It turns out that in internet storefront company, Limited Run, has made a blog post which alleges that 80% of the hits on their Facebook ads were bot generated:
Hey everyone, we're going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do. A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn't verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here's what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn't have JavaScript, it's very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What's important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That's correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn't reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes. But let's move on, because who the bots belong to isn't provable.
So, if you are looking at selling ads to your site, or looking at buying ads for your good service, it appears that the metrics, and hence the billing and/or payments, that you get from Facebook are not reliable.
As to whether Facebook is running a bot net to meet quarterly numbers, I agree with the CEO of Limited run, there’s no way to know, but what is clear is that an aggressive pursuit of bots clicking on ads would not be good for their bottom line.
BTW, the New York Times just published something on this, so it’s likely to get a lot of ink.
It also appears that the folks at Facebook are "major league assholes", to quote W, but that is not a surprise:
While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we're not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month. That's correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage. So we did what any good hardcore kids would do. We cursed that piece of shit out! Damn we were so pissed. We still are. This is why we need to delete this page and move away from Facebook. They're scumbags and we just don't have the patience for scumbags.
A deep thought after the break.
Is it just me, or is the whole Facebook/Zynga/Web 2.0/Social Network thing starting to smell a lot like the Dotcom bubble of the late 90s?