Advertising On Facebook...fake Clicks. They Suck.

[Matty Moo]

I keep real good tabs on my website. Where people are coming from and how they found me. I use google analytics and statcounter.

I've been using AdWords to advertise for almost two years. It works great and I can verify about 96% of the clicks on my ads. As long as they're running Javascript it will show up.

A few months ago I started advertising on Facebook, I had a $50 coupon so figured I'd try it out. At first I was only getting a hit or two a week as they have no way for the user to trigger when the ad shows up. In the past two weeks, I've been getting at least five clicks a day...This is where the bullshit starts.

I'm going through my logs, and I can only verify less than 20% of the clicks THEY are billing me for and saying that I'm getting. This is only Facebook, AdWords is still right around 96% as it always has been. Even people running off of proxies still usually show up. THose that are showing up are all in India and the Phillipines. So suddenly, 4 out of 5 people are disabling Javascript in their browser.

I didn't want to put on the tinfoil hat, but it sure looked like a bunch of shit to me, so I googled it and I find page after page of people saying the exact same thing. It's all bots clicking on the ads, and Facebook really seems to be nonchalant about what is going on. Why would they, every click is money for them. Who is behind it? Who knows...but we know that their value is overinflated and maybe they think it's time for them to back it up.

My average monthly Adwords campaign is right around $175/month. IF I would have let the Facebook campaign run it's course it would have cost me close to $300 without a single conversion. I had the ads limited to $10/day and the past few days the budget has been maxed everyday .

That campaign is now shut down. I will never advertise there again and will encourage others not to advertise there.

[flyfishing3]

wow. dirty pool, but i can totally see them doing this.

i was on there the other day looking for a way to delete my acct. i couldn't. i guess they wont make it easy for me to quit.

[Matty Moo]

I was laughing at people that wanted in when they went public, and I still am. As an advertising platform it's rather poor overall and that's what they are banking on for the money. Sure, they reach a lot of people, but the ads aren't really out there and there's no real good way to make the ads stand out.

Google makes no qualms about it, they're an advertising outfit. BUT, they're exceptionally good at it. The UI is decent and you can make it as custom as you want.

[ErikS]

How did you find out all of the proxy stuff and the disabled Java? Link to what you read?

[Matty Moo]

How did you find out all of the proxy stuff and the disabled Java? Link to what you read?

This is how it works.

There are all sorts of ways to track your own site using a little snippet of javascript. I have it on every page of my website, then on statcounter it shows the IP and where they came from to get there. The only way to get around it is to disable javascript in your browser. It's real basic stuff.

As for the proxies, lots of people browse using a proxy server. Those show up as long as they're running javascript. Facebook is saying I'm getting so many hits and charging me for it, but I'm only seeing less than a fifth of what they're telling me.

Google AdWords is extremely transparent, they really don't hide anything from you but they don't provide you with IP's. Not a big deal as that's easy to do yourself. I had a problem last year with what I thought was a competitor clicking on my ads repeatedly for weeks on end. Google refunded me the money for every click that came from that IP. I just showed them what I found and that was it.

Facebook offers next to zero transparency through their UI. All they tell you is that you had X amount of clicks and bill you for it. Not when, where, etc. Their UI tries to mimic google, but there's none of the depth that google has. Zip, zero, zilch.

Google "facebook advertising fake clicks".

[ErikS]

Thanks, been using adwords for 6 years. We are a social commodity, and try to target age ranges, times of year, etc with the FB advertising. Interesting stuff, thanks for the heads up.

[Matty Moo]

I'd say look into it as deep as you can. I won't advertise there again, but I'm not looking to reach a broad audience anyway. I need strictly keyword driven advertising, I've tried playing around with a lot of different things on AdWords and in the end it all goes back to cpc with keywords, at least that's what makes conversions for me. I used to put in hours a week playing with that stuff and spent even more hours keeping track of it.

The funny thing is Facebook really isn't in it's infancy anymore. They know they're in a position where they absolutely have to sell advertising, yet offer the worst UI with limited options. It makes me think that they're just hoping to ride on ads targeted toward everybody and not worried about the guy wanting to target a real select group of people. I'm far from any sort of expert, but it might be a case of "Too big to fail" thinking on their part.

They want to overtake Google on advertising, which will never happen because they don't have Google's resources or their way of thinking.

You know that feeling that you get when you have a pretty good idea that you're getting railed? That's the feeling I got after comparing what they say/charged me for and what I had to show for it. 16% show rate of what they say they provided and not a single conversion out of it. As a matter of fact, not one of their clicks even went past my first page.