Boy, it just hasn’t been Facebook’s summer: a high-profile dumping by General Motors was followed by a busted IPO in May, and its stock continues to sink -- trading at $21.77 at the
time of writing, down 43% from the IPO price. Meanwhile, a new eye-tracking study has cast (even more) doubt on Facebook’s ability to monetize mobile
traffic through advertising. But the most damaging news may come courtesy of a New York-based start-up, Limited Run, which claims that 80% of the clicks on its Facebook ads came from bots.
In
a much-circulated blog post, Limited Run, which offers Web site services to artists and musicians, informed fans that it is deleting its Facebook page and moving over to Twitter, with the following
explanation, which I have taken the liberty of re-posting at length:
“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.”
Now, 80% seems like an egregiously high
proportion of traffic coming from bots, and it may very well be that Limited Run had spectacularly bad luck (or was being fraudulently attacked by a competitor aiming to run up ad costs) – thus
making it an anomalous case. But what if it isn’t? All those commonly-heard complaints about Facebook advertising “not working” would suddenly start to make a lot more sense.
What needs to happen now is a wider investigation by online ratings firms, advertising and media agencies, and any interested (and competent) tech firms and individuals, to see if they can, in good
empirical fashion, replicate Limited Run’s results. Certainly nobody can deny that Limited Run’s anecdotal evidence is food for thought.