Just read an interesting article on TechCrunch about the problems advertisers are experiencing with Facebook’s self-serve ad platform and increasing click fraud. Interesting, because the issue is being brought out into more mainstream attention.

This actually isn’t ‘new’ news, the issue has been growing for weeks in a thread on Failbook ads over at Wickedfire. At first it was a couple of guys getting a few mysterious clicks from what was thought to be bots, but it has quickly emerged that a whole load of people have a big problem with fake/ghost/whatever clicks.

Problem is that advertisers are being charged per click and anywhere between 10-80% of clicks coming through their ads (which they are being charged for by the way, per click) are just ‘non existent’ traffic - that is, Facebook tracks the click, and charges for it but the advertiser never ’sees’ the visitor. (Most people are using Prosper/tracking 202 and/or Google analytics to check this, although Apache logs can also be used).

Obviously switching to the CPM - billed model would ease the problem, but if 80% of your clicks are not real visitors, and you didn’t have a great CTR anyway then even like that an ad is not going to end up very profitable (if at all).

Facebook so far have pretty much put the barriers up and refused to communicate with anyone over the problem, or even acknowledge that the problem exists, which hasn’t helped the situation one bit. If they carry on like that, then as far as I see it this is only going to end one way - a class action lawsuit filed by all affected advertisers.

If you have read this blog before, you’ll already know my views on Failbook advertising and that I don’t use it, but if you haven’t - I cannot stand the platform, or the way its run and don’t advertise there. The couple of times I’ve tried in the past, I tested a few things like magazine subscriptions - as soon as I noticed through Prosper that I was getting anything up to 6-8 clicks from the same IP’s on the same ad, (and not isolated incidents either even on just $80 worth of traffic) while being charged for the privelige, I cut and ran the proverbial mile in the opposite direction. They should have had systems in place from day one to cut that kind of bullshit out.

One thing is for sure, Farcebook needs to accept there is a problem, and do something about it asap. When mainstream high traffic sites with influence like Techcrunch start reporting things like this, hopefully  people will start to take more notice. It’s pretty negative publicity for FB, given their revenue-generating ambitions for 2009.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out!

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