Click Fraud Blog
Click Quality And Facebook Social Ads
May 20th, 2008
I have been doing a lot of work with Facebook social ads recently, and thought it would be a good time to write about the click quality issues I see with their program.
Why Use Social Network Ads?
As the strangle hold on Internet traffic by Google increases and the Yahoo/Microsoft partnership rumbles on and on, there is very little leverage an advertiser can bring to bear on Google in an effort to improve their advertising deal. There is an emerging option in the Social networks, in particular the ones developing their own pay per click advertising rather than partnering with the big search engines (Bebo/Yahoo, MySpace/Google).
What Are Facebook Social Ads?
Facebook has created it’s own advertising scheme where CPC or CPM ads can be displayed on the bottom left hand side of a Facebook user’s profile and example is shown below. In this case the ad is for Hilton Hotels.
The system allows a small text only or image and text ad to be created. This can then be linked to a site external to Facebook or to a page create on the site to advertise goods or services.
Due to the nature of the site and the information you supply, there is a lot of demographic targeting available for advertisers. Your ad can be targeted to location, sex, keywords (pre-defined in Facebook), age and educational status.
Facebook actions Social Actions are the novel part of this service. You ad can be displayed next to the normal social actions of Facebooks users. For example my friend Joe Bloggs buys tickets for the band The Click Quality Consultants (they are an indie guitar band - very cool). If this band were running a Facebook ad with social actions enabled, the ad would be displayed next to my friends updates, possibly making me click on their ad to buy tickets too.
The system uses a costing model similar to Google. You set a max cost per click for your ad, then a bidding system kicks in and if your max CPC is higher than your rival, your ad is dispalyed. You cost per click is also automatically reduced to 1 cent above your competitor in line with the Google model.
With an auidience of 70 million users growing by an estimated 250k per day, this is not a Google size or even Yahoo sized audience, but it has an engaged focused group of users which, when targeted correctly can provide decent returns for advertiers.
The Problems/Benefits As I see Them.
- My main concern is with the pricing of ads. In a Google or Yahoo campaign, I can see who I am competing with. With a Facebook ad, you must take it on on (forgive the pun) face value. Since there are no metrics to analyse, how do I know that Facebook is not artificially inflating the prices?
- All clicks have their referrer marked as Facebook, so it is difficult to find out which clicks are organic Facebook activity and which are paid for. This makes analysis of the traffic difficult.
- There is no way to create an exclusion list. If a Facebook users was maliciously clicking on your ads, you must manually contact the Ad support team for an investigation.
- Analysis of the conversion rate, depth, length and bounce rate of Facebook clicks found that this was comparable on the site I was working with to organic traffic, so I can conclude in this instance that the click quality from Facebook was as good as organic Google traffic.
- Text ads do not work on Facebook. As can been seen from the image above, a Facebook profile is very busy. A split test of text only versus image and text showed a 230%+ difference in click through. You need a compelling image ad for Facebook ad sucess.
- The system is not as mature as the search engines programs, this leads me to think that their click fraud filters will not be as advanced, therefore click fraud will slip through unnoticed.
- There is no content network of advertisers taking a cut for clicks, so publisher click fraud is not an issue.
- Excellent demographics. If you have a product which matches the audience it is a brilliant way to advertise.
Further Information
I am talking about this subject in much greater details at this months Webinar from the Click Quality Coucil, check out their website for details on how to join this event.
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Tags: social network click quality
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June 10th, 2008 at 7:36 am
I’m in the middle of some issues with facebook’s ad system, which is how I found your post to begin with. I’ve been doing research to see if anyone’s run into the same issues I have.
First of all, I should say that not only does my Google Analytics account show obvious evidence of click fraud, but there’s a scarier issue at hand here. Facebook claims, and has charged me for, 800+ clicks on given days where my Google Analytics (and a second third-party tracker) reveals only 250-300 clicks via Facebook on those days. This is a huge discrepancy and amounts to hundreds of dollars on each given day where this occurred.
