Facebook visit swindle Enraging Advertisers (Updated)

Facebook has a big revenue target that year - $550 million, according to investors who were pitched in the last round of funding. That’s nearly twice 2008 revenues of $280 million.

A big part of that revenue comes from cost-per-click advertising from small self serve advertisers. And right now those advertisers aren’t very happy. They’ve been complaining about go cheat of up to 100% for weeks, and the situation doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

Scores of complaints can be found at WickedFire, where advertisers are complaining of massive go scam and an indifferent Facebook. A few of the recent posts (excuse the language):

Tracking 202 is telling me 11 clicks….Facebook is telling me 145. That’s way off the 15-20%, is there a different margin for tracking 202 than there is prosper 202 or did I suffer from one of those visit bots?

Sucks how high the numbers are today. Its clear the problem is getting worse daily. I’ve moved most of my shit off facebook for the day being and magically my shit is all positive again. Crazy how that works. There are lots of places to buy traffic, some that will even actually give you the traffic you are paying for. Facebook is never going to confess to whats going on. I can nearly guarantee you that.

Facebook is still reporting 20% more clicks than I actually get. that is bullshit. whether I were at least getting bot traffic or something that would be one thing, but right now Facebook is simply stealing 20% of clicks that I paid for, which adds up to thousands of dollars. Someone should threaten legal action, that is straight up swindle on Facebook’s part.

FB visit cheat update: ratio is now precisely 10:1. 10 clicks reported on FB, 1 visit on prosper. No, that wasnt on a small scale either. Were talking 1000’s of clicks. Have fun facebook. Im checking out till you can fix that shit.

I’m targeting small, specific demos, Facebook reports precisely twice as many clicks as hit my LP. Facebook is stealing our money, fuck that shit.

This is experienced by not just those that use 202. When in doubt, look at your raw apache logs - which I did. The conclusion: 15% - 20% clicks never form 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).

These aren’t the standard go cheat complaints that advertisers have leveled against search engines for years. In those cases, bots are racking up the fake clicks, which obviously never convert to any sort of purchase or other action. But at least the advertisers see the clicks.

In that case advertisers are saying that Facebook is recording and charging for clicks that don’t exist at all, even from bots. Their tracking software (many use Prosper202, but others are using raw Apache logs) shows one set of numbers, which is 20% - 100% lower than what Facebook is recording.

According to the WickedFire posts Facebook isn’t officially acknowledging the problem or giving any refunds so far. But they are asking some advertisers to send in logs to show the discrepancy. So far, advertisers who go to the trouble to do that aren’t getting the response they wanted: “I was asked to send in my logs so I spent by an hour compiling logs by the date period in question, and they replied with their fucking scripted bullshit. I was sooo fucking pissed, since I took the duration to do that and they churn out a 2 second response.”

We have an newsletter in to Facebook for comment. Image is from a 2006 BusinessWeek report on visit fraud.

Update: From the comments below -

This is Brandon on the Facebook communications team. I wanted to chime in to invent certain that our voice was part of that discussion and to clarify how we are addressing that issue.

We take go quality very seriously and have a series of measures in place to detect it. We have large volumes of documents to analyze go 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.

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