Facebook has a big revenue target this year – $550 million, according to investors who were pitched in the last round of funding. That’s nearly twice 2008 revenues of $280 million.
A big part of that revenue comes from cost-per-click advertising from small self serve advertisers. And right now those advertisers aren’t very happy. They’ve been complaining about click fraud of up to 100% for weeks, and the situation doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
Scores of complaints can be found at WickedFire, where advertisers are complaining of massive click fraud and an indifferent Facebook. A few of the recent posts (excuse the language):
Tracking 202 is telling me 11 clicks….Facebook is telling me 145. That’s way off the 15-20%, is there a different margin for tracking 202 than there is prosper 202 or did I suffer from one of those click bots?
Sucks how high the numbers are today. Its clear the problem is getting worse daily. I’ve moved most of my shit off facebook for the time being and magically my shit is all positive again. Crazy how that works. There are lots of places to buy traffic, some that will even actually give you the traffic you are paying for. Facebook is never going to admit to whats going on. I can almost guarantee you that.
Facebook is still reporting 20% more clicks than I actually get. This is bullshit. If I were at least getting bot traffic or something that would be one thing, but right now Facebook is simply stealing 20% of clicks that I paid for, which adds up to thousands of dollars. Someone should threaten legal action, this is straight up fraud on Facebook’s part.
FB click fraud update: ratio is now EXACTLY 10:1. 10 clicks reported on FB, 1 click on prosper. No, this wasnt on a small scale either. Were talking 1000’s of clicks. Have fun facebook. Im checking out till you can fix this shit.
I’m targeting small, specific demos, Facebook reports exactly twice as many clicks as hit my LP. Facebook is stealing our money, fuck this shit.
This is experienced by not just those that use 202. When in doubt, look at your raw apache logs – which I did. The result: 15% – 20% clicks never make it to my LP. Clearly a case of click-fraud going on. Tested on 3 different servers at 3 different DCs (not a network issue).
These aren’t the standard click fraud complaints that advertisers have leveled against search engines for years. In those cases, bots are racking up the fake clicks, which obviously never convert to any sort of purchase or other action. But at least the advertisers see the clicks.
In this case advertisers are saying that Facebook is recording and charging for clicks that don’t exist at all, even from bots. Their tracking software (many use Prosper202, but others are using raw Apache logs) shows one set of numbers, which is 20% – 100% lower than what Facebook is recording.
According to the WickedFire posts Facebook isn’t officially acknowledging the problem or giving any refunds so far. But they are asking some advertisers to send in logs to show the discrepancy. So far, advertisers who go to the trouble to do this aren’t getting the response they wanted: “I was asked to send in my logs so I spent over an hour compiling logs over the time period in question, and they replied with their fucking scripted bullshit. I was sooo fucking pissed, since I took the time to do that and they churn out a 2 second response.”
We have an email in to Facebook for comment. Image is from a 2006 BusinessWeek report on click fraud.
Update: From the comments below (update here) -
This is Brandon on the Facebook communications team. I wanted to chime in to make sure that our voice was part of this discussion and to clarify how we are addressing this issue.
We take click quality very seriously and have a series of measures in place to detect it. We have large volumes of data to analyze click patterns and can identify suspicious activity quickly.
Over the past few days, we have seen an increase in suspicious clicks. We have identified a solution which we have already begun to implement and expect will be completely rolled out by the end of today. In addition, we are identifying impacted accounts and will ensure that advertisers are credited appropriately.
That’s a serious complaint. I’ve heard from many people that they tried advertising on fb and didn’t get any results from it.
Any info on the volume of complaints or are the ones mentioned in the post exceptions from the mass of advertisers?
I’m missing the basic incentive for clickfraud — profit…
where is the profit motive for clickfraud on fb?
Did you not read the same article? Here’s an example: Facebook bills an advertiser for 1000 clicks at 25 cents a click, or $250. Advertiser only sees 100 clicks hit their site and should have paid only $25. Facebook makes $225 profit from nonexistent clicks.
smh. YOU didn’t read the article.
Usually click fraud comes from two sources:
1.) Users of a PPC Feed on their domain –by click-bots through general proxies, zombies, spam or even more clever tools.
Those users hope their accounts survive to be paid out by the feed provider.
2.) Is a bit dicey b/c people still do it now — traffic arbitrage between feed providers.
