NEW Facebook Ads

i see the exact same patterns over the last few days. I would hope that the FB sales reps that lurk in this forum would do something.
 


I noticed the same thing about 1 month ago. I sent an email to them asking about the problem. Here's the reply I got back:

Hi User,

We take reporting accuracy seriously and have several measures in place to ensure that you are billed accurately, including regular third-party tests of the system from an advertiser's perspective.

Discrepancies between Facebook Ads reporting and third party reporting can be usually be attributed to one of the following:

Differing statistics or methodologies
Facebook Ads reports clicks. Many third party reporting packages report visits or page views, which may not correspond directly to clicks. Additionally, some third party reporting packages require that the user's browser have cookies, Javascript, and/or images enabled in order to record statistics, which may result in undercounting relative to the clicks reported by Facebook Ads. Statistics measured at daily intervals may be based on different time zones. For more information, please also consult the documentation for your third party reporting package. Google Analytics documentation related to this issue can be found here: Why do AdWords and Analytics show different figures in my reports? - Analytics Help

If your ads link directly to the site you're advertising, and you're tracking ad "clicks" by looking at page visits with facebook.com as the source, it's likely that your statistics will be significantly different than Facebook's reports. We have found that many reports of click discrepancies can be resolved by tracking clicks directly via a URL redirection system. If you have not done so already, we suggest that you set up a new campaign using this method.

To do so, please set the URL (link) of your ad to an intermediate redirection page that increments a counter and then redirects to the ultimate destination. For example, if the ultimate destination is www.mysite.com/landingpage.php, you would set up a redirection page at www.mysite.com/redirector.php and link that page to your ad. Then, www.mysite.com/redirector.php would increment a counter and redirect to www.mysite.com/landingpage.php. You can then compare the numbers shown by the counter and Facebook. Alternatively, you can implement third-party source tracking tags or redirection techniques, as long as the tracking is unique to your Facebook Ads.

Incorrectly implemented third-party reporting
Please ensure that you have implemented your third-party tracking correctly. We strongly recommend installing multiple statistics packages and comparing them to each other (as well as Facebook Ads reporting) to get a more complete picture of site traffic. Two free, commonly available packages are Slimstat (SlimStat — A simple web stats analyser based on ShortStat - Wettone.com) and Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics).

Facebook Ads click quality measures
We have measures in place to reduce click fraud and may filter out some clicks and impressions. This may result in third party packages overcounting relative to the clicks reported by Facebook Ads. We may invalidate repetitive or incomplete clicks, and we cap the number of times any user can see or click on your ad in a day.

If you still feel there is an issue, feel free to follow up with us. If you'd like us to investigate this further, please provide detailed click logs so that we can compare your reports with ours. Please note that Facebook does not endorse or otherwise support any of the third-party products or pages linked to in this email.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Penelope
Customer Operations
Facebook
Click to expand...
I've got a script that just tracks clicks right from the ad. I haven't had time to record the IPs and send them a click log.

Mike
 
FYI- it may not be FB..its starting to look like competitor bots...Id hit up FB and ask for a credit. They cant charge us for clicks with 100% bounce rates. Plain and simple: its fraud.
Think about it- if you were (are) a big fish, what would you do to your competition, especially if you have zero ethics and are 100% ruthless. You'd bang everyone else for extra ad spends, flag ads etc.
And its being done guys..
Im about to generate a report and ask for a credit. I hope everyone else does too.
 
there's some softlayer bots rolling around passing bogus referrers as of late -- it's not clear who is operating these. they've been going around past few weeks.

then you got the aol/trendmicro/etc. bots that click all the ads looking for spyware -- I get a ton clicks/day from them, and it looks like FB charges me for at least 5 from each which seems gay.

then there's some random shit that comes from japan that seems to click all my US ads. not sure who runs em but they come from 150.70.* IP's.

AOL clicks are the most common; 64.12.116.75 and 205.188.116.75 click a few hundred times a day each.

the increase in non-referrer traffic is definitely interesting. doing an analysis, it doesn't seem like it's because of the above mentioned bots; in fact most of hte above mentioned bots pass referers -- even the softlayer drones pass referers. the increase in non-refer traffic is spread out over ip blocks, and has gone up about 600% in the past 6 days. really looks to me like a FB change. its worth noting that the overbilling started in concert with this non-refer increases, and nto with the above mentioned vscan clickbots etc (those vscan clickbots have been around for months+)
 
and as far as competitor bots not showing up at all in analytics -- it'd be really really easy actually. not going to say just how because I don't want all you bitches clickfrauding my ads, but that'd be piece of cake to charge clicks to your competitors from fb without hitting their analytics software.
 
I've lost 15% of my clicks this week (as a side kick in the ass, almost half of my clicks are now coming from apps.facebook.com whereas before it used to be like 25%, those clicks fucking suck). These did not go to the networks that I was sending them to, regardless of network.

this shit alone is killing my campaigns. its driving me nuts. I'm going to send facebook a detailed click fraud report indicating that this is something new over the last week and that I want this shit refunded.

I advise you all to do the same so we can get them to fix this.
 
exactly.

jvincent said:
and as far as competitor bots not showing up at all in analytics -- it'd be really really easy actually. not going to say just how because I don't want all you bitches clickfrauding my ads, but that'd be piece of cake to charge clicks to your competitors from fb without hitting their analytics software.
Click to expand...

