Facebook has denied allegations from a music company that branded the social network as ‘scumbags’ and claimed that 80% of its ad clicks were generated by bots rather than people.
US start-up Limited Run (formerly known as Limited Pressing) claims that Facebook charged them for ad rate clicks, but it could only verify where 20% of those clicks were coming from.
80% of clicks were from users with Javascript disabled–a rare setting for a typical user.
After setting up a page logger, the Limited Run team says they discovered the 80% of clicks we were paying for were from ‘bots’, automated programmes on the web loading pages and driving up advertising costs.
Limited Run was formed in 2009 and provides a platform for selling digital music and physical items in the US. On its Facebook page this week, the company published a status update explaining why it will be deleting its Facebook account soon.
It read:
“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.”
Limited Run also alleges that when it approached Facebook to switch its page name from Limited Pressing to Limited Run following a rebrand attempt, Facebook agreed to do so only if Limited Run made a promise of its own:
“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….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.”
Facebook denies allegations
In response, Facebook said it has defenses in place to detect click fraud despite one company’s claim it detected suspicious clicks on its advertisements billed to it by the social-networking site.
A Facebook spokesperson said: “We’re currently investigating their 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.”
Facebook ads are supposedly only visible by logged-in users, and the social network has systems in place to monitor suspicious click activity, including repetitive clicks from a single user or those that appear to be coming from a bot, as well as to monitor whether or not JavaScript is enabled.
Facebook also requires requests for changes to page names to be routed through its team in order to avoid confusion, but it does not charge.
The accusation is still problematic for Facebook, which is already coping with high expectations from Wall Street following its IPO over the potential revenue the site could generate from online advertising.
The post has been shared on the social site more than 400 times and “liked” more than a thousand times, with many people asking Limited Run to post a more detailed note about its findings.