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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

#321

Post by freeall »

zburt wrote: post #263
ebtalley wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

data would be * IP addresses, one can assume a bot would only have a set of addresses they could use, barring botnets. * request patterns, ie: did the bot request css/js, etc * request timeframes * UA strings Sure, its a big data problem, but I can imagine that Facebook has solved these types of scenarios many times over.

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?

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

#322

Post by freeall »

don_draper wrote: post #290
nhashem wrote: post #162

My 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…

One quick way to detect bots is to look for a GET request of the robots.txt file

Sort of explained already, but "bad" bots would never go look for that file. And a good bot probably already identifies itself the the request, so no need to look through robots.txt.

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

#323

Post by saurik »

Out of curiosity, I just went back to a campaign I ran last year with Facebook to see if I was affected. I spent $2k on CPC advertisements with a filter targeting people related to phones, Cydia, Apple, etc.; the result was that I caught enough people that some smaller blogs reported on my ads.

http://www.givememind.com/saurik-advertises-cydia-tweak-on-f...

So, this campaign lasted one day, just over a year ago, on July 22nd. During this time, Facebook claims I got 5229 clicks. According to Google Analytics (which will only log users whom have JavaScript working and enabled), I got 5057 hits to that landing page.

Finally, working from logs, I have managed to find 5643 total requests for the URL. If I filter for those that explicitly sent a referer from facebook.com/ajax, I see 4644; of course, many people have browsers that do not send referers due to various reasons.

Therefore, I feel safe concluding that, for my website, a year ago, I was not having "80% of ad clicks from bots". I present this evidence in order to help people attempting to understand this issue to provide the possible clue that this is either "user-specific" or "changed in the last year".

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

#324

Post by Maskawanian »

brador wrote: post #228
tlrobinson wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surprised no ones mentioned the noscript plugin. Since the user is on facebook they'd have facebook unblocked, but noscript still blocking everything else. How would you discern a noscript user from bot?

What you say is valid, however no-script users are a small minority of internet users. I doubt their numbers would tip the results in either direction.

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

#325

Post by Wyfurl »

In January my startup ran a trial Facebook ad campaign using a free $100 advertising credit from Facebook. Extremely pleased with the results, we started paying to advertise and immediately noticed a substantial drop off in the conversion rate (down over 70%) even though we were using the same targeting, ads, and made zero changes to our website.

As a Facebook advertiser, user, and stockholder, I'm not impressed.

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

#326

Post by Foy »

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…

He never said to ban the suspicious accounts, just don't charge companies for their clicks.

The detection part aside, it's a simple fix. I just wonder why FB hasn't already. (Is it because it'd hurt their revenue when they need it the most?)

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

#327

Post by vampirechicken »

jlgreco wrote: post #249
vampirechicken wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does 'using awk' count as a slight? It was the proper add-on to the previous comment kids today don't learn awk. Becuase they have Perl, Ruby, and Python which are supersets of the unix command line tool set. Awk was the king in the years before Perl. I never really learned to use cut, so I sitll use awk for one-liners the deal with columns in delimited-data text-files.

Sorry, I read it as a slight because it came right after "uphill both ways in the snow" .

Which usually precedes "Get off my lawn!"

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

#328

Post by vampirechicken »

jlgreco wrote: post #249
vampirechicken wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does 'using awk' count as a slight? It was the proper add-on to the previous comment kids today don't learn awk. Becuase they have Perl, Ruby, and Python which are supersets of the unix command line tool set. Awk was the king in the years before Perl. I never really learned to use cut, so I sitll use awk for one-liners the deal with columns in delimited-data text-files.

Sorry, I read it as a slight because it came right after "uphill both ways in the snow" .

Which usually precedes "Get off my lawn!"

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

#330

Post by c3d »

Maybe it's time for the web to switch to a model where revenue is not driven by clicks, but by actual transactions. It's harder, of course, but it would sanitize things a bit. Hopefully, bots won't learn how to pay. And if they do, well, it doesn't hurt.
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