discounting those bot clicks to the advertiser it becomes far more difficult to test your limits as a bot (you would need to be a paying advertiser, just to analyze the human to bot threshold). It's similar to hell-banning, in that the user's generally unaware they've been hell-banned. Take a minute to think about the effort a…
I agree. This is an easy problem, considering FB's resources. Only a logged in FB user can click on ads. Not random crawlers. That alone makes this problem 100 times easier than what Google has to face with invalid clicks. No excuses.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#359My startup is essentially an advertising aggregator (pooling traffic from a variety of publishers and routing it to advertisers) and dealing with things like bot detection is a HUGE chunk of what we work on, technology-wise. Let me try and give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole can go. - Okay, you want to detect bots. Well, "good" bots usually have a user agent string like, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2…
The big problem here isn't detecting bots. Sure, in this one company's case bots may be the problem; but in general, it's detecting behavior that you are paying for that doesn't make you any money. There may be real users who click "like" a lot; they may do it because they're paid, or they may do it because they're bored and trying to see how many "likes" they can collect. It doesn't really matter; none of them are very valuable to an advertiser.
Rather than trying to explicitly filter bot traffic, they should try to quantify the value of particular "likes". For instance, a user who demonstrably clicked through and purchased something is much more valuable than one who "likes" 10,000 companies and has no friends, whether or not they're a bot.
And heck; a bot that has thousands of followers who all buy lots of things is valuable too. Maybe someone created a particularly effective meme-generator bot, and people who follow that bot are likely to buy ironic T-shirts. Whether or not a user is a bot isn't all that relevant; it's whether that user's activity correlates with you making sales.
Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bot masters then just have to figure out roughly what your activity/ad clicks rate is. They can do this over time by looking at statistics. Then they make some bundled crapware browser plugin that gets installed by legit facebook users that will click ads at that interval + some random time. Possibly do the ad clicks in background so that the user does not know.
How exactly are they going to know they're being flagged as bots? When all you're doing is discounting those bot clicks to the advertiser it becomes far more difficult to test your limits as a bot (you would need to be a paying advertiser, just to analyze the human to bot threshold). It's similar to hell-banning, in that the user's generally unaware they've been hell-banned. Take a minute to think about the effort a…
It depends whether the bots are creating accounts or hijacking existing ones (via browser plugins or whatnot).
The bots will not be able to get accurate statistics without paying, but they might be able to get "good enough" statistics. For example, is the system moving in a direction we like.
If you do need to pay , a good bot herder probably has enough stolen credit cards to use.
Yes, there are certainly mitigation techniques. But like other spam/bot related problems it becomes an arms race.
You only need 1 good bot programmer to release his bot online for thousands of budding script kiddies to take advantage of.