M.A. acknowledges this in the article — “These aren’t the standard click fraud complaints…”
This isn’t “click fraud” it’s tracking bug or feature depending which side you are on.
Your question was “where’s the profit motive?”. I showed you. The allegation is that Facebook is reporting clicks fraudulently, and that this fraudulent reporting of clicks is generating some tidy profits for Facebook. Arguing that this is a different type of click fraud is nice, but that doesn’t change the answer to your question of where the profit motive is. It lies squarely in Facebook’s balance sheet, whether intentional or due to a bug.
You’re out of your element. “Tidy profits” — don’t you mean chump change in one adcycle from small publishers — the figures quoted in the piece itself are admittedly dubious.
In the short run (not even mid or long run PER THE ARTICLE), fb is losing the small clients as a direct result of the bug — that’s hardly maxing revenue and making “Tidy Profits.”
By not understanding the whole issue it leads to a conclusion that doesn’t really make sense.
“Click Fraud” becomes a red-herring in which the process piece wraps itself around. (haha how bad was that.)
I can confirm that this is not small potatoes. I’m an advertiser on Facebook, and of the $10,000 or so I spent on FB, I was billed for 20% more clicks than I received. I’m not even close to being one of the big advertisers on FB(and I’ll be taking my ad dollars elsewhere until this is resolved), but even for me, Facebook essentially stole $2,000 of my money in a month. You can probably take 20% of Facebook’s hundreds of millions in ad revenues, and attribute that to click fraud. Hardly pocket change.
blah – you’re an idiot.
Click fraud means fraudulent clicks. Fraud is defined as: “deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.”
FB is charging for more clicks than actually occur. That falls into the above definition.
You are suggesting a venture company that’s taken 715 Million dollars with 280 MM in 2008 rev. is engaging in fraud that could ruin its reputation for relative peanuts, AND given the loss of advertisers in the smaller self-serve platform doesn’t even max rev.
Fraud as you say is INTENTIONAL deceit, and those are strong allegations against a very large company over a very small relative amount.
NO amount of name calling on your behalf makes the charges make sense.
blah – Having worked for a (now ex-) large pay-per-click advertising company, including managing of the click fraud filter system, I can tell you that big companies like this will in fact knowingly allow this sort of thing to happen.
In my case, my company was taking a ton of traffic from Russian porn sites. Everyone inside the company knew it was bad traffic, but it was was such a significant foundation of the company’s revenue, that they allowed it.
blah – you f’ing retard. you reeeaally missed the point of the entire article. it’s about Facebook sending fraudulent clicks – not users clicking their own ads..
Facebook sends fake clicks so they can charge you more.
Myspace did it as well – I ran about $35k worth of traffic to my site – they billed me for $45k. I emailed to have it investigated and they took a look at it, got back to me and said “yes you are correct there was an error – we should have charged you $1000 more (and they did)… true story.
stay classy.
I read and understood the article perfectly fine, it is what is not in the article nor present in the “analysis” that presents the problem.
blah is actually suckerberg. His point is, this isn’t fraud if you compare it to the rest of the crimes he has committed. Anyone doing business with the criminal enterprise called FaceBook is foolish.
I heard cpc on Facebook was very poor, that even though they dedicate the right panel portion to it entirely – it’s still not converting as well as they’d hope.
They wanted to sell vanity urls, but it proved too difficult to do – so they gave them for free. But that was supposed to be the saving grace of Facebook – they didn’t want to throw away all the research and work done to make vanity urls possible – so they just gave it for free.
It was not excepted from facebook. Small scale bloggers like me are often engaged in this type of work. But Facebook………..
I blame the russians
This is really sad. How can we trust any of the ad networks if we can’t trust facebook. I hope they aren’t doing this on purpose, but I’d imagine they probably are.
my earlier comment disappeared
Akismet might have got your comment as spam.
Well going to this news I think FB will need to look in to this matter seriously otherwise advertisers will take out their hand from advertising on FB and will see a huge revenue drop.
Hopefully advertisers will realise that because of the Holocaust deniers groups on facebook are still there will drive down advertisement income and they have to do something about that, not that for some an advert free site like this wouldn’t be appreciated occasionally…
…but their ad revenue is gonna be a lot down in the next few financial quarters, pressure on them by their investors might just get them to behave themselves and address problems coming at them from all corners.
I’m sure they’ll come out of it stronger, but a loss of members as a result (would apply to me if I was a member in the first place) and their reputation will take a LOT longer to recover.
