80% Of Facebook Ad Clicks Are From Bots
The Facebook ads bots fiasco seems to be spiraling out of control. A few stories back we covered news that some advertisers may be getting shafted by Facebook with thousands of ad clicks coming from bots.
At the time of that story many were quick to come to the aid of Facebook citing that ‘their’ ad traffic was perfectly legit and there wasn’t a bot to be seen in their traffic logs. Now there is another accusation and this time the source is being seen as credible.
Limited Run is start-up that sells physical products ranging from vinyl records to music equipment and the company is reporting that more than 80% of its Facebook ads traffic is coming from bots. And the accusation wasn’t something whispered but a full-scale detail of how money was being wasted.
The details of their findings were published on their website: “A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. 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.”
There’s more but the above highlights the scale of the problem Limited Run and other advertisers are having on Facebook. And the social networking giant seems to tacitly admit to the problem, saying in a statement that: “We refined and improved our methodology for recognizing what we call duplicate or false accounts. These refinements resulted in an increase in our estimate of duplicate or false accounts relative to our earlier global estimate, primarily driven by emerging markets such as Turkey and Indonesia… Since authentic identity is so important to the Facebook experience, we’ll continue to try and improve our user management techniques with the goal of ensuring that every account on Facebook represents an authentic unique individual.”
With news emerging that over 8% of Facebook profiles are fake this can’t be good news for Facebook. Limited Run has pulled all its ads and other properties from Facebook and the fallout will no doubt cascade to other advertisers. This won’t go away anytime soon, we don’t think.
We’ll keep you posted.
(Source: sitetrail.com)
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