Yet Another Company Claims Facebook Ad Clicks Are Mostly From Bot

Yet Another Company Claims Facebook Ad Clicks Are Mostly From Bot

A recent post on its company page, Limited Run, a New York company that offers website solutions to artists and musicians claimed, 80% of the clicks from its ads were from bots.
Limited Run said it could only verify 15-20% of the clicks on its site through a host of standard analytic solutions, which led to it building its own custom software for tracking.
The company explains: Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still we couldn't verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. 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. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots.
Limited Run claims they contacted Facebook, who "wouldn't reply."Facebook declined to respond immediately on this issue when reached by Tom Mango, co-founder of Limited Run, explained further: Technically speaking, we used about 6 different analytics services as well as built our own analytics system to try and confirm the ad click throughs from Facebook. The way client side analytics works is that it will try and load some JavaScript on the page and, if that doesn't work, it just loads a single image. On about 80% of the incoming page requests from our ad campaigns, neither the JavaScript or the images were being loaded. Normal web browsers, used by normal people, will load both JavaScript and images. However, bots, such as ones that crawl the web or bots that attempt to hack into websites to leave spam comments on blogs, don't usually load those
extra things like JavaScript and images. This is how we came to the conclusion that the majority of the click throughs we were getting were from bots. We have no idea who the bots are run by and don't think Facebook has anything to do with them.
As it turns out, this issue while not everyday news, is not new for Facebook. In June of 2009, complaints arose regarding discrepancy in ad clicks versus what clients could verify. Facebook verified a discrepancy and claimed to be implementing appropriate changes. A month later, In April of this past year, the two companies along with others were denied certification for a class action in a District Court in California.
The final straw for Limited Run came unrelated to the click issue, it was regarding changing the name on its company page: While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we're not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. 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. That's correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage In regards to that specific issue, Facebook gave us the following statement:
We're currently investigating Limited Run's claims. For their issue with the Page name change, there seems to be some sort of miscommunication. We do not charge Pages to have their names changed. Our team is reaching out about this now.Unlike others, Limited Run isn't accusing Facebook of fraud. The company startup-claims-80-of-its-facebook-ad-clicks-are-coming-from-bots it could have been a competitor attempting to sabotage the firm through increased ad costs. Nonetheless, Facebook admits it might haveas many as 50 million fake users Mango reiterated that it wasn't the clicks that led Limited Run to leave Facebook, it was the customer service. While he acknowledges Limited Run is smaller than a lot of Facebook's clients, it raises questions over how widespread the problem might be, even if it's not widely reported. At a time when effectiveness of the social network's ads are constant debated this surely doesn't help.
A recent post on its company page, Limited Run, a New York company that offers website solutions to artists and musicians claimed, 80% of the clicks from its ads were from bots.
Limited Run said it could only verify 15-20% of the clicks on its site through a host of standard analytic solutions, which led to it building its own custom software for tracking.
The company explains: Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still we couldn't verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. 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. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots.
Limited Run claims they contacted Facebook, who "wouldn't reply."Facebook declined to respond immediately on this issue when reached by Tom Mango, co-founder of Limited Run, explained further: Technically speaking, we used about 6 different analytics services as well as built our own analytics system to try and confirm the ad click throughs from Facebook. The way client side analytics works is that it will try and load some JavaScript on the page and, if that doesn't work, it just loads a single image. On about 80% of the incoming page requests from our ad campaigns, neither the JavaScript or the images were being loaded. Normal web browsers, used by normal people, will load both JavaScript and images. However, bots, such as ones that crawl the web or bots that attempt to hack into websites to leave spam comments on blogs, don't usually load those
extra things like JavaScript and images. This is how we came to the conclusion that the majority of the click throughs we were getting were from bots. We have no idea who the bots are run by and don't think Facebook has anything to do with them.
As it turns out, this issue while not everyday news, is not new for Facebook. In June of 2009, complaints arose regarding discrepancy in ad clicks versus what clients could verify. Facebook verified a discrepancy and claimed to be implementing appropriate changes. A month later, In April of this past year, the two companies along with others were denied certification for a class action in a District Court in California.
The final straw for Limited Run came unrelated to the click issue, it was regarding changing the name on its company page: While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we're not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. 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. That's correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage In regards to that specific issue, Facebook gave us the following statement:
We're currently investigating Limited Run's claims. For their issue with the Page name change, there seems to be some sort of miscommunication. We do not charge Pages to have their names changed. Our team is reaching out about this now.Unlike others, Limited Run isn't accusing Facebook of fraud. The company startup-claims-80-of-its-facebook-ad-clicks-are-coming-from-bots it could have been a competitor attempting to sabotage the firm through increased ad costs. Nonetheless, Facebook admits it might haveas many as 50 million fake users Mango reiterated that it wasn't the clicks that led Limited Run to leave Facebook, it was the customer service. While he acknowledges Limited Run is smaller than a lot of Facebook's clients, it raises questions over how widespread the problem might be, even if it's not widely reported. At a time when effectiveness of the social network's ads are constant debated this surely doesn't help.

Facebook Unconcerned that Advertisers Pay for Thousands Of Fake 'Likes''!

Facebook Unconcerned That Advertisers Pay For Thousands Of Fake 'Likes'

　

Facebook has previously admitted that 5-6% of its 90 million accounts are fake. But this is the first time evidence has emerged that spam accounts are rooking advertisers who pay for campaigns on Facebook that reach no one "real."