Isn’t there a way for independent verifiers to look at these CPC CPM numbers that the companies report to us?
I have used FB advertizing and I wonder how these numbers come up without corresponding results. Sadly Google is not better. We just have to take what we are given.
I can verify it. I’ve been advertising on facebook for over a year. Most of the clickfraud is EASY to block, they just won’t do it. I mean, the declared browser is damn netscape. And none of them execute javascript.
The worst numbers are on open demographic ads(similar to the figures the author quoted) but even more tightly defined campaigns fall victim.
Facebook Caught RED HANDED !!!!
Click fraud is still to come.
wow, seems Facebook is under loads of pressure …
Whoa – I’m glad I read this first. Think I’m going to use GoogleAds instead for now.
Even Google Adsense have lots of fraud clicks from those Adsense Clickers Group. But I think much better than advertising on FB. Go for it.
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
This is also seen on Google Adwords but rare. Google has lot better tracking than FB
I have stopped using Facebook since last month since from my Google Anaytics, there seems to be more than usual repeat clickers
it appears that FaceBook has not yet done its Home Work of keeping its Advertisers Happy! Google is the Best at this Job. Lots of Publishers get banned from Adsense Everyday!
Hard to believe especially from such a public-facing company as Facebook. If it turns out that they are ripping off advertisers as badly as claimed I think it could be a show stopper for FB. Once bitten twice shy?
public facing as in a public restroom?
consumer facing they are not.
this is by far the most creative business model we have ever seen.
I am the biggest fraud on the web. I tell people that I know what I’m talking about, but it turns out I’m completely full of crap. All the time. Just wait, I’ll get to the next post, as soon as I can figure out which clever “locator” thingy to put in front of it.
Onboard the Facbook fail train
This is how yahoo was a few years ago, no wonder yahoo is a fail.
100% True. Fucking Yahoo used to rip us off by saying that they can’t block users from fucking China clicking on our ads. And most of the ads were being shown on parking pages of domainers. I wonder how many of those scumbag domainers engage in click fraud too? They used to refund a little bit of the charge, but it is a pain to go thru the rounds each time.
No way they will reach their target revenue with actions like these. And if they won’t stop this stuff soon enough, more and more advertisers will move along. And it’s pretty hard to earn advertiser’s trust again. Plus, come on, fraud is illegal, and I’m pretty sure somebody will sue them
I think all of the people that profited from fundraising and selling stakes in Linkedin and Facebook (maybe Twitter too) should have to give the money back to the VCs and ultimately the pension funds.
Read the Valleywag about Linkedin in 2008 pre and post funding from Bain Capital (part of Brain Consulting) who it seems got burned badly – very different stories about revenue.
Mike is happy with facebook for not letting him have mike as vanity URL. Finally writing negative abt facebook.
LOL
This is serious news for Facebook.
If they don’t sort out this Click Fraud business very soon, their Ad Revenue Model will turn into a deadpool.
I’m really hoping that there’s some non-evil explanation for this. I won’t be using FB ads again until it’s sorted out in some satisfactory way, at any rate.
fraud AD ,Facebook has a big revenue target this year – $550 million, according to investors who were pitched in the last round of funding. That’s nearly twice 2008 revenues of $280 million.
Facebook is never going to admit this unless this is going public. And I can almost guarantee that they will not bother to refund.
banner ads don’t actually work?! SHOCKING!!!!!!!
….
Hahaha — My sentiments exactly.
Actually I was thinking along the lines of: “Wait, there are ads on facebook?”
I can’t say for sure whether or not we experienced fraud with Facebook advertising – but we ran some limited tests about a month ago and felt from the beginning that the numbers weren’t adding up.
We ran ads within a very small community (5000 users) and never actually saw our ad show (and we had many friends look for it). Yet we saw clicks register almost like clockwork. We dropped it after a week because of a general feeling of unease. If it’s true, I hope the lid gets blown off it.
Exactly my sentiments. I too did a test run of FB ads for a week recently and the #’s were to the millisecond regular. Every x minutes = y clicks. The page that I had FB linking to was a private page, so I tracked the clicks via FB’s admin, my own ad admin (for an internal ad I posted on that page), and our analytic software. I literally would stopwatch and it was truly amazing the regularity of FB’s clicks. I didn’t notice any over/under reporting, so my ‘fraud’-like experience was different. I won’t bother getting into the success rate of these ghost clicks to the site.
