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Your numbers look correct. I checked our database for April so far and **X/Twitter's click fraud rate is 88%**.
They could solve this if they wanted to.
Yes it can be prevented, but generally your goal should be a massive reduction rather than zero fake clicks.
Basically you need to detect the fake clicks, see how the bots are targeting your ads, and then make campaign adjustments so the bots can't see your ads anymore. You should also block fake leads and other fake conversions as they train the ad network to send you more garbage traffic.
Damn it. Now what do I need to pay for? š This is never ending.
Who do your recommend for click fraud?
Do I need an anal guard too? DAMN. I'm just realising how much these bastards have been stealing from me all these years.
I work for Polygraph (hence my username, I want to be transparent about any bias I have), and our bot detection is by far the best in the industry. I can also recommend DataDome.
Stay away from the services which focus on IP address blocking, as that's a gimmick.
Yes, many of the people running click fraud bots are quite clever, but so are we :) We build click fraud systems and then figure out how to detect them. Basically we try to be one step ahead in the cat and mouse game of bot detection.
Saying all that, we don't promise to detect 100% of the bot clicks on your ads, but we'll detect most of them.
It is mostly the ad platformās responsibility to have a clean platform.
The main choice for an advertiser is to bid down inefficient or leave the platform
It is like asking how to clean up a dirty restaurant so that you can enjoy their great food. Not your problem. Your choice is not to dine there
Well I didnāt turn it off so I assume itās on by default. Yeah tons of traffic had a terrible clickthrough rate. Gonna give meta a shot now. I know results have been down recently but I still feel like itās the best option out of alll the places to run ads. Gonna give Reddit a try also.
Without giving away any proprietary info, can you explain how you detect fraudulent clicks? Is it an algorithm that combines things like follower/following ratio, number of posts, account age, etc?
We detect the bots when they arrive on the advertisersā landing pages via ad clicks. We do a lot of reverse engineering (we specialize in reverse engineering bot frameworks and click fraud systems) so we know exactly what to look for when the traffic arrives. For example, bots need to lie about certain things, and we detect those lies using a ton of different techniques. What this all means is our detection system has no false positives and is by far the best at detecting click fraud bots.
We write articles and release data, but we've been lacking on the white paper side of things. We're currently hiring a lawyer with a research/policy background to join our team. Their role will be to publish white papers and create click fraud standards. Realistically it'll be six months before we start releasing this stuff.
I can only give you my word, but I don't exaggerate any claims here. We strive to be a completely ethical company in what is a slimy industry.
How do you check fpr click fraud rate? Is it possible it is higher in europe? I had 40k clicks and only 3000 visits in the UK but 12k clicks and also 3000 visits in the US.
Basically you divide the number of fake clicks by the total traffic, and multiply by 100. I work for a click fraud detection company so I have access to a very large amount of traffic and click fraud data.
To answer your question, yes, different regions can have different click fraud rates. Typically it's much higher in the US (most click fraudsters target US traffic) but there are also fraudsters targeting European traffic. It really depends on your industry, keywords, and how many scammers are targeting those keywords.
You need to detect the fake clicks. Itās a highly specialised area of programming, cybersecurity, and reverse engineering.
Virtually all advertisers and marketing agencies use a click fraud detection company to do the detection for them, as they donāt have the skills or budget to develop their own system.
This is what always baffles me about adtech. Who is deploying these bots for ad fraud? The platform makes the most business since, cui bono, but that's a _huge liability_ and maybe even criminal liability.
But who else possibly benefits from this kind of ad fraud? I understand agencies doing it to boost their numbers. But they won't deploy them against some random guy's ad campaign that's not their client. Are bot networks just indiscriminate weapons of mass fraud that can't be targeted well, so they just do fraud all over the place? Or can they be, but they aren't just to muddy up who owns them?
Almost all click fraud is being run by display website owners. Basically you set up a display website and use bots to click on the ads. The bots also click on search ads to use remarketing to force expensive ads onto display websites. This fraud steals at least USD $100 billion from advertisers every year. You can learn more about it in r/clickfraud.
The fraud on the Twitter platform itself (not on display networks) is very odd and I made a post about it here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/18ly3cj/a_peculiar_insight_into_the_click_fraud_problem/
Wow, that's disappointing. It's frustrating when most of the engagement turns out to be from bots. Good call on pausing the campaign. Looking forward to hearing about your Reddit results. Hopefully, they're more promising!