The BBC reports:

Michael Tinmouth, a social media marketing consultant, ran Facebook advertising campaigns for a number of small businesses, including a luxury goods firm and an executive coach, they became concerned after looking at who had clicked on the adverts.

While they had been targeting Facebook users around the world, all their "likes" appeared to be coming from countries such as the Philippines and Egypt." Mr Tinmouth asked Facebook to investigate the issue of questionable profiles after one of his clients refused to pay for his adverts on the basis they had not reached "real people".

Tinmouth then created a fake business, "Virtual Bagel," And found that it too gathered Likes from fake accounts. Facebook told the BBC it was not a big deal: We've not seen evidence of a significant problem," said a spokesman.All of these companies have access to Facebook's analytics which allow them to see the identities of people who have liked their pages, yet this has not been flagged as an issue.

Use Interactive Communication, properly executed, and overcome all these problems immediately...and for ever!

Click Fraud

Martin Fleischmann put his faith in online advertising.

He used it to build his Atlanta company, MostChoice.com, which offers consumers

rate quotes and other information on insurance and mortgages. Last year he paid

Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. a total of $2 million in advertising fees. The 40-year-old entrepreneur

believed the celebrated promise of Internet marketing: You pay only when

prospective customers click on your ads.

Now, Fleischmann's faith has been shaken. Over the past three years, he

has noticed a growing number of puzzling clicks coming from such places as

Botswana, Mongolia, and Syria. This seemed strange, since MostChoice steers

customers to insurance and mortgage brokers only in the U.S

Fleischmann is a victim of click fraud: a dizzying collection of scams and

deceptions that inflate advertising bills for thousands of companies of all

sizes. The spreading scourge poses the single biggest threat to the Internet's

advertising gold mine and is the most nettlesome question facing Google and

Yahoo, whose digital empires depend on all that gold.

The growing ranks of businesspeople worried about click fraud typically

have no complaint about versions of their ads that appear on actual Google or

Yahoo Web pages, often next to search results. The trouble arises when the

Internet giants boost their profits by recycling ads to millions of other sites,

ranging from the familiar, such as cnn.com, to dummy Web addresses like

insurance1472.com, which display lists of ads and little if anything else. When

somebody clicks on these recycled ads, marketers such as MostChoice get billed,

sometimes even if the clicks appear to come from Mongolia. Google or Yahoo then

share the revenue with a daisy chain of Web site hosts and operators. A penny or

so even trickles down to the lowly clickers. That means Google and Yahoo at

times passively profit from click fraud and, in theory, have an incentive to

tolerate it. So do smaller search engines and marketing networks that similarly

recycle ads.

SLIPPING CONFIDENCE

Google and Yahoo say they filter out most questionable clicks and either

don't charge for them or reimburse advertisers that have been wrongly billed.

That confidence may be slipping. A BusinessWeek investigation has revealed a

thriving click-fraud underground populated by swarms of small-time players,

making detection difficult. "Paid to read" rings with hundreds or thousands of

members each, all of them pressing PC mice over and over in living rooms and

dens around the world. In some cases, "clickbot" software generates page hits

automatically and anonymously. Participants from Kentucky to China speak of

making from $25 to several thousand dollars a month apiece, cash they wouldn't

receive if Google and Yahoo were as successful at blocking fraud as they

claim. "It's not that much different from someone coming up and taking money out

of your wallet," says David Struck. He and his wife, Renee, both 35, say they

dabbled in click fraud last year, making more than $5,000 in four months.

Employing a common scheme, the McGregor (Minn.) couple set up dummy Web sites

filled with nothing but recycled Google and Yahoo advertisements. Then they paid

others small amounts to visit the sites, where it was understood they would

click away on the ads, says David Struck. It was "way too easy," he adds.

Gradually, he says, he and his wife began to realize they were cheating

unwitting advertisers, so they stopped. "Whatever Google and Yahoo are doing [to

stop fraud], it's not having much of an effect," he says.

Spending on Internet ads is growing faster than any other sector of the

advertising industry and is expected to surge from $12.5 billion last year to

$29 billion in 2010 in the U.S. alone, according to researcher eMarketer Inc.

About half of these dollars are going into deals requiring advertisers to pay by

the click. Most other Internet ads are priced according to "impressions," or how

many people view them.

Google and Yahoo are grabbing billions of dollars once collected by

traditional print and broadcast outlets, based partly on the assumption that

clicks are a reliable, quantifiable measure of consumer interest that the older

media simply can't match. But the huge influx of cash for online ads has

attracted armies of con artists whose activities are eroding that crucial

assumption and could eat into the optimistic expectations for online

advertising. (Advertisers generally don't grumble about fraudulent clicks coming

from the Web sites of traditional media outlets. But there are growing concerns

about these media sites exaggerating how many visitors they have -- the online

version of inflating circulation.)

Most academics and consultants who study online advertising estimate that

10% to 15% of ad clicks are fake, representing roughly $1 billion in annual

billings. Usually the search engines divide these proceeds with several players:

First, there are intermediaries known as "domain parking" companies, to which

the search engines redistribute their ads. Domain parkers host "parked" Web

sites, many of which are those dummy sites containing only ads. Cheats who own

parked sites obtain search-engine ads from the domain parkers and arrange for

the ads to be clicked on, triggering bills to advertisers. In all, $300 million

to $500 million a year could be flowing to the click-fraud

　

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