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Facebook Click Fraud Fix Coming Today
Techtree News Staff, Jun 22, 2009 1223 hrs ISTAdvertisers enraged about the inflated click figures
Over the weekend, a lot of advertisers complained about the click issues on the ads placed at popular social networking site Facebook, as reported by TechCrunch. In response to this, Facebook quickly acknowledged the issues with differences in click numbers and said that it'll be coming out with a fix today.
Click Fraud takes place when an individual, automated script imitating web surfer behavior or a computer program performs repetitive clicks on 'charge-per-click' based ads. Facebook Advertisers were enraged about the inflated click figures available from Facebook. At Wickedfire forums, a discussion thread about 'NEW Facebook Ads' carried lot of flames about the issue:
Tracking 202 is telling me 11 clicks .Facebook is telling me 145. That's way off the 15-20 percent, is there a different margin for tracking 202 than there is prosper 202 or did I suffer from one of those click bots?
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 s***.
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 percent - 20 percent 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).
So, the ratio of ad clicks was way higher than the actual click numbers on Facebook. Clicks on these links are just meant to inflate the figure and don't actually represent any sort of purchase or any other action related to a particular ad. Advertisers complained about the same to Facebook and the site in return asked for their logs for checking the discrepancy.
Brandon McCormick, from Facebook Communications team, acknowledged the issue and responded:
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.
It's likely that people's trust on Facebook is a bit shaken after the recent series of breach on Facebook's security options. The series of phishing scams on Facebook had disturbed many users. Instead of rolling out new features, it's believed that Facebook should provide secured experience to its users and advertisers, at least momentarily.
Last week, Microsoft had sued three Vancouver based individuals for a click fraud scam and demanded $750,000 as damages.
Click Fraud takes place when an individual, automated script imitating web surfer behavior or a computer program performs repetitive clicks on 'charge-per-click' based ads. Facebook Advertisers were enraged about the inflated click figures available from Facebook. At Wickedfire forums, a discussion thread about 'NEW Facebook Ads' carried lot of flames about the issue:
Tracking 202 is telling me 11 clicks .Facebook is telling me 145. That's way off the 15-20 percent, is there a different margin for tracking 202 than there is prosper 202 or did I suffer from one of those click bots?
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 s***.
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 percent - 20 percent 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).
So, the ratio of ad clicks was way higher than the actual click numbers on Facebook. Clicks on these links are just meant to inflate the figure and don't actually represent any sort of purchase or any other action related to a particular ad. Advertisers complained about the same to Facebook and the site in return asked for their logs for checking the discrepancy.
Brandon McCormick, from Facebook Communications team, acknowledged the issue and responded:
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.
It's likely that people's trust on Facebook is a bit shaken after the recent series of breach on Facebook's security options. The series of phishing scams on Facebook had disturbed many users. Instead of rolling out new features, it's believed that Facebook should provide secured experience to its users and advertisers, at least momentarily.
Last week, Microsoft had sued three Vancouver based individuals for a click fraud scam and demanded $750,000 as damages.
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