Beware of Advertising On Facebook
- July 31, 2012
Recently, a Long Island-based startup that offers “a platform specifically designed for labels, musicians, and artists, selling digital and physical products,” (LimitedRun.com) decided to go up against the Big Boys at Facebook. After noticing that they could only truly account for about 20% of the clicks they were paying for through having Facebook advertisements, they decided to do a little more investigation.
First, they used a few other analytics programs, one that also showed only about 20% of the clicks they were paying for were verifiable, and others that placed the number closer to 15%. At this point, Limited Run decided to create their own software to be sure these numbers were correct. What they found was astonishing, infuriating and, frankly, bad news for any company that has trusted Facebook with their advertising.
In a post on their website entitled “Why We’re Deleting Our Facebook Page” they explain exactly what they figured out through the use of other software as well as the analytics software they created:
“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. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t reply.”
Their post is actually giving them more attention than their Facebook Ads ever did, so some question the validity of the situation, calling it a promotional tactic. According to co-founder of Limited Run, Tom Mango, publicity was the last thing on their minds. “I haven’t Googled us, but I’m sure what comes up now is this Facebook thing,” says Mango. “We don’t want this to drag on. We want to move on from this. We don’t want them to be linking to this forever.”
Are you currently advertising on Facebook? Are the Ads producing business that is comparable to what you are being charged? Comment below and share your thoughts on this story!
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