My 2nd problem with FB ads is from a User standpoint. The # of fraudulent ads they allow is unbelievable. Is it ironic that they allow so many Google Click fraud ads on FB now? I think not.
Very similar experience — tracked clicks via an internal page with a counter.
FB regularly reported 2 clicks where the “clicks” were within milliseconds of each other, from the same IP address.
To me, that means (possibly) the user double-clicked the ad… but you’d expect that FB would have some method of filtering that.
(Lucky the campaigns were CMP, not CPC.)
You nailed it – it really was like clockwork. We raised our eyebrows almost immediately. The other interesting thing is that we chose PPC over PPM (because we expected and somewhat wanted a low CTR – we were branding a site w/in one city) and the overall cost matched what we would have paid PPM almost to the penny. It added up too well.
My advice to FB: use some of that loot to hire a real engineer – have him/her write a more intelligent fraud-bot so it’s not so obvious.
Just as I was about to consider a dry run of FB ads. I always thought the ads on FB would have been underclicked if anything, they are so easy to ignore!
I also wonder if these metrics are any different when referring people to a promotional Facebook Page, which seems to be what they want you to do!
I have been seeing the very same issue. Facebook is approximately charfing for 20% from clicks then ones that are showing up in my log. I did not know what to make of it other than the face that few people misclicked and reverted back instantly.
I now think it is an issue with Facebook’s tracking mechanism.
Why is there foul language in this report? That is unprofessional. I’m interested in websites for artists and like advertising that is interesting . The advertisers should be grateful for any clicks. They (ads)are a nuisance
You’re not serious, are you? Surely this is meant to be sarcastic? I’d deplore the waste of precious air all these years otherwise.
yeah you have no idea how internet ads work. and foul language? it’s a direct quote of a post. he’s reporting without censoring.
Bad news for Advertisers . I heard Facebook will lunch Adsense alternative . Let see this has any impact on that.
@Carol
Are you seriously saying that it is ok for Advertisers to be ripped off? Are you seriously saying it is ok for Facebook to defraud people by adding extra clicks or by ignoring a very obvious problem?
Just in case you aren’t aware, that is actually theft.
“The advertisers should be grateful for any clicks. They (ads)are a nuisance”
They should not be grateful for fake clicks that they have to pay for.
Seriously, most ignorant post of the day.
She got one thing right though. Most of the ads are freaking annoying (huge teeth ads, annoying “I’m richer than you ads”, four eyed baby ads)… though I must say I hardly see them anymore after I voted them down a few times…
Facebook has horrible quality traffic for anything else apart from junk ringtone sites or something else orientated towards wasting time.. we have purchased many thousands of dollars worth of traffic and it did nothing whatsoever, whereas Google traffic even at $15 per click is massively profitable.
Wait a minute. Are you telling me there’s ADS on the internet? When did this happen? OMIGAWD! I just realized… you guys have never heard of Firefox, NoScript, or Adblock+. You actually think people pay attention to those annoying banners! Ha. If that’s your business model… trying to profit from someone clicking on those pathetic pieces of page-stealing annoyances, then you’re truly fucked. And rightfully so. ROFLMAO.
So, I take it that you are one of the few who wouldn’t mind paying a subscription fee to every service or blog you use or read, right?
I’ll take viewing a few shitty ads over being nickel and dimed to death any day. No, I’m not clicking, but if everyone stopped seeing them completely, they’d have to find money somewhere.
When facebook has extremely large corporations doing bulk buys, do you really think it gives 2 fucks about a $20-30 million dollar segment of their overall advertisers running affiliate programs?
Be realistic. They don’t give 2 shits about affiliates or small local brands. They want the nationwide brands to get their panties wet and buy mass traffic.
How else do you think they’re going to drive an ongoing business model based on growth, make it IPO, or even justify the network’s worth to a larger buyer?
Evidently Nick Berg and others — see the top. LOL.
I can understand, to a small advertiser the amount is a lot — but it is relative AND it is quite a leap to blame a company for engaging in fraud as opposed to neglect.
jeez.
And yet… it’s still fraud.
lol, how is this news?
