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Industry Trends

Facebook Click Fraud

By July 24, 2009July 30th, 2023No Comments

Even though the global recession may be coming to an end, it seems rather unrealistic for a company to project revenues for 2009 at nearly double the value of 2008. Yet, that is exactly what Facebook is doing. They are targeting revenue of $550 million this year, while last years revenue was $280 million.

It would be great of course if they can achieve these figures.

A large part of this revenue is expected to come from small scale advertising. But lately there have been complaints from several small business advertisers that they are being billed for clicks they do not see on their trackers.

There have been complaints from various advertisers that a lot of click fraud has been occurring. In fact it ranges between 20 – 100%

The allegations also say that this is not a standard click fraud, where mischief makers click several times on an ad without making any purchases. Here the advertisers do not see any clicks on their tracking apparatus, but still they are being billed for these.

This is also not a network problem according to the advertisers as they have checked out on different servers at different DC’s.

Advertisers who have complained to Facebook about these discrepancies, and were asked to provide the appropriate logs were also miffed, that instead of owning up to the errors, Facebook has sent them a standard scripted reply.

A spokesperson from the Facebook communications team has said that Facebook is looking into the issue of suspicious clicks and has identified a solution, which they are implementing.

Facebook must remember that these allegations are serious, and if the matter is not resolved very soon, it may backfire on them if advertisers choose to leave them and use other networks instead.