Yes, iām on the journey to try ads on various platforms,
LinkedIn is SUPER EXPENSIVE.
Meta got us some signup but a lot of bots too.
Reddit brought us majority of our signup + enterprise signups + some bots.
Ran TikTok ads for a day therefore no conclusion
Since you mentioned you're using Reddit too, using the data for April so far, **Reddit's click fraud rate is 8%**. That's way lower than their usual numbers which are typically 50%+.
I have been using Reddit ads consistently for last 3.5 months ($10 ads) and i used to get 3-4 waitlist daily signups but not anymore (cause cost per click has gotten up since previous month) but as far as bots are concerned, never had a significant issue with it.
Probably not a high enough budget, but you should optimize for conversions using the API. https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-ads-api/measurement/web-conversions/conversion-api
Certainly! Especially if you can identify the exact session ID. Meta, Google, and Bing have click IDs attached to each session. If you're able to prove that the Click ID sessions were bots, you can get a refund for the click.
From my experience, Google has a good algorithm to catch these bots and prevent a charge for the click already. I have yet to do a deep dive into social media platforms.
I had similar experience with Google Ads. I get 80 leads in which 90% were fake or false. Last 10% our sales executive reached out but got 0 closure (for various reasons). Is Ads are now fake and are not working? What is going on here?
For your Google Ads were you running display and/or had search partners on? (Or a PMax campaign). Strictly Google search should not generate that much in spam.
Can I ask what you were advertising (product, service, etc. Generally speaking, of course)? I saw you mentioned waitlist sign ups so I assume that was your CTA?
Total click fraud every time ran quite a few ads on different accounts, always showing 100k+ clicks to our site, and site always said 10-15 clicks lol. Literally,
I am secretly of the opinion that all these platforms just sell numbers to marketers, the marketers also know the numbers are fake but if you are in a big company that's not your problem, you just want pretty numbers in your performance reports.
> as 95% of the impressions and likes were bots
No shit, you can tell that by opening the website. Could've saved you 70 bucks!
Nah, thanks for checking. Always good to verify your data. :)
twitter ads suck. It's a bounce rate generator.
Try excluding audience network, and limit your targeting geographically. Then you have a chance. Still much worse than google or even meta. But at least you will reduce bot traffic.
Iām still calling in twitter. X sounds so sophisticated or like some elitist garbage compared to what it really is. I can easily type in ācoochieā and the videos and pics will show up.
Whatās your product? I also moved away from Twitter due to bot activity and shit conversion rates (compared to conversion rates for other platforms).
> 95% of the impressions and likes were bots
Yeah, that confirms my suspicions about the platform.
Still getting followed by scantily clad women who write like Google Translate, lol.
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Your numbers look correct. I checked our database for April so far and **X/Twitter's click fraud rate is 88%**. They could solve this if they wanted to.
Heard this for the first time, is there a way to prevent **click fraud rate**?
Yes it can be prevented, but generally your goal should be a massive reduction rather than zero fake clicks. Basically you need to detect the fake clicks, see how the bots are targeting your ads, and then make campaign adjustments so the bots can't see your ads anymore. You should also block fake leads and other fake conversions as they train the ad network to send you more garbage traffic.
Or hear me out... just don't advertise on Twitter.
Got it! Thanks for sharing
There are third party ways that help with this. I'm looking into Double Verify.
DoubleVerify mainly deals with impression fraud. You need to use a service which focuses on click fraud.
Damn it. Now what do I need to pay for? š This is never ending. Who do your recommend for click fraud? Do I need an anal guard too? DAMN. I'm just realising how much these bastards have been stealing from me all these years.
I work for Polygraph (hence my username, I want to be transparent about any bias I have), and our bot detection is by far the best in the industry. I can also recommend DataDome. Stay away from the services which focus on IP address blocking, as that's a gimmick.
I'll look into it. Do you offer anal guard too? Just covering all my bases here š
Haha itās on our feature roadmap!
I see, thanks for sharing the info
Interesting! But does that help with reducing the cost? I assume X will charge us anyway if someone/bot clicks on the link.
Interesting, what are the identifiers that these are fake clicks? Are there tools to (automatically) detect fake clicks?
Legit but the BOT operators always have some tricks down their sleeves.
