Margie Barkley: How do you protect your Facebook Ads from bots?

Bots on Facebook or Instagram? Is this old news?

Most people today know that many social media accounts have been automated.

Estimates suggest that 95 million Instagram profiles and 270 millions Facebook accounts may be bots or false profiles. We’ve learned to ignore fake news, disinformation and trolls accounts and live with them despite their impact.

Bots on Facebook can have negative effects for digital marketers. They’re hard to ignore, especially when you consider the amount of money they are bringing in.

Let’s take a look at what Facebook bots are doing and how they work before we get into the problem.

Facebook bots & types of audiences

Bad audiences are any social media accounts that have a low to no chance of conversion. It could be that they are not human or designed to serve a different purpose than real interaction.

Bot Accounts

Even a beginner programmer can easily create a Facebook bot or Instagram bot. These bots can be used for many purposes, including spreading misinformation or boosting engagement on certain accounts. A vending machine in Moscow is well-known for selling Instagram clicks and followers for a few dollars. While researching click farms, two people showed me their Instagram robots in action.

{What is Bot Traffic? | ClickCease Academy”, “description”: “Learn what is bot traffic and how to block it https://bit.ly/3imYBp3 Bot traffic: non-human traffic to a website or an app, coming through organic or paid traffic. Bots and web crawlers are an important part in the global web ecosystem. More than half of internet traffic is automated. But – there are good bots, and bad bots. Good bots can perform useful tasks, such as: delivering your search results; collecting marketing and performance data; automating repetitive tasks; providing automated customer service. Bots are also used to carry out malicious activities and can go undetected. Bots are used for many things, including: Viruses and malware (including ransomware) – Credit Card Fraud – Account Takeover and brute-force attacks – Click fraud and Ad Fraud – where bots click on your ads and fraudulent websites can boost payouts. It’s data time! Cybercrime accounts for over $1 trillion in lost revenue annually, with ad fraud and click fraud being the biggest contributor to this (https://cybersecurityventures.com/cybercrime-damages-6-trillion-by-2021/). Fake traffic on PPC ads accounted for 41 billion dollars worth of losses in the marketing industry in 2021 alone (https://www.clickcease.com/blog/who-is-making-money-from-ad-fraud/). Compare this with credit card fraud which was responsible for the theft of $31 billion in the same year (https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170711-credit-card-fraud-what-you-need-to-know). Bad bots affect us all, whether we are aware of it or not. Protecting our ads and website from malicious bot traffic has become a necessity for marketers to keep themselves and their customers safe online. Check out our ClickCease blog to get a deeper dive into bot traffic https://bit.ly/3imYBp3 Want to know more about ClickCease and get a 7-day free trial? Click here https://www.clickcease.com/”, “thumbnailUrl”: “https://i.ytimg.com/vi/s5Rj1EIU23c/default.jpg”, “uploadDate”: “2022-12-01T14:18:59Z”, “duration”: “PT1M33S”, “embedUrl”: “https://www.youtube.com/embed/s5Rj1EIU23c”, “interactionCount”: “206”>

Accounts duplicated

There are many reasons people use duplicate accounts on Facebook. They can be for a variety of reasons, including managing their business, trolling other users or stalking an ex. People use duplicate accounts for a variety of reasons, including managing their business, troll people, and stalking their ex.

These accounts aren’t necessarily fraudulent, but they are more likely to be used for a particular purpose. They have fewer chances of being converted.

Accounts that are compromised or zombie accounts

Zombie profiles are created when people stop using their social media profiles or pass away. Even though there are ways to remove these profiles from social media, there are still many that are floating around.

Bots and hackers can also compromise or hack these accounts.

Cyborg accounts

Fake accounts are a problem on Facebook. They’re created to spread misinformation.

The Russian troll farms are perhaps the most notorious example. These fake accounts are often operated by a combination between humans and bots. They are called cyborg account.

These accounts use bots to share or post content (often from questionable sources), make comments, or boost the popularity of individuals, groups, and businesses. They also employ humans to interact on the site. For example, commenting or responding to posts. This can generate many ad impressions.

Malware Clicks

Facebook Audience Network (FAN) is a very popular way to advertise on third-party applications. The problem with these apps, however, is that it’s not always possible to verify whether the clicks were genuine.

Recent cases have shown that malware in apps can generate click traffic fraudulently. DrainerBot was one of the malware that could view banner and video ads, even when an app infected with it wasn’t used.

Malware can often take advantage of human activity by hijacking clicks and touches. Clickjacking, or click injection as it is also known, allows the developer to generate revenue without the user knowing by faking or directing the click towards an advertisement.

Data center traffic

Data centers can generate your ads impressions in a variety of ways. Web scrapers, or data harvesting, is one of the methods. These scrapers are used by many legitimate software programs, such as Ahrefs or Google, to collect data on the web.

There are many less sophisticated web scrapers who can unintentionally generate an impression for a Facebook advertisement.

Fraudulent botnets are another form of data centre traffic that is well-publicized. Fraud campaigns like 3ve and Methbot use data center traffic as a way to hide their location and identity.

What is an impression in advertising?

Facebook marketers know that impressions are important. Ad impressions are what we mean.

How many of your impressions on bad audiences and bots?

CHEQ.AI data shows that 4% of Facebook ad impressions and clicks are generated by bots.

Facebook has actually removed 2.2 billion fake profiles between January and March 2019. This is a double-digit increase since the end last year.

These duplicate or fake Facebook accounts are also found on Instagram.

Facebook bots: How they affect your marketing

You’re likely to see poor audience engagement, no matter how much money you spend on Facebook ads.

You’ll lose money for each ad you see. What about other ways bots or bad audiences can affect your ads.

Skewed Analytics

Your data will also be affected by bot traffic and audiences who are not excluded from your analytics. Many businesses only focus on KPIs and engagement. Why not invest more money in the platform that produced your traffic?

You can improve your overall ad performance by being aware of bot traffic. This can help you exclude bad audiences and optimize your ad targetting.

Retargeting is a bad idea

If you only target these bad audiences one time, it’s fine. What if you target your ads again to the same automated accounts or bad audiences? You’re effectively spending twice as much on impressions and clicks.

Fake Leads

Bots can interact with links more naturally. It can be used to generate downloads or complete forms, which will affect your analytics and may also lead to false leads.

Fake leads can lead to wasted resources in retargeting and marketing. They may even result in direct sales inquiries.

Cart abandonment

Cart abandonment rates are also high on shopping sites. This can have knock-on effects, such as an increase in inventory distortion and distortion rates.

Fraud bots on Facebook can affect your shopping carts and use stolen bank cards (carding)

Carding

Carding is another issue that shopping sites face. A bot will use several fraudulent or stolen cards to make a purchase. Criminals use this method to test which stolen bank cards actually work.

Carding can distort your metrics, result in fraud and disputed transactions and even criminal charges against the seller.

Blocking Facebook bots bad audiences

Digital marketers are increasingly aware of the negative impact bots have on their ads. Online ads, particularly Google Ads, have become more complex as the need to manage and filter invalid traffic is a necessity.

As we have seen, Facebook Ads is not immune from the problem of fraud.

Fraud prevention software is the best way to take back control over your marketing budget. You can block bots and gain insights into the interactions with your ads, factors that lead to fraudulent clicks, as well as other information such as location.

ClickCease, the leading industry-leading click fraud prevention tool, is used by professional marketers and major brands. ClickCease blocks invalid traffic with its best fraud filters and an ever-growing list of bots.

How to protect your ads from bots on Facebook The post How to Protect Your Ads from Bots on Facebook?