To make matters worse, Facebook has no customer support line for its advertisers. I was simply led to a generic “contact us” form, only to go well over a day before hearing back from a support rep who only shared his first name and had no specific address to respond to. The issue has dragged out for over five days now, and if I’m lucky, I’ll hear back from this rep once every two days with responses that do nothing to help to resolve what appears to be an obvious issue of click fraud, and very quite possibly inaccurate and flawed tracking with respect to their quantity of clicks. I sent them official Google Analytics reports to confirm the discrepancies, as well as the report from another third party tracker, only to be told that their engineers looked into the issue for me and that all was confirmed as accurate on their end.
This is a huge problem and one that will hold Facebook back from establishing itself as a legitimate online advertising force. I have no access to any data via Facebook that supports their claim, so I’m essentially in the dark and going on a generic email response I received from a customer service rep with Facebook. No offer to discuss further, no phone number, no nothing. As someone who’s spent hundreds of dollars per day on their ads, the least I’m owed is some better customer service and the willingness to resolve what’s very obviously an issue of inaccurate tracking.
It’s a shame because their demographic is ideal for my service.
Thanks for the post and I’m glad to see that someone out there sees things for what they potentially are. Here’s some living proof that you’re onto something.
Jesse
June 21st, 2008 at 11:40 am
I have to say that facebook ads do work but I have also come up against their dodgy delivery system. Amazingly I managed to come out on top after their system delivered me hundreds of clicks after I requested to pause the ad . Obviously I was having kittens for the duration as I didnt want to pay for this over delivery but they still think to this day that they didnt send the clicks. So I didnt have to pay for them (rare situation or what!), but my stats showed clear as day that I had plenty of clicks. Their ad serving is still open to serious problems and for this reason my daily budget stays low in case I cant pause them :(.
Good post I have to agree with your points regarding more transparency, a way to see more of where the clicks are coming from would be great. If you can target a demographic, why cant they deliver this info to advertisers or at least summarise so we can refine our ads to responsive groups like you do with negative keywords?
January 6th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
I am having similar problems with what I consider to be click fraud. Google Analytics tells me that I am receiving around 30% less clicks and those that are coming my way are bouncing at a much higher rate than other traffic - referred and organic. The conversion rate is also much lower - around 1/2 that of organic traffic, so I think it is pretty clear that it is not legitimate traffic. I have yet to contact Facebook - I cannot even find their contact form on their site yet - but will post Facebook’s response.
February 21st, 2009 at 11:39 pm
For those of you who are running deliberately fraudulent ads, such as “make money typing for Google”, you are in fact being targeted by Facebook users. There is a network of us who are deliberately clicking on these ads repeatedly to drive up the fraud artists’ costs, thus hopefully putting these criminals out of business.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:28 am
Same issue here, just today, charged me for, 800+ clicks but my 2 site trackers reveals only 500 visits.
I am going to contact them for an explanation otherwise I will contact my credit card company.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
I have reached this page for exact same reasons. I noticed that Google Analytic shows about 30% less visits that Facebook shows(and charges clicks). I also noticed that i still get visits from Facebook although my ads have been switched off. But the reason why i started testing it was that i had very similar problems with MySpace but they charged me TWICE as many clicks than tracking showed visits(i tried 3 different campaigns). MySpace so far has only responded that they can not comment on 3rd party tracking software. Would be interesting to hear what was the outcome your dispute Jesse?
April 28th, 2009 at 3:08 am
I have been experimenting with FC ads 3 times now, and for certain Statcounter shows that I was billed TWICE for every incoming click from falsebook on my last campaign.
Just set up a new site, with google analytics AND statcounter, the site is getting zero organic traffic, and FB tells me 5 people clicked in, YET I have had zero visitors still…
So either google and statcounter are junk, or… my guess is that Facebook is running a scam, and maybe Ralph Nader should get his Consumer Reports to look into it.