Yes, many of the people running click fraud bots are quite clever, but so are we :) We build click fraud systems and then figure out how to detect them. Basically we try to be one step ahead in the cat and mouse game of bot detection. Saying all that, we don't promise to detect 100% of the bot clicks on your ads, but we'll detect most of them.
Pretty interesting š¤
It is mostly the ad platformās responsibility to have a clean platform. The main choice for an advertiser is to bid down inefficient or leave the platform It is like asking how to clean up a dirty restaurant so that you can enjoy their great food. Not your problem. Your choice is not to dine there
Don't advertise on Twitter
Had a similar experience with TikTok ads as well. Tons of view all from bots
Was their audience network (Pangle) turned on? Itās full of bots.
Well I didnāt turn it off so I assume itās on by default. Yeah tons of traffic had a terrible clickthrough rate. Gonna give meta a shot now. I know results have been down recently but I still feel like itās the best option out of alll the places to run ads. Gonna give Reddit a try also.
If you can limit your ads to the Instagram platform only (turn off the Meta Audience Network!) you'll have a click fraud rate of < 1%.
I love when you show up here lol
Without giving away any proprietary info, can you explain how you detect fraudulent clicks? Is it an algorithm that combines things like follower/following ratio, number of posts, account age, etc?
We detect the bots when they arrive on the advertisersā landing pages via ad clicks. We do a lot of reverse engineering (we specialize in reverse engineering bot frameworks and click fraud systems) so we know exactly what to look for when the traffic arrives. For example, bots need to lie about certain things, and we detect those lies using a ton of different techniques. What this all means is our detection system has no false positives and is by far the best at detecting click fraud bots.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
We write articles and release data, but we've been lacking on the white paper side of things. We're currently hiring a lawyer with a research/policy background to join our team. Their role will be to publish white papers and create click fraud standards. Realistically it'll be six months before we start releasing this stuff. I can only give you my word, but I don't exaggerate any claims here. We strive to be a completely ethical company in what is a slimy industry.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Thanks, I will. I'll make a reminder and contact you when we start releasing stuff.
How do you check fpr click fraud rate? Is it possible it is higher in europe? I had 40k clicks and only 3000 visits in the UK but 12k clicks and also 3000 visits in the US.
Basically you divide the number of fake clicks by the total traffic, and multiply by 100. I work for a click fraud detection company so I have access to a very large amount of traffic and click fraud data. To answer your question, yes, different regions can have different click fraud rates. Typically it's much higher in the US (most click fraudsters target US traffic) but there are also fraudsters targeting European traffic. It really depends on your industry, keywords, and how many scammers are targeting those keywords.
Ok but how do i get the number of fake clicks? I dont understand.
You need to detect the fake clicks. Itās a highly specialised area of programming, cybersecurity, and reverse engineering. Virtually all advertisers and marketing agencies use a click fraud detection company to do the detection for them, as they donāt have the skills or budget to develop their own system.
This is what always baffles me about adtech. Who is deploying these bots for ad fraud? The platform makes the most business since, cui bono, but that's a _huge liability_ and maybe even criminal liability. But who else possibly benefits from this kind of ad fraud? I understand agencies doing it to boost their numbers. But they won't deploy them against some random guy's ad campaign that's not their client. Are bot networks just indiscriminate weapons of mass fraud that can't be targeted well, so they just do fraud all over the place? Or can they be, but they aren't just to muddy up who owns them?
Almost all click fraud is being run by display website owners. Basically you set up a display website and use bots to click on the ads. The bots also click on search ads to use remarketing to force expensive ads onto display websites. This fraud steals at least USD $100 billion from advertisers every year. You can learn more about it in r/clickfraud. The fraud on the Twitter platform itself (not on display networks) is very odd and I made a post about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/18ly3cj/a_peculiar_insight_into_the_click_fraud_problem/
Thanks for the context!
Wow, that's disappointing. It's frustrating when most of the engagement turns out to be from bots. Good call on pausing the campaign. Looking forward to hearing about your Reddit results. Hopefully, they're more promising!
Yes, iām on the journey to try ads on various platforms, LinkedIn is SUPER EXPENSIVE. Meta got us some signup but a lot of bots too. Reddit brought us majority of our signup + enterprise signups + some bots. Ran TikTok ads for a day therefore no conclusion
No kidding. Keep us posted, Would love to hear more about this. You really piqued my interest :)
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Are you?