Im not a coder but ive got lots of them around and they all echo the same sentiment..
 
How do we contact facebook support? I can't see any options.. not even a forum. That help link is pretty much useless
 
affiliatearmy said:
Im not a coder but ive got lots of them around and they all echo the same sentiment..
Click to expand...


its very very easy. we are talking one line of code here.

Looking at my numbers more closely, facebook is charging me for 10% more clicks than they sent me AND 15% of my clicks have no referrer and aren't making it through to the network. So now I understand why my totals for this week are 25% off. I thought it was one network's tracking and now I realize its whatever the fuck is going on with facebook and its very screwed up.

Here's a question, if this is NOT the case for you and you advertise on facebook can you please post to say its not affecting you?

Maybe facebook will give me a list of IP addresses based on the clicks they are charging me for, if we can find commonalities with either those or amongst non referrer traffic then we can start to build a picture of what's happening exactly. I don't have much confidence in facebook's ability to fix anything on their own (still waiting on that IP exclusion tool...)

Also lets see if we can figure out when this shit started exactly.
 
I asked facebook about click discrepancies 1 month ago. Here's the reply that I got back:

We take reporting accuracy seriously and have several measures in place to ensure that you are billed accurately, including regular third-party tests of the system from an advertiser's perspective.

Discrepancies between Facebook Ads reporting and third party reporting can be usually be attributed to one of the following:

Differing statistics or methodologies
Facebook Ads reports clicks. Many third party reporting packages report visits or page views, which may not correspond directly to clicks. Additionally, some third party reporting packages require that the user's browser have cookies, Javascript, and/or images enabled in order to record statistics, which may result in undercounting relative to the clicks reported by Facebook Ads. Statistics measured at daily intervals may be based on different time zones. For more information, please also consult the documentation for your third party reporting package. Google Analytics documentation related to this issue can be found here: Why do AdWords and Analytics show different figures in my reports? - Analytics Help

If your ads link directly to the site you're advertising, and you're tracking ad "clicks" by looking at page visits with facebook.com as the source, it's likely that your statistics will be significantly different than Facebook's reports. We have found that many reports of click discrepancies can be resolved by tracking clicks directly via a URL redirection system. If you have not done so already, we suggest that you set up a new campaign using this method.

To do so, please set the URL (link) of your ad to an intermediate redirection page that increments a counter and then redirects to the ultimate destination. For example, if the ultimate destination is www.mysite.com/landingpage.php, you would set up a redirection page at www.mysite.com/redirector.php and link that page to your ad. Then, www.mysite.com/redirector.php would increment a counter and redirect to www.mysite.com/landingpage.php. You can then compare the numbers shown by the counter and Facebook. Alternatively, you can implement third-party source tracking tags or redirection techniques, as long as the tracking is unique to your Facebook Ads.

Incorrectly implemented third-party reporting
Please ensure that you have implemented your third-party tracking correctly. We strongly recommend installing multiple statistics packages and comparing them to each other (as well as Facebook Ads reporting) to get a more complete picture of site traffic. Two free, commonly available packages are Slimstat (SlimStat — A simple web stats analyser based on ShortStat - Wettone.com) and Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics).

Facebook Ads click quality measures
We have measures in place to reduce click fraud and may filter out some clicks and impressions. This may result in third party packages overcounting relative to the clicks reported by Facebook Ads. We may invalidate repetitive or incomplete clicks, and we cap the number of times any user can see or click on your ad in a day.

If you still feel there is an issue, feel free to follow up with us. If you'd like us to investigate this further, please provide detailed click logs so that we can compare your reports with ours. Please note that Facebook does not endorse or otherwise support any of the third-party products or pages linked to in this email.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Penelope
Customer Operations
Facebook
Click to expand...
Mike
 
So the question is, has FB in there history ever even paid back any money for click fraud? Do you guys think even one person in the ad department has that authority? I would not be surprised if we dead end with this stuff real fast and are left with 3 options.

1. Class action suit
2. Just deal with it
3. Stop using FB

I just seriously doubt FB is going to give back the 10k+ they owe me for click fraud over the last 10 days.
 
miketpowell said:
So the question is, has FB in there history ever even paid back any money for click fraud? Do you guys think even one person in the ad department has that authority? I would not be surprised if we dead end with this stuff real fast and are left with 3 options.

1. Class action suit
2. Just deal with it
3. Stop using FB

I just seriously doubt FB is going to give back the 10k+ they owe me for click fraud over the last 10 days.
Click to expand...

damn i wish i was spending what you are if they owe you 1k a day in click fraud.

I've hit them up both on that contact form and the aff email. Can't hurt to try. This shit might only get worse.
 
So...I was looking at my stats for today.

Facebook says they have sent 3318 clicks.

I've only received 1774.
 
seriously guys start bitching or this is only going to get worse. i'm not saying this is going to fix anything but what else can we do?
 
conv3rsion said:
seriously guys start bitching or this is only going to get worse. i'm not saying this is going to fix anything but what else can we do?
Click to expand...

I'm attempting to find out if they are set up in anyway shape or form to give refunds for click fraud. I doubt they are currently and something tells me they don't want to set up to do so.


I'd say if FB does not fix this there will need to be a class action suit brought against them I'd say.
 
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