Is Facebook giving us fake ad clicks??!!

[Nemanja]

Yesterday I started Facebook ads campaign for this forum.
I've created 9 different ads with different pics, titles and descriptions to split test them.
Today they all got approved, so I was exited to see how ads will perform
And according to Facebook they started getting impressions and eventually clicks, great!

But then I checked my real time stats by statcounter and saw that only some clicks are registered.
Now I'm getting suspicious and started to check all kind of logs in statcounter and GA and they are not reporting those clicks from Facebook.
In fact Facebook said it sent 66 clicks, GA reported only 3 and statcounter showing 6 (t was me 3 times),
so it was actually 3 visitors out of 66 reported by facebook, time to stop facebook ads

My question is WTF is going on??? Is Facebook giving us fake clicks and stealing our money??

I found few articles and threads on forums about this same issue, some people are even suing them:
Facebook Shows WAY More Ad Clicks than Google Analytics?
Rampant fake Facebook ad clicks riddle hits dead end ? The Register


I guess I will stick with my standard free marketing tactics and
for paid traffic only google adwords.

What are your experience with this?
I would really like to hear more about it.

[seobunny]

My Partner invest $100 for ads tageting to facebook fanpage... and he gets around 1000 new fans after this... but I dont know if this good result or not lol

[wink0r]

One of the external links from one of those articles has this information:

Is there a way to effectively monitor my Facebook Traffic using Google Analytics?

The answer is “Yes”. Don’t worry Facebook is not scamming you. There is a simple solution to this frustrating problem, tag your Facebook Ad itself with the source so that it can be captured when someone comes to your website. Luckily, these can be quickly generated using Google’s URL Builder Tool. Appending a unique identifier to a link, tells Google that, “Any actions by this visitor should be attributed to this particular campaign.” By linking a Facebook Ad to a tagged URL, you are classifying the traffic for Google Analytics.

How to Track Facebook Ad Traffic Using Google Analytics | The Net Impact

[Nemanja]

My Partner invest $100 for ads tageting to facebook fanpage... and he gets around 1000 new fans after this... but I dont know if this good result or not lol

He got 1000 fans but what was ROI. Fans can be faked as well.

One of the external links from one of those articles has this information:

How to Track Facebook Ad Traffic Using Google Analytics | The Net Impact

Thanks Wink, I already found few solutions as well to test this further along with my own logging script.
But if GA wouldn't work well how iz possible that statcounter is not showing visitors as well
and statcounter worked very well and accurate for me all these years.
I understand that maybe few clicks are bogus or not logged,
it can happen, but 80-95% is waaay to much to be some mistake.

[wink0r]

Your own logging script should tell the story, probably. I think that this is a case where something that has access to the server logs can better analyze the data.

Two things mentioned in the article that may have an effect on GA particularly were the extensive use of https on FB and the way in which FB redirects traffic from clicks on the site. The author of the Net Impact article seems to feel that the FB accounting of clicks is reasonably accurate.

It will be interesting to follow the results of your testing. I have noticed discrepancies between GA and Adsense reporting from time to time, where Adsense reports more page views than GA.

[Nemanja]

Follow up...

I made another campaign with Google URL builder tool, so will report back...
I highly doubt this will show anything except what I already know,
because I already saw all visitors to this targeting page(which I was promoting) and there where only 16 total entries from outside IMTalk.org, 3 from Facebook.
But we will see what this will bring.

---------- Post added 09-16-2013 at 06:56 PM ----------

Also it is strange why stat counter isn't showing all those clicks as well.

---------- Post added 09-16-2013 at 07:19 PM ----------

One more followup...

I made custom URL for this campaign with Google URL builder tool, as you know from post above...
I made custom php/mysql script to track this special URL that I'm promoting by facebook ads
and I have tested it and it is tracking great all activity, storing referral URLs, IPs, agents...
Facebook approved my ad and it is active now.
The game is on

[Nemanja]

OK these are the results of a second run with special custom URL and custom tracking script.
Facebook reported 38 clicks,
GA not showing a single click,
statcounter recorder 1 visits from facebook, 5 minutes before ad was approved(it was from approval team),
then 1 visit from me (I was testing the link) and then one final visit from someone from Brazil, but that last visit was strange, no visit length available...

My custom script recorded 33 visits/hits(without me and FB approval team) to this page, 6 was from Facebook, others where without referral information,
but I classify them as some types of bots and most of their IPs where strange, very similar to IPs with facebook referrals(that 6 recorded),
also there where few regular boots like bing, gogle, etc..

Now the question is why these 6 visits/hits coming from facebook where not recorded by statcounter and GA,
also why these 27 visits/hits (minus few bing, google,etc) where not recorded by statcounter and GA as well?
Well it is because javascript which is used to track visits(at the bottom of the page) is not loaded and it can be becasue of couple of reasons,
visitors dont' have javascript enabled and/or visits are too short for javascript to be loaded and executed.
So all in all these "visits" are surely acting very strange, very similar as some bots or fake traffic scripts etc.

For me this is more than enough, I'm not using Facebook ads anymore.

[wink0r]

I started putting the analytics code in the head section long ago for just this reason. I know that it can cause a problem with page loading if the script does not execute fast, but the results are more accurate in my opinion.

I have recently seen the figures of 1 to 2% of browsers without javascript enabled. Of course, few bots bother with js.

It might be interesting to set up a secure page as the target for a comparison.

In the final analysis it is results that count, and I agree that the results don't look good.

---------- Post added 09-16-2013 at 09:34 PM ----------

There are far too many bots on the web today. There are days when I am nearly sure that the click counters from some of my affiliate networks have got to be counting bot clicks. While those clicks don't cost anybody money they don't make anybody money either.

[Nemanja]

I understand what you are saying and sure if you bring the code more towards the top of the page chances are way better for that code to be executed.
But if code isn't executing(at any portion of the page), something is wrong, these are fake or low quality visits and sure they will not convert and this is what we all need conversion.
It was very long time since I didn't used google adwords, I have new project coming on soon, so I will try adwords as well.
I think they are harder to target and setup, but once you are done with all that should be OK.

[bloggersjoy]

I think Google adwords has always been better than Facebook ads and is still better. You said you got just 3 visitors from Facebook but there are also many other low cost advertising networks that would have delivered more visits to your site than Facebook did.

[Nemanja]

Some may say I'm conspiracy theory guy , but I was thinking about a bit more and one thing is non stop ringing in my head, which was bothering me from way back before...
Facebook convinced people to behave in certain patterns, same as Google is doing with SEO and other big companies as well, etc...,
One of such thing is that people all over net are writing that it is better to have link to your facebook fan page rather then link to your money page/landing page from your facebook ads
and reason for that is because "facbook users doesn't want to go outside of facebook"(among other), OK it does make sense until this point, kinda, but how they will visit your sales page then??
They need to leave eventually , so I guess from fan page, but isn't that bad thing according to facebook and mainstream IMers???
So why anyone in their "bright" mind would be sending visitors to some fan page rather then to their sales page,
it doesn't make sense, it is one more unnecessary step where visitor can decide to leave and not visiting your money page and buy your product or what ever...
But it make sense, because then they have more control over clicks, /metrics/insights(how they call it), likes, etc...
Some might say, but people will like that page and their friends too will like it and it will spread like wildfire etc...
but main question is "who" will like that page, from where these likes are coming from??
So far I'm not convinced and not buying that whole story about facebook ads,
but I would gladly like for someone to prove me wrong .