Invalid clicks on Facebook and account credited

emile — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:02:40 +0000

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve run a few test campaigns on Facebook Ads. I was disappointed to see that about half the clicks Facebook said I got were not recorded by my Tracking202 installation. I thought maybe it was a problem with the speed of the server the Tracking202 software was on (a somewhat cheesy shared server), and decided to look into it later.

Yesterday, I came across the TechCrunch article about people on Wickedfire being up in arms about large amounts of invalid clicks, and was relieved to find out that others saw the issue, and Facebook was on to solving it.

Today, in my Facebook Ads Manager account, I got the following message:

“Recently, we have detected an increase in invalid clicks on Facebook. Your account was impacted and as a result, we are crediting your account. Your credit has been automatically deposited into your Facebook account and will apply toward future advertising campaigns. Your credits expire December 15, 2009.”

The amount they credited me was about 75% of what I felt were “missing” clicks, so I’m pretty happy that they were close to the same number on their side. I’m sure as they fine-tune their invalid click detectors, that number will be closer to true.

Keywords AJmain and GGmain showing up in Tracking202 data

emile — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:35:28 +0000

I’ve been using Prosper202 to track keyword searches and performance for some affiliate marketing experiments we’re doing. It’s a very nice product, with a lot of information available on which keywords people search for before clicking on your ads. It takes a fair amount of setup, but once in place, the information that can be gathered is very useful for fine-tuning Pay Per Click campaigns. Prosper202 is self-hosted and open-source, but they also have a hosted solution with even more bells and whistles at Tracking202 Pro.

One issue that has popped up is that I have been seeing the keyword AJmain show up in searches from MyWebSearch.com for one of my campaigns, and couldn’t figure out what it was. I put a negative campaign keyword in for it, but after seeing it again in my tracking data, I dug into it a little bit more.

The incoming link looks something like this:

http://search.mywebsearch.com/mywebsearch/AJmain.jhtml?qid=0fba4305452cb2a61dc1c57dbc92633e&pg=AJmain&ord=20&action=click&p=AJmain&tpr=jrel4&ptnrS=ZUxdm523YYUS&searchfor=KEY+WORD+HERE&si=&ct=RR&st=kwd&ss=sub&cb=ZU

Notice that there is a ‘p’ parameter, which it turns out Tracking202 is using to get the keyword, as some search engines pass the keyword in that parameter. Not so for MyWebSearch.com; they use the ’searchfor’ parameter to carry the keyword that was searched by the user.

The URL-parsing code is in three different files, and I’ve posted a bug report/possible fix in the Tracking202 forum. Take a look there for more specifics. I’ll update if and when the developers get back on the report.

Update: Keyword GGmain from MyWebSearch.com shows up too, with the same issue. The link looks like:

http://search.mywebsearch.com/mywebsearch/GGmain.jhtml?qid=aee506c433e0ba6ae18155ac1557a2c6&pg=GGmain&ord=20&action=click&p=GGmain&tpr=sugrs&ptnrS=ZKxbn045TQUS&searchfor=KEY+WORD+HERE&si=&ct=RR&st=hp&ss=sub&cb=ZK

Sequential Logic » Tracking202

Invalid clicks on Facebook and account credited

Keywords AJmain and GGmain showing up in Tracking202 data