Facebook click fraud 101



It's not surprising to me at least. The hardest part about doing something like this is coming up with enough US, residential non public proxies to get away with it. The rest of it is a very very easy to do.
 
Bullshit, I don't believe that's the source of the click fraud. Who are these mythical advertisers with 2,000 Facebook accounts clicking on everyone's ads?
Once again, that would just offset the costs incurred by increasing their CTR. If anything, it might even be a good idea to click your own ads- the higher CTR might make the expenditures worthwhile.

In short, I don't think there's a shadowy conspiracy clicking FB ads day and night. I think that's just another bullshit excuse from Facebook.

I got credited like 1% too. Thanks Facebook, that almost makes up for the 20% in fraud clicks you sent me.
 
machinecontrol said:
Bullshit, I don't believe that's the source of the click fraud. Who are these mythical advertisers with 2,000 Facebook accounts clicking on everyone's ads?
Once again, that would just offset the costs incurred by increasing their CTR. If anything, it might even be a good idea to click your own ads- the higher CTR might make the expenditures worthwhile.

In short, I don't think there's a shadowy conspiracy clicking FB ads day and night. I think that's just another bullshit excuse from Facebook.
Click to expand...
I think it's one of a few ways it's happening.
All the CTR in the world can't make up for a lot of clickfraud. In a perfect, ideal PPC situation it would. However:
1)Facebook has an artificial price boost/floor (remember the days where the cpc rose by a certain amount in every demo?)
2)We're competing against the large CPM ads as well, which are unaffected by clickfraud. So pretty much clickfraud happens, we drop bids to compensate, then more CPM ads show.
 
machinecontrol said:
Bullshit, I don't believe that's the source of the click fraud. Who are these mythical advertisers with 2,000 Facebook accounts clicking on everyone's ads?
Once again, that would just offset the costs incurred by increasing their CTR. If anything, it might even be a good idea to click your own ads- the higher CTR might make the expenditures worthwhile.

In short, I don't think there's a shadowy conspiracy clicking FB ads day and night. I think that's just another bullshit excuse from Facebook.

I got credited like 1% too. Thanks Facebook, that almost makes up for the 20% in fraud clicks you sent me.
Click to expand...

Unless the bot racks up a few thousand impressions before clicking through. That would take way too long though. I think anyways. My guess is that's one of the ways FB is "fighting fraud". Flagging accounts with abnormally high CTR. I'm sure this little cat and mouse game will continue on. This isn't over yet.
 
My hats actually off to FB at this point, got a nice credit for 9% of my June spend back. Hell of a surprise.
 
machinecontrol said:
Bullshit, I don't believe that's the source of the click fraud. Who are these mythical advertisers with 2,000 Facebook accounts clicking on everyone's ads?
Once again, that would just offset the costs incurred by increasing their CTR. If anything, it might even be a good idea to click your own ads- the higher CTR might make the expenditures worthwhile.

In short, I don't think there's a shadowy conspiracy clicking FB ads day and night. I think that's just another bullshit excuse from Facebook.

I got credited like 1% too. Thanks Facebook, that almost makes up for the 20% in fraud clicks you sent me.
Click to expand...

+1
Arrington is a joke, he loves these little conspiracies, his 'sources' could be feeding him bullshit.
 
Hmm, good article. The whole game theory thing is bullshit though....I don't think anyone feels forced to commit click fraud, rather I think victims just leave. (See comment
Brian - June 26th, 2009 at 3:26 am PDT).

This is fucked up though. Stealing landing pages is one thing but click fraud is just going too low.
 
Sorry for the dumb question guys, but where do you find out whether you've received a credit from FB or not. I've checked my billing in the FB platform and didn't see anything, and my CC online updates are behind at least a day or two.

Is there anywhere else that indicates a refund?
 
Spliffic said:
Sorry for the dumb question guys, but where do you find out whether you've received a credit from FB or not. I've checked my billing in the FB platform and didn't see anything, and my CC online updates are behind at least a day or two.

Is there anywhere else that indicates a refund?
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Yeah don't check the billing page. Check the Funding Sources page. There it shows below your credit card information.
 
Facebook says the fraud is now under control.
Click to expand...
Ummm.... No.


One thing Facebook is willing to talk about on record is that they are heavily monitoring click rates on ads and flagging accounts that are statistically out of bounds for human review.
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Lol, FB accounts are 10 cents or less. How much does it cost to have an employee in California or Ireland to do a manual account review? $2+? Fail. I guarantee that new accounts can be created 100x faster than they can be manually reviewed and squashed.

FB seems to be stuck in 1999 time warp.
 
Thanks Fatal, fuck I didn't get jack shit then. I even sent in click logs etc. Man seriously what a fucked up company.
 
What % credit did peeps get? I only got 5.4% of my spend, which seems like a lot less than the actual clickfraud I experienced.
 
seems like u dont get a credit yet if your payments aren't up to date. i base this on 2 accounts. one got a good credit which is paid up to date, the other which is behind in payments has nothing yet
 
got 12% credit for June spending...pretty nice although I surely hope they have enough resources to prevent this from happening again
 
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