
Facebook Click Fraud Enraging Advertisers - malte
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/21/facebook-click-fraud-enraging-advertisers/
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omarchowdhury
As an advertiser on Facebook, I can attest to the fact that Facebook's recent
increase in click fraud has become UNBEARABLE.

What started with 1-2% of clicks being fraudulent, has progressed to some ad
campaigns recieving 10 real clicks to 90 fake clicks.

And this is over 10,000s of clicks.

FUCK Facebook because they do nothing about it, simply providing a boilerplate
email.

EVEN an IP exclusion tool would help, but Facebook doesn't have that.

But what the fuck do you expect? They treat their customers like shit. They
have "Ad reps" on their platform who serve only one purpose: to increase your
daily budget on their platform. Ask them anything else and they are totally
fucking clueless.

Also, apologies for the recurring vulgarity but this has been an issue for me
for the past month. It's money.

~~~
aristus
It takes time to turn a big boat. I think it's naive of them to not have
anticipated this kind of problem. It would also be naive of us to expect an
"Ad Rep" who was probably a PolySci student 2 months ago to be able to fix it.
If it's really such an UNBEARABLE problem you don't have to bear it. Suspend
your ads and come back when it's fixed.

~~~
TrevorJ
No. Sorry, just no. If you buy a Mercedes and they deliver a Yugo, you've been
defrauded. Fine, maybe they can't get you the Mercedes back right away but
they sure as heck can refund your money. Facebook appears to not even be
talking to these customers beyond a form letter. That's just plain wrong. Yes,
problems can take time to fix but working with the customers you have just
screwed over to compensate them can be done RIGHT AWAY. Apparently they aren't
doing this, and that is the problem.

~~~
aristus
Bad customer service, yep. It's ok to be angry, but that doesn't invalidate my
point: click fraud often takes companies by surprise (though it shouldn't) and
that it will take a non-trivial amount of time to fix (I'll guesstimate 3
months once it gets serious attention from management) but it _will_ be fixed.
It's like an ant infestation.

In the meantime given the bad customer service and probable time frame, the
best thing to do is suspend your ads. FB will pay a LOT more attention to that
than how many customers call up to verbally abuse their salespeople or vent on
forums.

~~~
TrevorJ
It will take time to fix the root of the problem, sure, I buy that. What I
don't buy is that Facebook has no ability to make it right with the customers
before that time.

~~~
aristus
Well, they can't throw money out of helicopters just yet. There's no quick
magic fix ("here's your $9.46 back, sorry") because they don't full apprehend
the problem, nor do they have a workable filter to separate legit and fraud
clicks.

Maybe you are hoping for some reassuring words + action, but I've been there
and it can take awhile before a competent manager notices there is a problem
to be fixed in the first place. Then they need to do a lot of analysis to make
their own definition of "fraud" (a misleading term that covers a large
spectrum of behavior), which may not be possible to unambiguously apply to
historical data.

As my business advisor Barbie likes to say "CPC is hard! Let's go shopping!"

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vaksel
Facebook advertising just sucks period, users just don't pay attention to it

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pj
Once again, history repeats itself. Facebook users fell for it. Facebook
advertisers fell for it. Facebook investors fell for it...

It's a terrible situation for everyone involved. It's the great lie of the
internet. MySpace laid off 30%. Seriously, why does anyone think Facebook is
immune?

It doesn't work people. It just doesn't work.

~~~
zaidf
What doesn't work?

~~~
aristus
Having infrastructure costs similar to running a search engine, but a revenue
model that is at best 1/10th as efficient as search keyword advertising.

You can demo-target display ads all you want, but the facts remain: search
engine users are _searching for something specific_ while social network users
are just dicking around.

Facebook's current advertising model is essentially the same as Yahoo's
display ads plus some demo-target frosting. Note that a) Yahoo has additional
revenue streams and b) isn't doing that well.

~~~
zaidf
It is one thing to say facebook's current advertising isn't working.

It is another to use that fact to reach a conclusion like "It's the great lie
of the internet."

I use facebook. And clock over 10 hours a day with a fb window open. According
to the OP, I've bought into some type of a lie. I'm wondering what that is.

Re: revenue...give them time. I think they'll figure out. It usually takes web
companies with explosive growth some time to pin down their source of $.

And offering myspace's poor management as evidence of why facebook is bad
makes zero sense.

I think facebook's paypal-killer will be its source of revenue in future.

~~~
aristus
"great lie" was pj's phrase, not mine, but I took that to mean "perennial tar-
pit". FB might succeed but a long string of similar social media businesses
have failed to pin down the whole revenue/cost thing. It'll have to be
something very different from display ads.

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jotto
Is it possible that it's not fraud, but instead users accidentally clicking
advertisements (which then register on facebook's end) but the user quickly
realized their mistake and closes the browser (so it doesn't get registered on
the owner's end)?

~~~
il
That would mean 20-50% of Facebook users have ninja-like reflexes that let
them close a browser within milliseconds of clicking an ad, before a redirect
is recorded. Unlikely.

~~~
jotto
I don't think it's as unlikely as you suggest.

Click an advertisement on Facebook, you'll see it redirected as Facebook
registers it in a few milliseconds, but you'll have several seconds before the
actual targeted site loads and can easily close it.

~~~
il
The tracking on the advertiser's server also takes a few milliseconds before
you're redirected to the landing page.

