In a recent post on its company page, Limited Run—a New York company that offers website solutions to artists and musicians—claimed 80% of the clicks from its Facebook ads were from bots.

Limited Run said it could only verify 15-20% of the clicks on its site through a host of standard analytic solutions, which led to it building its own custom software for tracking.

The company explains:

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.

Limited Run claims they contacted Facebook, who "wouldn't reply."

Facebook declined to respond immediately on this issue when reached by BI.

In an e-mail, Tom Mango, co-founder of Limited Run, explained further:

Technically speaking, we used about 6 different analytics services as well as built our own analytics system to try and confirm the ad click throughs from Facebook. The way client side analytics works is that it will try and load some JavaScript on the page and, if that doesn't work, it just loads a single image. On about 80% of the incoming page requests from our ad campaigns, neither the JavaScript or the images were being loaded. Normal web browsers, used by normal people, will load both JavaScript and images. However, bots, such as ones that crawl the web or bots that attempt to hack into websites to leave spam comments on blogs, don't usually load those extra things like JavaScript and images. This is how we came to the conclusion that the majority of the click throughs we were getting were from bots. We have no idea who the bots are run by and don't think Facebook has anything to do with it.

Story continues

As it turns out, this issue—while not everyday news—is not new for Facebook. In June of 2009, complaints arose regarding discrepancy in ad clicks versus what clients could verify. Facebook verified a discrepancy and claimed to be implementing appropriate changes.

A month later, RooZoo and Unified ECM filed lawsuits alleging fraud. In April of this past year, the two companies along with others were denied certification for a class action suit in a District Court in California.

The final straw for Limited Run came unrelated to the click issue, it was regarding changing the name on its company page:

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

In regards to that specific issue, Facebook gave us the following statement:

We're currently investigating Limited Run's claims. For their issue with the Page name change, there seems to be some sort of miscommunication. We do not charge Pages to have their names changed. Our team is reaching out about this now.

Unlike others, Limited Run isn't accusing Facebook of fraud. The company told TechCrunch it could have been a competitor attempting to sabotage the firm through increased ad costs. Nonetheless, Facebook admits it might have as many as 50 million fake users.

Mango reiterated that it wasn't the clicks that led Limited Run to leave Facebook, it was the customer service. While he acknowledges Limited Run is smaller than a lot of Facebook's clients, it raises questions over how widespread the problem might be, even if it's not widely reported. At a time when effectiveness of the social network's ads are constant debate—this surely doesn't help.

The full text of its post is below:

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.

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.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this page and liked our posts. We really appreciate it. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, where we don't get shaken down, you can do so here: http://twitter.com/limitedrun

See more:

Facebook Says It Can Take A YEAR To Get Results From Its Ads



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