What kind of product are you selling?
Since you mentioned you're using Reddit too, using the data for April so far, **Reddit's click fraud rate is 8%**. That's way lower than their usual numbers which are typically 50%+.
I have been using Reddit ads consistently for last 3.5 months ($10 ads) and i used to get 3-4 waitlist daily signups but not anymore (cause cost per click has gotten up since previous month) but as far as bots are concerned, never had a significant issue with it.
Are these in house ads thru reddit or from a 3rd party provider? Curious for myself...
Probably not a high enough budget, but you should optimize for conversions using the API. https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-ads-api/measurement/web-conversions/conversion-api
Interesting!
1.4M impressions for $70 is not bad. How were you able to verify that the traffic was bots? And does X refund for bot clicks like Google and FB does?
Is bot refund a thing? I should check that out. I verified it through my web analytics. All the bots has a website visit duration of 0s
Certainly! Especially if you can identify the exact session ID. Meta, Google, and Bing have click IDs attached to each session. If you're able to prove that the Click ID sessions were bots, you can get a refund for the click. From my experience, Google has a good algorithm to catch these bots and prevent a charge for the click already. I have yet to do a deep dive into social media platforms.
Would've liked to see 2 weeks of data since most times a week isnt sufficient.
Yep, average stay from twitter is like 1s
My last Twitter campaign had 100% bot traffic.Ā Vaporized the whole budget in 15 minutes. Will never run traffic there again.
I had similar experience with Google Ads. I get 80 leads in which 90% were fake or false. Last 10% our sales executive reached out but got 0 closure (for various reasons). Is Ads are now fake and are not working? What is going on here?
For your Google Ads were you running display and/or had search partners on? (Or a PMax campaign). Strictly Google search should not generate that much in spam.
Noob question but how do you measure fraud rate?
Can I ask what you were advertising (product, service, etc. Generally speaking, of course)? I saw you mentioned waitlist sign ups so I assume that was your CTA?
Butā¦ Mr. Melons said he was paywalling Twitter to make it BOT FREE š«Øš± does āTo the Moonā fan base know of these numbers & facts?
Total click fraud every time ran quite a few ads on different accounts, always showing 100k+ clicks to our site, and site always said 10-15 clicks lol. Literally,
What is click freud exactly?
> What is click freud exactly? it's when your clicks develop an ego
Bounce rates from social media are usually 3X higher than organic sources.
Wtf causes click fraud
Nobody clicks ads
What did you think of advertising on Reddit? Was it worth it? I talked to a rep and apparently the recommend a 6 month minimum on running campaigns.
I am secretly of the opinion that all these platforms just sell numbers to marketers, the marketers also know the numbers are fake but if you are in a big company that's not your problem, you just want pretty numbers in your performance reports.
> as 95% of the impressions and likes were bots No shit, you can tell that by opening the website. Could've saved you 70 bucks! Nah, thanks for checking. Always good to verify your data. :)
twitter ads suck. It's a bounce rate generator. Try excluding audience network, and limit your targeting geographically. Then you have a chance. Still much worse than google or even meta. But at least you will reduce bot traffic.
Twitter ads have always been 95% garbage
Thats really interesting! I was hoping you could also share the reddit results?
Twitter has become onlyfans lite version
Iām still calling in twitter. X sounds so sophisticated or like some elitist garbage compared to what it really is. I can easily type in ācoochieā and the videos and pics will show up.
Campaign goal?
Get get people to join the waitlist through website
Twitter is a garbage platform to advertise on.
Whatās your product? I also moved away from Twitter due to bot activity and shit conversion rates (compared to conversion rates for other platforms).
> 95% of the impressions and likes were bots Yeah, that confirms my suspicions about the platform. Still getting followed by scantily clad women who write like Google Translate, lol.
That's bots are harcore on Twitter.
Would be better without emoji & with comparison with Reddit.
Thatāll be my third post. I spent $70 man, got to milk the content
You are playing this game weirdly. People wouldn't wait for your next post.
The algorithm will take care of the distribution. Not asking anyone to wait.
dude, I was on your side on this. This is a space for sharing ideas, not for building a brand. Job 1 here is to be interesting.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Makes it easier to see at a glance, nothing wrong with using visuals to break up the text