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Facebook Bots Are Not Stealing Your Ad Spend

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Re: Facebook Bots Are Not Stealing Your Ad Spend

#3
I was hoping the article would be a little more informative and definitive according to the title. It is based on assumptions itself with a little theory behind it.

As for the statement - "The first is that the traffic coming in had JavaScript disabled. If this was the case then the JavaScript analytics software would not detect the incoming traffic and therefore would not be able to log the result at all." You can track incoming requests outside of javascript through the server. That is possibly what they had wrote.

Re: Facebook Bots Are Not Stealing Your Ad Spend

#4
post #2

So this article is claiming that 80% of people clicking on Facebook ads have chosen to use https? Seems way too high to me.

Facebook has been strongly recommending people switch this on (a one-step process, prompted in your news feed) for over a year now. http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/06/02/https-secure-browsi...

I'd be surprised if the number was as low as 80%.

Re: Facebook Bots Are Not Stealing Your Ad Spend

#5
All the Facebook campaigns I have run use url parameter tagging to track clicks (i.e. for Google Analytics append &utm_source=facebook...) to the url.

I think this is fairly standard practice so it seems unlikely to me that they'd have to use the referrer exclusively

Re: Facebook Bots Are Not Stealing Your Ad Spend

#6
> The first is that the traffic coming in had JavaScript disabled. If this was the case then the JavaScript analytics software would not detect the incoming traffic and therefore would not be able to log the result at all.

Did you read their post? To quote:

> Here's what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn't have JavaScript, it's very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What's important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. 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.

Emphasis added.

Re: Facebook Bots Are Not Stealing Your Ad Spend

#7
post #4
post #2

So this article is claiming that 80% of people clicking on Facebook ads have chosen to use https? Seems way too high to me.

Facebook has been strongly recommending people switch this on (a one-step process, prompted in your news feed) for over a year now. http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/06/02/https-secure-browsi... I'd be surprised if the number was as low as 80%.

I have to say, I think you are VASTLY overestimating the average facebook user.

Re: Facebook Bots Are Not Stealing Your Ad Spend

#8
post #3

I was hoping the article would be a little more informative and definitive according to the title. It is based on assumptions itself with a little theory behind it. As for the statement - "The first is that the traffic coming in had JavaScript disabled. If this was the case then the JavaScript analytics software would not detect the incoming traffic and therefore would not be able to log the result at all." You can t…

I can't believe someone who has 'delivered highly scalable solutions' actually managed to write this line on his blog with a straight face. How were you not able to deduce that the devs likely detected disabled javascript without the use of javascript?

His whole post is devoid of content and nothing but statements without any real substance or evidence.

Re: Facebook Bots Are Not Stealing Your Ad Spend

#10
post #4
post #2

So this article is claiming that 80% of people clicking on Facebook ads have chosen to use https? Seems way too high to me.

Facebook has been strongly recommending people switch this on (a one-step process, prompted in your news feed) for over a year now. http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/06/02/https-secure-browsi... I'd be surprised if the number was as low as 80%.

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