Archive for October 31st, 2007

Do Facebook Flyers Fix Fraudsters?

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

This series on social network sites and their pay per click programs, and the risk of click fraud when using them continues with an analysis of Facebook’s Flyer Pro program.

Facebook has expanded on it’s Flyer program which was a traditional cost per impression (CPM) program to produce the imaginatively titled Flyer Pro program, a pay per click model. Using this system, advertisers can create a flyer to send to the Facebook home page of a demographically selected group of users.

Flyers are the skyscraper type ads which are displayed on the left hand side of a Facebook home page just below the search and application list.

How it works:

  • An advertiser must create a Facebook account with credit card attached to it.
  • From the account page they create a flyer with the following set; theme, title, body of flyer and they can also upload an image to increase the impact of an ad if required.
  • Demographics are set including location, sex, age, keywords, political views, relationship status, education level and workplace details.
  • The next stage of the process is to set max cost per click and max daily budget, terms most PPC advertisers are familiar with.

The Facebook website has this to say about max CPC:

A higher max price per click increases the chance your ad will be shown. We discount clicks on your behalf, so you may pay less than your max price depending on the current demand for your ad’s audience. We will never bill you more in a day than your budget.

One of the most powerful search criteria is the keyword setting. Unlike a search engine PPC campaign, the keyword is a tag people are using on their accounts, rather than a supposed keyword people will type in. As demographics and keywords are set, the audience size is show to the advertiser. This leads to very controlled and targeted advertising.

At first glance the model appears to be resilient to click fraud, there is no way for a competitor to get at your ads from their home page as the Facebook server controls the push of your flyer and there is no syndication of ad revenue to create a publisher click fraud scenario as we see on Adsense, and any attempts at multiple clicks will be very easy to spot as they emanate from your home page.

There is however a chink in the armour of Facebook, example flyers can be viewed from the Flyer Board http://www.facebook.com/flyer_board.php, when I checked this out, it looked as if flyers available to me were being displayed. I have requested confirmation from Facebook (they have not replied at time of writing) to see if these Flyer Boards cost if a click is generated. A simple clickbot could be employed to repeatedly click on an Ad and deplete the advertisers budget if I was competing in the same space as them.

So in conclusion, where I thought StumbleUpon is click fraud proof, Facebook has a flaw (in my opinion) which needs to be plugged before advertisers can have complete faith in the process.

UPDATE

Facebook have replied to my query, and only the original flyer program is shown on the flyer board.

With a flyer pro campaign we do not display the flyers on the flyer
board of networks. Flyers will appear on the left hand side of users
profile pages. Let me know if you have any further questions.

So in conclusion, it looks like the new Facebook Flyer Pro program is inherently click fraud proof and is a good choice for PPC advertisers who want highly targeted exposure. It should be noted that the old Flyer program may be the subject to click fraud attacks via impression fraud.

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