> When in doubt, look at your raw apache logs – which I did. The result: 15% – 20% clicks never make it to my LP.
out of how many? where’s that 10 to 1 click fraud?
it’s VERT common for people to close window as soon as they accidently clicked an ad. it’s very likely that those accidental clicks manage to get counted by facebook before your little page opens up. lookup the host name, make a connection… lots of time to close the window.
the only clicks in facebook i’ve done – all accidental. and i’d say 8 out of 10 i am quick enough to close before page loads.
No No No. There is a grand fb conspiracy to defraud these guys out of .09% of fb’s revenue for the year.
We are talking organic snacks v. fake hostess twinkies man.
Fb engineers had to take it into their own hands.
That’s like saying how could a company AIG write credit default swaps knowing it could never possibly cover them. They’re the biggest insurance company in the world. Why would they do that?
That’s really bad for Advertisers, hope they’ll do something about it soon.
I think some of the blame has to be with Google, because it was their ad-pays model that has permeated the whole of the internet at large, they have a lot to answer for if it’s discovered they’ve introduced a flawed system, but the whole of the net is like that in places.
Them not doing about it – because it’s a money spinning income stream? If the fraud is that bad, then how about walk away from advertising with FB company, that’ll get their attention.
is this for real? we just started a campaign on facebook Save when you buy used cars directly from Hertz. R We saving with facebook or R we getting ripped off?
It’s very real. If you are not tracking your advertising on Facebook you need to be. This is a HUGE problem right now.
you’re getting ripped off.
I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on an ad in facebook with the intention of learning more about the scammy product on the other end.
100% of the time my facebook ad clicks are unintentional and I click back to facebook as quickly as I can navigate. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn most people mistakenly click on ads too.
If facebook is screwing people, then maybe you should reconsider your age renewing facebutter empire.
Thanks for your insights that no one cares about.
Facebook committing fraud is no different than “scammy facebutter”.
In fact, it’s worse. It’s theft.
Scammy ads are (in part) so popular on facebook BECAUSE of the click fraud. When scammy products are the only things with margins high enough to profit, they’re the only things that run.
you screw people with scam rebill offers and FB screws you, so what’s the problem? Sounds like a healthy relationship to me.
No its like FB screws us & in turn we’re screwing them with rebill offers. Thats healthy relationship!
There might be a compatibility problem with the ad server those advertisers are using and Facebook.
Anyway, FB doesnt force you to buy on a CPC basis. If you are a smart marketer, you’d usually be buying on a CPM basis anyway.
Are you kidding? Do you have any idea what the CTR on FB is? South of 0,1%, I Guarantee you that.
Buying CPC is way smarter in this case. Do the math.
Is this really click fraud or just badly written click tracking code written by either Facebook or 202?
Only an independent auditor would truly know. Maybe Facebook should pony up the cash to get an auditor to establish good faith for its advertisers?
why the hell are folks advertising on facebook anyway?
because
A. Google pays me $197 an hour
B. Helen lost 142lbs. by taking a combination of Acai Berry and Colon Cleanse pills.
The world must know these 2 things!
Since they don’t have an affiliate network, it is hard to believe that the click fraud is being committed by its users. There is no motivation to do this (unlike google AdSense where there is a revenue sharing with the publisher and the publisher has a motivation).
Regardless, the conversion rates on Fb is pretty low.
My experience with FB ad buys supports this article. Every couple of months I do a test buy to see if things have changed–they haven’t yet. No reason to buy from them until they fix things. Glad the issue is receiving more light (for the benefit of Facebook and their advertisers).
wow… people complaining on wickedfire? that’s new…
The incentive is from the Apps. They get a rev share of the ads that run along side their apps.
You have no controls with FB – you cannot talk to a human unless you spend 100k a month, you cannot turn off the Apps. Their interface is terrible. The ROI is horrible. I’ve never seen such low conversion rates on any traffic as I get with FB. Its far worse than MySpace . And equals Porn and P2P. You want to predict the future of FB look at the ROI the advertisers get. Its deplorable. Right now they are new and hot so people are trying them. Give it 6 months before they exhaust the pool of willing victims.
Another case of the teenagers thinking they’ve got it all figured out but learning that they have no idea.
Fuckerberg is such a cocky tool.
Adserver thank you!!!! This gives some necessary background, that this piece sorely lacks.
1.) Apps get rev-share.
2.) FB v. Myspace analytics
3.) The size of advertsing budget fb is concerned over.
Holly molly..!! It seem to be that Facebook is robbing their advertisers 24/7 x 52 weeks.
Get out now folks..!
