Facebook ads: Is it all bots?
Hey everyone,
What's the trick to Facebook ads? Or... is it a scam?
We have been running some experimental campaigns with Facebook ads. Specifically using the "link clicks" ... since we are marketing an analytics platform; we can see that everything, I mean 100%, of traffic coming from Facebook is a bot.
Here is a screenshot of the data:
Note that the traffic has 100% bounce, but also 0 engagement... the majority never even fully load the page.
More typical analytics data looks like this:
So, anyone know what we are doing wrong? We are doing "link clicks" and targeting 'web analytics' related markets.
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We're actually using Darwin to find out how much people are going to our pages, and we're finding that majority of users are bots. Not sure if it was an issue with the bot flagging itself? Majority of these are clicks coming from people putting our pages in their bio, example bio of https://www.instagram.com/elainecovers/
Can't add an image here but of 946 unique visitors, ended up with following event labels:
Not entirely sure what the different bot event labels are
I'll take a look at those flags, the issue w bot detection is sometimes a browser update will cause false positives. Bot detection will improve in the future (if thats what users want us to focus on)
A better measure of bots in Facebook's case is the zero engagement traffic.
Frankly, social media companies and Google don't report on the true numbers of actual users clicking the link.
In itself, often the links were indeed clicked, though nobody expects these platforms to allow bots to use their platforms.
There appears to be a long article on ad fraud. Just FYI, it's probably an ad itself.
https://www.businessofapps.com/ads/ad-fraud/research/ad-fraud-statistics/
Have you tried to filter out FB ads approval bot traffic?
Every time you launch or change something within the ads they go to the review process & you'll get a lot of bot traffic.
Recently, I've noticed it's possible to use UTM parameters with space to filter out the real users vs. bots in GA. Bot traffic will include "+" instead of blank space.
Results are not that bad at all when you filter out the approval bots.
See the example screenshot: https://share.getcloudapp.com/NQuo0dEb
@mojmir that is a super good idea. I will play around with it. I have a call with Facebook's ad "consultants" today and will discuss this issue with them.
I'll go ahead and follow you for more analytics tips!
@arpowers what do you think of this?
That gives a different view on the "real" FB Ads traffic.
@mojmir also, if you do this sort of work send me an email -- i have a budget for some traffic growth.
Really need to see the ads themselves - copy and creative are a huge factor.
But, may I ask why Facebook? Is this where your target hangs? I wonder if there might be other platforms that would be better suited. Like YouTube, LinkedIn and Google PPC.
Were you optimizing for conversions?
Personally, I use hotjar, I want to see what each person does who lands on my page. If they dont even scroll or anything, I know its bot activity
Ya Darwin does everything hotjar does.
I used to spend £1,000 a day on facebook ads and we found that the more specific you can be the better all those metrics would be. We would usually see about 7-10K of sales for a £1K spend. There are so many factors here that could be throwing the numbers off it's hard to say.
Either way, facebook ads are great if your follow the usual online ad guidelines around target demo, good copy etc
Ya i think it's just going to take a bit of time to figure it out; everytime i revisit i find something else that could be improved. More of a learning process than anticipated.
Without seeing your ads and your audience settings I doubt anyone can help
Slightly unrelated, but your dashboard looks really nice. Did you use some css or component framework or did you style it all yourself?
I can recognize Tailwind css (and possibly Tailwind UI components)
I saw a similar behavior when I had very low CTR of my ads: I guess that 0,5% of ad clicks are unintended and people just go back to facebook. The users wanted to click somewhere else on facebook.
Having ads tailored to the audience with emotional content can gave me 10% CTR and much engagement on my landing page. But, this is impossible for most subjects I guess.
You'll typically want to exclude the audience network too. Talking about low-quality inventory...
what do you mean by that? the audience you build?
What @abrar said.. You can read more about it here -> https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork/
It's one of the ad placements for FB (similar to FB/IG desktop or instream video). A lot of people say you end up getting tons of visitors/engagements for your ad with AN placements but almost 0 real conversion.
Man that's scam lol
Darwin looks awesome by the way. Might try it out with my next project, the inclusion of behavioural analytics would allow me to drop hotjar.
Ya that's the idea. All that stuff is free also.
Yea in general, I'd avoid link clicks as an optimization for the reasons you state - I had the same experience. If you want to do traffic then I'd suggest using landing page views.
Ya they weren't working either but on review I think it's because the pixel was blocked
You have to experiment with different conversions, messaging and ads.
I thought the same thing a while back, but I think it comes down to a few variables which you just need to sort out.
How are your page load times BTW?
Load times are solid, it's a prerendered site.
Ya I think we need to dig in more, Facebook makes this hard to do well. I suspect they like "mistakes" that help them sell their bad inventory