Company halts facebook advertising after analytics shows 80% bot traffic

ayzo

ayzo

Like a boss
Jun 8, 2007
2,923
157
0
https://www.facebook.com/limitedpressing/posts/209534972507958

Hey everyone, we're going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do. 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. 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. That's correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn't reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes. But let's move on, because who the bots belong to isn't provable.

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. So we did what any good hardcore kids would do. We cursed that piece of shit out! Damn we were so pissed. We still are. This is why we need to delete this page and move away from Facebook. They're scumbags and we just don't have the patience for scumbags.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this page and liked our posts. We really appreciate it. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, where we don't get shaken down, you can do so here: Limited Run (limitedrun) on Twitter
Click to expand...
 


I can't believe people take Facebook seriously. This is a prime example. The company going public was a joke if not a slap to the face of common sense. Facebook's time has been up. They'll still be around, but I think we've all notice, everyone's on there less and less, so you tell me if makes sense to put money towards Facebook.
 
I don't doubt that it is ethically beyond facebook to do something like this, however I do doubt that they are dumb enough to implement an advertising manipulation scam that is so easily detectable.
 
About a month ago, I told the member of our staff in charge of social media to never ever again promote or mention any Facebook initiatives. Linkedin yes, Twitter okay, even that commie-site Reddit.

But in all our experiences with Facebook, and I'm talking laser-focussed interest-group testing, the traffic was complete shit and never converted. Now that's for our niche which is white, male, over age of 50, so may not apply to you.

But the bot allegation is pretty interesting all the same. There were billions of dollars at stake with the IPO, eh? And not too hard to code some bots, methinks.
 
It's probably just tools from other marketers (sc)raping the shit out of Facebook ;) lulz ... they should publish the list of IPs used to see if anyone can identify themselves with them.
 
Benji49 said:
About a month ago, I told the member of our staff in charge of social media to never ever again promote or mention any Facebook initiatives. Linkedin yes, Twitter okay, even that commie-site Reddit.

But in all our experiences with Facebook, and I'm talking laser-focussed interest-group testing, the traffic was complete shit and never converted. Now that's for our niche which is white, male, over age of 50, so may not apply to you.

But the bot allegation is pretty interesting all the same. There were billions of dollars at stake with the IPO, eh? And not too hard to code some bots, methinks.
Click to expand...

I had good results in the gaming niche. I used facebook ads -> facebook fan page (give aways, contests, etc) -> optin list. It was about a year ago though and I might have just got lucky.
 
Facebook is starting to get annoying much like MySpace was, but in a different way. MySpace allowed people to customize the fuck out of their page, making most pages unloadable and fucking ugly. On facebook, all the sudden within the past few months people are excessively liking these stupid fucking viral images, cluttering the feed and making it feel much like shitty ass myspace.
 
yea so all you folks who are using "facebook research" and "social market research" tools all it is are scrapers that are scraping /ads/adboard on 1000s of demo specific accts THUS driving up all this traffic

^report does sound fishy but i knew something like this would happen
 
ericchristopher said:
i can't believe it hasn't died already. i can't believe someone hasn't bettered both the experience for users and advertisers.
Click to expand...

What other site is tightly integrated with nearly 25% of the top 10,000 sites (49.3 if count regular links) on the web? With all of these sites sucking on the FB tit how can it go away? Even if FB went out of style tomorrow it would take years for all these sites to get around to cutting FB out. Just think of all the sites that depend on FB to manage their user base. Like it or not more and more sites get on board everyday. A web with no FB would simply cause chaos.
 
Modern mobile browsers run java afaik. Also, isn't like 50% of fb traffic mobile nowadays - I think I read that somewhere?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom