8 ms·

Hopefully for their investors' sake that revenue isn't significantly driven by click fraud, a rumor that's been circulating for years http://thesocialmediamonth

by jrcii 11y ago

Hopefully for their investors' sake that revenue isn't significantly driven by click fraud, a rumor that's been circulating for years http://thesocialmediamonthly.com/startup-ceo-alleges-massive-click-fraud-on-facebook/ http://thesocialmediamonthly.com/startup-ceo-alleges-massive... * Is anyone aware of evidence of the extent of click fraud on Facebook? I see a lot of discussion about it but not a lot of data.

tn13 11y ago
I dont have data but whenever I buy likes on page they seem to come from people who are totally fake.
- hayksaakian 11y ago
  like fraud and click fraud are two separate issues. like fraud is highly pervasive, there's tons of evidence on it. source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag click fraud less so. i've run marketing campaigns and you do see some clicks missing in google analytics, but it's not as bad as the like fraud.
- cubano 11y ago
  You buy likes and then are surprised that they come from totally fake people?
  - cldellow 11y ago
    Facebook has a kind of campaign that is explicitly to garner likes, nothing illicit about it. There are multiple articles about the quality of the demographic you get when you use their official platform. Conspiracy theorists point out that likes are a very weak signal of interest, and thus it's hard to judge if you got good likes or bad likes. Facebook has a conflict of interest in choosing who to show your like ad to: if both Alice and Eve are willing to like you with equal probability, but Eve is less likely to be an engaged fan, Facebook should show your ad to Eve. You got your like, so you're happy, but your content is less likely to organically go viral, because Eve isn't as engaged as Alice would have been. Notably, not all of your fans will see your posts: Facebook no longer guarantees delivery to people who have liked you. Luckily, Facebook will help you run a campaign to target the fans of your page that you just paid to get.
gdeglin 11y ago
Companies the spend the most on Facebook ads track the resulting revenue they earn very closely. So even if lots of clicks were fraudulent, they're looking at ($ earned from clicks)/($ spent on clicks). Based on Facebook's continuing increase in earnings, it's safe to bet that lots of major advertisers are seeing this ratio returning >1, and are therefore increasing their spend.
- such_a_casual 11y ago
  To expand on this, I think you can eliminate a significant amount of this fraud by properly configuring your ad campaigns (or whatever facebook calls them) and using "tricks of the trade". The companies that spend the most on facebook ads, will likely allocate a good amount of resources to hiring people who are experts in facebook marketing. So you have a lot of people not being experts in configuring their ads getting fraudulent clicks/likes/followers/stalkers/customers/etc and losing money on advertising when they go down this route, but the big companies spending more money on facebook as they get better at new_revenue/ad_costs.
- AJ007 11y ago
  Facebook is the only platform that lets advertisers target a mass audience with very fine demographic precision. Google you lose the demographics. Television, you lose the the precision. All advertising platforms deliver fraudulent/worthless/imaginary/bogus views. Print has a problem with publishers making up circulation numbers. Television has a problem with ads running while no one is watching. Radio has a massive problem as their listener numbers have collapsed. The display ad exchanges have tremendous problems. Mobile apps have an incredible amount of accidental clicks which may often either be 10 year olds trying to play a game or just outright fake. Video ad networks have a problem with ads auto-playing on repeat that are seen and heard by no one. Google and Facebook are about the easiest to deal with, by far.
  - santaclause33 11y ago
    As someone who spends a lot on Google and Facebook ads - this guy got it right.
  - 11y ago
jonesb6 11y ago
I came across a guy a few months ago who generates a six figure income for himself via click fraud, though apparently via Google's platform. I think their is a certain amount of Black Market SEO Google/Facebook/Whoever will write off as an acceptable loss because the technology just isn't their to stop it (or at least the financial incentive is not there). Basic heuristics however seem to be able to keep the big offenders in check, and that's all that really matters it seems.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
morgante 11y ago
> * Is anyone aware of evidence of the extent of click fraud on Facebook? I see a lot of discussion about it but not a lot of data. This probably counts more as an anecdote than as data, but at my last startup we bought about $100,000 of Facebook advertising and never saw click fraud (we tracked downstream behavior and revenue very carefully). Far and away Facebook provided the best traffic compared to any other paid channel.
- Chris_Newton 11y ago
  Also anecdotally and at a smaller scale, our experience is similar. What Facebook have claimed in their reports appears to match our data from other sources reasonably well.
throwaway198374 11y ago
Sorry for the throwaway, I work in ad tech. Other posters are saying they see hardly any fraud on Facebook. My employer is a more traditional ad tech company (think exchange and direct buys) and we estimate 60-70% of our exchange inventory is fraudulent, and at least 15% of our impressions are delivered against fraudulent sites (of course we don't tell the customers). In reality the numbers are probably higher. The problem is that literally everyone except the end customer is making money off this. As soon as anyone talks about the need to do something about it the whole "let's not rock the boat", "what about our revenue targets", "well you can't tell Sales that" crowd comes out. I personally think there's a reckoning coming soon to traditional ad tech. There is so much fraud, such ludicrous and impossible revenue and impression targets, so much pushback against shitty and annoying advertising, and so little incentive to be honest with the customer. It can't last like this.
- hayksaakian 11y ago
  unless you're talking about really sophisticated fraud, i think advertisers and publishers both care about it. I'm on both sides of the coin. As an advertiser, click fraud is obvious when I see a huge disparity between google analytics and the ad network. You'd have to put a lot of effort into sending fake traffic that actually engages with the advertiser's landing page. As a publisher, I know that if I send a bunch of BS traffic to my advertisers they will blacklist me and starve my website. Regarding your estimates, I agree for really broad traffic. If your targeting options are very vague/loose you can buy ad traffic for very cheap, but you end up with a large number of click fraud. Most advertisers should want to be as narrow as possible with their targeting. The tricky thing is that when everyone is bidding on the golden goose egg demographics the price jumps quickly. In some cases, you're better off buying the 'general audience' traffic for pennies just because of sheer volume multiplied by chance.
- ghshephard 11y ago
  I would think that customers are reasonably sophisticated when it comes to stuff like this, particularly when they are spending real $$$. How difficult is it, for something like brand advertising, to do before/after poll's to discern how effective the dollar spend is in promoting a brand (with conversion to sales, it's even more trivial.) Done properly, the customer doesn't actually care if 99% of the exchange inventory and impressions are fraudulent, as long as they accomplish whatever objectives they set out to. Put more explicitly, if the objective for an advertiser (or, more likely, their agency) is to build awareness of a brand, they can measure a measure awareness among their target group, run a few million dollars of advertising, and then measure awareness again to see the difference. Done with enough customers, and enough programs, you start to get a very clear sense of where the dollar is best spent.

by jrcii 11y ago

tn13 11y ago

I dont have data but whenever I buy likes on page they seem to come from people who are totally fake.

hayksaakian 11y ago
like fraud and click fraud are two separate issues. like fraud is highly pervasive, there's tons of evidence on it. source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag click fraud less so. i've run marketing campaigns and you do see some clicks missing in google analytics, but it's not as bad as the like fraud.
cubano 11y ago
You buy likes and then are surprised that they come from totally fake people?
- cldellow 11y ago
  Facebook has a kind of campaign that is explicitly to garner likes, nothing illicit about it. There are multiple articles about the quality of the demographic you get when you use their official platform. Conspiracy theorists point out that likes are a very weak signal of interest, and thus it's hard to judge if you got good likes or bad likes. Facebook has a conflict of interest in choosing who to show your like ad to: if both Alice and Eve are willing to like you with equal probability, but Eve is less likely to be an engaged fan, Facebook should show your ad to Eve. You got your like, so you're happy, but your content is less likely to organically go viral, because Eve isn't as engaged as Alice would have been. Notably, not all of your fans will see your posts: Facebook no longer guarantees delivery to people who have liked you. Luckily, Facebook will help you run a campaign to target the fans of your page that you just paid to get.

gdeglin 11y ago

Companies the spend the most on Facebook ads track the resulting revenue they earn very closely. So even if lots of clicks were fraudulent, they're looking at ($ earned from clicks)/($ spent on clicks). Based on Facebook's continuing increase in earnings, it's safe to bet that lots of major advertisers are seeing this ratio returning >1, and are therefore increasing their spend.

such_a_casual 11y ago
To expand on this, I think you can eliminate a significant amount of this fraud by properly configuring your ad campaigns (or whatever facebook calls them) and using "tricks of the trade". The companies that spend the most on facebook ads, will likely allocate a good amount of resources to hiring people who are experts in facebook marketing. So you have a lot of people not being experts in configuring their ads getting fraudulent clicks/likes/followers/stalkers/customers/etc and losing money on advertising when they go down this route, but the big companies spending more money on facebook as they get better at new_revenue/ad_costs.
AJ007 11y ago
Facebook is the only platform that lets advertisers target a mass audience with very fine demographic precision. Google you lose the demographics. Television, you lose the the precision. All advertising platforms deliver fraudulent/worthless/imaginary/bogus views. Print has a problem with publishers making up circulation numbers. Television has a problem with ads running while no one is watching. Radio has a massive problem as their listener numbers have collapsed. The display ad exchanges have tremendous problems. Mobile apps have an incredible amount of accidental clicks which may often either be 10 year olds trying to play a game or just outright fake. Video ad networks have a problem with ads auto-playing on repeat that are seen and heard by no one. Google and Facebook are about the easiest to deal with, by far.
- santaclause33 11y ago
  As someone who spends a lot on Google and Facebook ads - this guy got it right.
- 11y ago

jonesb6 11y ago

I came across a guy a few months ago who generates a six figure income for himself via click fraud, though apparently via Google's platform. I think their is a certain amount of Black Market SEO Google/Facebook/Whoever will write off as an acceptable loss because the technology just isn't their to stop it (or at least the financial incentive is not there). Basic heuristics however seem to be able to keep the big offenders in check, and that's all that really matters it seems.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

morgante 11y ago

> * Is anyone aware of evidence of the extent of click fraud on Facebook? I see a lot of discussion about it but not a lot of data. This probably counts more as an anecdote than as data, but at my last startup we bought about $100,000 of Facebook advertising and never saw click fraud (we tracked downstream behavior and revenue very carefully). Far and away Facebook provided the best traffic compared to any other paid channel.

Chris_Newton 11y ago
Also anecdotally and at a smaller scale, our experience is similar. What Facebook have claimed in their reports appears to match our data from other sources reasonably well.

throwaway198374 11y ago

Sorry for the throwaway, I work in ad tech. Other posters are saying they see hardly any fraud on Facebook. My employer is a more traditional ad tech company (think exchange and direct buys) and we estimate 60-70% of our exchange inventory is fraudulent, and at least 15% of our impressions are delivered against fraudulent sites (of course we don't tell the customers). In reality the numbers are probably higher. The problem is that literally everyone except the end customer is making money off this. As soon as anyone talks about the need to do something about it the whole "let's not rock the boat", "what about our revenue targets", "well you can't tell Sales that" crowd comes out. I personally think there's a reckoning coming soon to traditional ad tech. There is so much fraud, such ludicrous and impossible revenue and impression targets, so much pushback against shitty and annoying advertising, and so little incentive to be honest with the customer. It can't last like this.

hayksaakian 11y ago
unless you're talking about really sophisticated fraud, i think advertisers and publishers both care about it. I'm on both sides of the coin. As an advertiser, click fraud is obvious when I see a huge disparity between google analytics and the ad network. You'd have to put a lot of effort into sending fake traffic that actually engages with the advertiser's landing page. As a publisher, I know that if I send a bunch of BS traffic to my advertisers they will blacklist me and starve my website. Regarding your estimates, I agree for really broad traffic. If your targeting options are very vague/loose you can buy ad traffic for very cheap, but you end up with a large number of click fraud. Most advertisers should want to be as narrow as possible with their targeting. The tricky thing is that when everyone is bidding on the golden goose egg demographics the price jumps quickly. In some cases, you're better off buying the 'general audience' traffic for pennies just because of sheer volume multiplied by chance.
ghshephard 11y ago
I would think that customers are reasonably sophisticated when it comes to stuff like this, particularly when they are spending real $$$. How difficult is it, for something like brand advertising, to do before/after poll's to discern how effective the dollar spend is in promoting a brand (with conversion to sales, it's even more trivial.) Done properly, the customer doesn't actually care if 99% of the exchange inventory and impressions are fraudulent, as long as they accomplish whatever objectives they set out to. Put more explicitly, if the objective for an advertiser (or, more likely, their agency) is to build awareness of a brand, they can measure a measure awareness among their target group, run a few million dollars of advertising, and then measure awareness again to see the difference. Done with enough customers, and enough programs, you start to get a very clear sense of where the dollar is best spent.