Startup dumps Facebook: ’80% of ad clicks came from bots’ $FB [RT]
August 2, 2012 Leave a comment
New York-based online music startup Limited Run has ditched Facebook after its research revealed an alleged advertising scam. The company claims that 80 percent of its online ad clicks on Facebook were generated from automated ‘bots,’ not humans.
While testing Facebook’s advertising system, Limited Run said it could only verify that around 20 percent of the clicks were coming from users visiting its website.
Limited Run discovered that most of the users clicking on its Facebook ads had JavaScript disabled, making them almost impossible to track with regular analytics software. The company coded a custom-built page logger, and claims it found that 80 percent of the Facebook clicks it was paying for came from bots.
Facebook’s advertising rates are based on the number of clicks a company’s ads receive. Limited Run alleges that the ads were not clicked by real individuals, but rather by automated bots – internet software applications programmed to repeat automated tasks.
