stradivarius creon: Startup claims many of Facebook?s ad clicks driven by bots

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Startup claims many of Facebook?s ad clicks driven by bots

Startup Limited Run says bots are driving clicks on its Facebook ads.?

A startup is making some dramatic claims about Facebook, saying that bots, not real people, are the driving force behind clicks on its Facebook ads.

In addition, the startup says Facebook wouldn?t change the startup?s name on its Facebook page without committing to buying $2,000 per month in ads, a move the startup described as a shake down.

?That was kind of the last straw,? said Tom Mango, co-founder of the startup Limited Run, when I caught up with him by phone. ?We have to get out of Facebook.?

Limited Run, which is based in New York and makes a platform for musicians and artists to sell physical and digital goods, posted its story about its experience Monday in a Facebook post explaining why the company is shutting down its account.

Mango said that the company noticed the numbers of ad clicks it was paying for didn?t align with the number of visits to its website, according to the analytics service it was using. So Mango spent a month testing six or seven other analytics services, all with the same result: Only about 20 percent of the clicks the company was paying for were making it through to its website.

Limited Run then set up its own tracking system, and says it found that those other clicks were all coming from bots, driving up the startup?s advertising costs.

?We have no idea where the bots are from,? Mango said. ?Our biggest thing is we don?t have time to deal with this kind of crap. We wanted to be able to advertise on Facebook, but we?re small. We can?t afford to put money out there and not actually get our return on it.?

When the company asked Facebook about the discrepancy, it got ?standard canned replies about every analytics service is different,? Mango said.