It is indeed pretty obvious the quality of Ads on Facebook is appaling… mostly get-rich-quick kind of Ads… it would be surprising the ad inventory is not somehow connected to the low reported traffic / convertion ratios….
Michael,
I think you should anonymously set up a investigation – sign up as a affiliate somewhere, make your jump pages, make a couple ads on FB, and track and publish your response rates.
Once you have it set up, you can run the same story every couple of months.
Its a great service to provide (you could cover other networks too) and you’ve got the cred to do it.
I agree they should do this… but they won’t, it’s just easier to copy and paste complaints from an internet forum, than it is to do a real investigative reporting…
Yep. What do you expect from a neo-fascist organization?
Facebook doesn’t care. They’re probably sitting back laughing.
Well as I have always said its some shit in the game. In every business you will find cut throats, because i have been blogging for 6 months now, and the company that I started with has never paid me for a dime when I had 12,000 views for my work. It’s time for all of the major players that pay revenue should revamp their source of payment. Because Bloggers are working their butts and we are actually rewriting the web. 3,4,24, cent is really not working, and its no very fair especially for those who are dedicated to sharing their work
oh, techcrunch. you’ve barely scratched the surface of the shadiness of facebook. Q1 earnings weren’t doing so well a few months ago… so what happened? For the last 2 weeks of Q1 they laxed or you can say got rid of their advertising policy to just let anything through. Clearly padding their numbers to help them when they go public. Click costs went from ~ 25 cents to 70+ cents overnight. The volume was also huge. CTR on shady ads is 3-4x more the regular click-thru rates. so now only are you making 2-3x more per click. You’re also getting 2-3x as many clicks.
How you guys missed this even bigger story is beyond me.
They’ve been consistently missing it for a year. I told TC to do a their own test months ago and they would have better idea of what FB earnings were. TC has been hopelessly snowed in by Facebook PR for a long time now.
I found a discrepancy of 5:1 on the ads I tested on Facebook. Whether the ads are a nuisance or not is beyond the point. Nobody wants to see ads that are irrelevant. On TV, On Newspapers, Internet, etc. I think the core discussion is whether or not Facebook is committing fraud or if this is a bug.
Advertisers are paying for the clicks, and advertisers are the ones that make possible many freebies in web 2.0
um, this feels a bit under-researched & reported at the moment. either a) this is widespread, and there should be more / larger example scenarios discussed & detailed, or b) it’s not widespread and it’s either a facebook ad system bug or a specific scenario for a smaller set of folks.
as with a few others above, I’m not sure I understand the motivation either. normal click-fraud is based on either 1) somebody making a quick buck off AdSense clicks, or 2) somebody trying to waste a competitor’s ad dollars. I don’t see either scenario being discussed here, so I’m confused as to who would benefit from the fraud.
either Google or Facebook *directly* benefiting from click-fraud by intentionally ripping off advertisers is patently ridiculous and frankly just not believable. you better have hard facts and a consistent pattern of abuse to make that case, and I still just don’t get the motivation. Facebook isn’t some desperate fly-by-night blogger or scamsite.
this is either overblown or underreported.
figure out which and write the real story.
agree with @davemcclure. I doubt FB would commit fraud intentionally, but either a bug or user base behavior could drive things to look like fraud.
I have been testing the platform for 2 months now, for research purposes. I consistently find that FB CTR is 2-5x what my web analytic reports tells me.
It could be a bug. I am interested to hear FB side of the story, I sent them my logs and asked for their opinion.
Advertising on social networks is yet to be proven as an effective mechanism (because of the lack of proepr targeting when targeting is based on profiles that are not accurate… the users have no incentive to provide accurate profile info), so this is for sure something FB wants to address properly.
Right — my guess it is a bug — as people have described it seems people click the ad, but don’t actually make it through the redirect and get to the landing page.
Thanks man, it’s nice to see someone shares my view on what constitutes fraud.
Advertising on a platform like Facebook (or MySpace) won’t get you many results, because the target user is such a broad area.
Obviously you’ve never touched either ad platform because you can nail down the demographics as far as you’d like (ex: 18 – 21 year old males in California who are interested in MMA)
Shhh! Dont you tell this to everybody!
4 things:
1/ It’d probably be helpful/fair to note that a discrepancy of 15-20% between publisher reported stats for clicks/impressions and those measured by 3rd party tracking software is considered standard for online advertising. This is generally true with campaigns on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.
