I recently read an article about a small business uncovering that they believe 80% or more of Facebook’s clicks could be automated clicks made by bots (machines). Described in this article the small business, Limited Run, spent a decent ad budget over a short period of time on Facebook ads and got quite a few likes and increased traffic to their website. The problem, it turns out, is afterward the company took a hard look at the “people” who clicked through to their website and generated the advertising costs. The results are a bit staggering.
They found that 80% of the clicks from the Facebook advertising to their website was from users who had JavaScript disabled. This is non-technical terms, is like driving down the road at night with no headlights on. JavaScript is a massive component of today’s web browser, and trust me, if you disable JavaScript then try and surf the web, it will be a much less desirable experience. In fact, only 1-2% of real users on this company’s site (historically before the Facebook advertising) had JavaScript disabled. So that means AT LEAST 80% of the traffic from the Facebook ads looks to be from a bot or automated computer system that finds links and clicks on them to either drive up marketing dollars or another sinister reason. This is not good.
I wanted to corroborate this story with one of my client’s sites to see if this is a hoax or if there are these fake accounts and bots rampant on Facebook as I’ve heard. I took a company we recently launched a website and Facebook page (no Facebook ads mind you, just a Fan page) for and looked at some of the recent “Likes” that seemed odd. This company is a totally legitimate local Northern VA company; however, recently I had noticed they were getting Likes from very strange looking names.
Then the patterns started to show up. Check out some of the “people” who Liked their Facebook page:
- Maynard Jarvis – 18 friends, all whom are super weird and doesn’t seem legit, also has 4,077 Likes (just like “he” liked my company’s fan page) which makes no sense for someone with only 18 friends. CLEARLY a fake account or bot.
- John Smith – 2 friends and 2,804 likes. Couldn’t be more clearly a fake account or bot.
- Shradha Srivastava – 200 friends and 4,660 likes. The content of this “person” has been putting on their page is so obviously crappy marketing for SEO reasons for website companies and get-rich-fast scams. This is without a doubt a fake account.
- Control Panell – Very new account, most of its “friends” are web hosting companies and they have also liked the same companies so clearly its a fake account. Control panel is also a word used heavily in the web hosting arena, so they didn’t even try to make up a person’s name here, just totally fake.
I found this goes on and on, fake accounts galore, across ALL my client’s Facebook pages. You may ask what do these accounts have to gain from fake accounts and fake clicks. Well, if a fake account can build up a big friend base, even if 10% of them are real, then they have an audience and stand to gain. This, however, is TERRIBLE for the ecology and life of Facebook. Google Ad Words is notoriously very strict about fake clicks and bots, Facebook, on the other hand, started as a fun social network and now is trying to monetize that network with Ads and quite frankly, clearly has NO IDEA what they are doing in this department.
My neighbor is an extremely successful website entrepreneur who has built multiple successful social media and community sites and he has been harping on me that Facebook is a fad and a scam and will go down hard soon. I’ve been telling him he’s too brash and the network of “people” is so large that they can’t fail at this point.
However, with data, information, and news stories like this, I think I’m starting to agree with him. Be very cautious of spending large amounts of ad dollars on Facebook ads because as we are finding out there are little quality checks done on these Likes and clicks and you could easily be paying for bots and fake accounts to waste your TIME and MONEY.