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Comment by theomega | Hacker News Reader

I think the explanation here is that Facebook tracks clicks on the banners on their site while the author of this post tracks page views using GA or other tools. These are two different metrics. In between lies (at least one) redirect (from Facebooks click tracker to your website) plus a full load of your website. There are a lot of visitors who click but never make it to the second link: Be it because they accidentally pressed the link (very likely) or because they decided otherwise and aborted.

I'd still go with your conclusion that it is difficult for the advertisers to track whether the ads pay of if you are paying per click. I would not go as far and say that Facebook is doing fraud or scam.

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There will always be a discrepancy. No doubt about it.

However, the magnitude of the discrepancy has never been so much in any of the networks I have advertised on.

As someone who has overseen spends to the tune of over 1 Million USD on various networks, I can attest to the fact that this does not happen often.

The discrepancy is why I like to have a conversation with my advertisers about the reporting I send them versus the GA activity they track on their website.

My numbers might be slightly higher a than what they see in traffic, but if they're still happy with the activity happening on their site, it is still a successful ad buy.

Edit: should also mention that my ads are priced monthly and not per click.

are you offering a flat CPM rate or RON on a specific site?

This is particularly true for mobile, where it's very easy to mistakenly tap on an ad while attempting to scroll/swipe.

The natural user reaction is to quickly go 'back' by swiping or hitting the back button, often before promoted site has time to load and fire off its mess of tracking pixels/javascript.

However, Facebook itself has tracking pixels, and are configurable such that you can optimize for visitors that reach conditions (e.g. complete a signup). It makes much more sense to look at costs and ad performance based on these downstream metrics, vs. looking at banner ad clicks. (As stated in the article)

> This is particularly true for mobile, where it's very easy to mistakenly tap on an ad while attempting to scroll/swipe.

Even if this is the case, I think it would be hugely unethical of Facebook to sell accidental clicks as deliberate engagement.

Watch out when using tracking pixels. I am sorry I've not been able to find the source yet but in the past Facebook has said that they use them to target ads at other users if they successfully hit your tracking pixel.

It makes sense that they would as they now know that user is likely to click ads and follow through, but will in the long run increase your advertising costs as you're now competing against others for that user

I would agree that, especially Javascript based tracking, numbers differ. What looks suspicious here is a factor of 10 though (19 to 190), which is hard to believe coming from people pressing back/mobile/slow loading etc.

As a mobile user of facebook I can attest that 100% of the ads I click are accidental and terminated before load completion.

Would be better if he'd looked into server logs and check referrer/utm.

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