2/ Given the intent/usage patterns of the average user on the site, I would suppose randuev has the explanation for any higher-than-standard discrepancy rates above: users closing out pages after facebook registers a LEGITIMATE click, but before 3rd party tracking software can fire (or, in some cases, the request even hits the apache log on the destination). This could occur either because of accidental clicks, or because a user clicks an ad on purpose, thinking it’ll lead to one thing, the see that it’s loading another and close the destination page before the 3rd party tracking software gets to fire.
3/ The self service ads are AUCTION PRICED. So, if advertisers really do think a reported click on Facebook is worth 1/2 of a reported click elsewhere, they should simply set their max bid to 1/2 of what they’d value a click at elsewhere. Advertisers set the price. Seriously.
4/ It would definitely not be profit maximizing in any period beyond the short term for the company to be deliberately engaged in any sort of click-fraud. Facebook is smart enough to realize this.
As for discrepancies between an ad platform’s clicks and my tracking software as an advertiser, yes, it’s normal. What’s happening on FB is different though. Running an ad with any sort of sizable audience nets a shit-ton of obviously fraudulent clicks. Stuff like 25 clicks from the same ip in the period of a minute with no referrer. Wouldn’t be bad if Facebook didn’t charge for this shit, but they seem to have no protection against this sort of fraud.
And, no, the auction priced thing doesn’t work. Theoretically, if everyone’s CTR is increased by these fraudulent clicks, everyone’s CPC should decrease: no net effect, right? Unfortunately, Facebook seems to have some sort of price floor put on… the net effect is that their ad platform is bordering on worthless right now.
1. 15-20% is not common in the least bit. I don’t know how much experience you have in online advertising, but 5% is standard, not 15-20%.
2. This doesn’t make sense at all. Not being a dick, but the redirects, non-pixel based tracking, etc, happen within fractions of a second. A clickthrough will go as follows, Facebook -> Jump Link on Server(where most track as well, and results would show in Apache logs) -> Landing Page. The first step, Facebook -> Jump Link, happens so fast, that there is just no way that 15-20% of people can “X” out their browser that quickly.
3. They’re Auction priced, OK, you still have an average CPC to go off of. This isn’t google, what you set your CPC to, you aren’t going to be paying half of on Facebook. At most, it will be 5 cents less than the set CPC. Setting your max bid to 1/2 of what you value a click elsewhere is a totally irrelevant statement as well.
4. I’m not saying Facebook is engaged in click fraud. To me, that wouldn’t make sense. What’s being said, is that it’s happening and they are doing nothing about it. Also, the statement about short term, and Facebook realizing that, see about three months ago when the opened up the flood gates for advertisers, to boost their revenue, and it hit the fan.
Fact of the matter is, I’ve been advertising on Facebook since it’s inception as Facebook Flyers. I have NEVER seen click fraud rates this high. On some campaigns I was running I have seen 50-60% drop offs. I have the data to back this up. I’ve since stopped advertising on Facebook due to this, as the first week in June, click fraud has accounted for a massive loss in clicks, that I paid for. Again, I have the data to back this up, have sent it to Facebook, and nothing was done. I didn’t expect a refund that large, but I did expect something to be done.
josh… you have no idea what you are talking about… if you have no experience in online advertising please don’t talk. I spend over 300k a month on various media buys including facebook. Yes online advertising does work…
Yeah, actually I manage millions of dollars of spend each month, across an array of formats/platforms, and have been doing it for several years. My point was that everyone in the business knows that discrepancies are to be expected, and that it would make sense to provide that background in the article.
On the specific point about how third party tracking works, revver, seem to be missing the fact that many advertisers utilize tracking initiated via JS tags (I was saying in very rare cases requests might not even hit the apache logs of the destination site, because someone mentioned that case above). Even though the calls are often made in the body onload, there’s still more than enough time for a user to close a tab with a would-be destination page before it loads. Try it for yourself?
What still isn’t clear is – who is generating these clicks ? It has to be :
a) Bug in FB’s tracking software (most likely reason)
b) FB is generating the clicks themselves and thereby engaged in deliberate fraud (unlikely, as it undermines their own platform in the long-term)
c) Advertisers undermining other advertisers by clicking on their ads to make them run out of budget (and then buying clicks cheaply). This is possible, but easy to fix.
It can’t be the traditional publisher clickbotting as the only publisher here is Facebook.
-shamik