Posts Tagged ‘social networks’

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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StumbleUpon, Is It Click Fraud Proof?

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

In my continuing series on social network sites and their click fraud benefits, I discuss StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon (SU) is marketed as channel surfing for the Internet, it’s users flick from site to site giving the content a thumbs up or down and then move on, or stay if they like what they see.

The Stumbler (as they are know) installs a button marked Stumble onto their browser, they click on the button and they are redirected to a random website. If they like it, they click on another thumbs up button, they dislike it, the dreaded thumbs down is given. Whilst browsing the net, Stumblers can also suggest new sites for fellow surfers to check out.

The social network aspect of this system, is the creation of virtual friends on the SU main site where they can share sites, and pages they have discovered. From the main site, a Stumbler will select their interest groups, this will decide which web pages are served up to that user. The top level interest groups are arts,commerce, computers, health, living and media.

Back to the main reason of this article, the pay per click advertising programme they have created and the investigation into their claim that it is click fraud proof.

Pay per click on the StumbleUpon system works in the following fashion:

  • The user creates an account
  • One or more campaigns are created.
  • A campaign is associated with a website URL.
  • The URL is assigned to one or more interest groups.
  • A daily budget is set, and funds are credited to the StumbleUpon account via PayPal.
  • The campaign goes through an approval process.

Once approved the campaign is activated on the StumbleUpon network and it is served up to Stumblers for their surfing pleasure.

The real difference in the SU model is that each display of the website comes at a fixed fee of 5 cents, and there is currently no way to increase that amount in order to improve the frequency or prominence of that display.

This is a push model rather than the pull model used by Google and Co. I say this because it is the SU servers which decide which web page to display to the channel surfing Stumbler. In between paid display there will be normal “organic” displays. The algorithm used to display web pages which are paid or organic is unknown to this correspondent. A request for details has been submitted to SU but not response has been received to date.

Website owners can limit where there ads are displayed via geographic, age and sex demographics.

With the above in mind I find it difficult to see how third parties outside of StumbleUpon itself could commit click fraud, there is no way for a competitor to select your ad click on it, there is no syndication service for people to benefit from, thus removing publisher click fraud and clickbots or click farms have no say in when you ad is displayed. So in answer to the article heading, Yes I think this method is click fraud proof.

The following statement is extracted from the StumbleUpon Advertisers FAQ

How does StumbleUpon prevent click-fraud?
StumbleUpon doesn’t syndicate paid listings to third parties - the primary source of click-fraud in pay-per-click networks. We also don’t have any mechanism by which someone can force your site to come up as a paid result, so a competitor can’t drain your account.

If you would like more details on StumbleUpon paid placement visit their website http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads

Further reading Stumble Upon User Ate My Hamster.

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Can Advertisers Turn to Social Network Sites to Prevent Click Fraud?

Monday, October 29th, 2007

The rise of the social network in recent years has been an Internet phenomenon, and a large number of web marketers are trying to tap into these fertile markets where a well presented idea can go “viral” very quickly.

Over a series of posts I will discuss the rise of PPC programmes within social networking sites, and ask the question, is this type of advertising a solution to click fraud?

Social networks can be defined as a software solution which facilitates interaction between groups of like minded people. The most widely used social networking sites at the time of writing are MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and StumbleUpon. Groups of individuals will connect with each other and share discussions, media such as photographs,audio and video.

The communities approach very quickly build demographic groups which marketers are very keen to tap into. Some are creating viral content which is spread by community members. An example of this are Facebook applications. A very successful one was a Zombie program which allows friends to bite each other which turns a person into a Zombie in true horror movie fashion. Behind this extremely successful marketing campaign were the producers of a new Zombie film, who were able to spread the message of the film’s release to a large number of engaged users.

Moving forward from this, the social network companies are looking to tap into their own users via pay per click functionality. I intend to discuss the offerings of both StumbleUpon and Facebook over two future articles. The thing which differentiates these two PPC models is that they appear to be inherently less susceptible than the models in use by the major search engines.

In the next article I will focus on the PPC model adopted by StumbleUpon.

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Stumble Upon User Ate My Hamster

Friday, September 28th, 2007

No not really, just trying to drag the fickle Stumblers into this blog post to read about the consequences of their website channel surfing.

For the uninitiated, Stumble Upon is a social networking application where people stumble around the Internet as if they were channel surfing in the ad break with the aim of finding new and interesting web sites. If they like the site they give it a thumbs up or else they give it the dreaded thumbs down. The social aspect is that the newly stumbled sites can be shared with a group of friends.

It’s a great site and it can generate a ton of traffic for blogs such as this, but the problem from a click fraud perspective is the profile of a Stumbler is exactly the same as a paid to read click fraud farm.

What we see on our analytics from a Stumbler is a person landing on our site, spending a fraction of a second before moving on. If someone is carrying out a click fraud investigation, it is hard work to see past these valid Stumbler profiles and not judge them to be click farms clicking on paid ads and then moving onto the next site to carry on their fraud.

The way to get past this problem is to limit which referrer you are analyzing from. Stumble Upon is quite clearly the source, drill down on you ppc provider and ignore all Stumble data. This should help pin point if your are the victim of click fraud.

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Pay to Read Facebook Application

Monday, September 24th, 2007

Whilst Browsing though Facebook applications today, I came across one which looks remarkably like a pay to read scheme.

Cash Cliques as it is know, asks people to click on websites, stay on the site for 30 seconds and then move onto the next one. In return a small trickle income is sent to the clicker via Paypal.

The sales copy for the application states:

By simply adding this application you can earn $ for clicking on websites, you don’t even have to look at the website just wait 30 seconds and click on the next and get paid for everyone you click on!
We’re not talking $Millions but a couple of extra quid a week for simply being on Facebook is better than nothing!
You can be paid by PayPal or cheque so you don’t have to worry about revealing your bank details!
If you don’t like it you can remove the application at any time, like any Facebook application! But UNlike other Facebook applications, this one can make you REAL money!
Good Luck!

In a pay per read scheme, the user will usually click through on a pay per click link, costing advertisers money, the clicker then pauses to simulate a real person reading content on a website before moving on.

The people who benefit are content providers taking a share of the ad revenue from systems such as Adsense or competitors trying to deplete the daily marketing budget of another company.

I would recommend that no-one signs up for application of this sort as they are just another manifestation of click fraud.

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