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Potential Issues With Facebook

Version 2 2013-08-09, 02:35
Version 1 2013-08-09, 01:31
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posted on 2013-08-09, 01:31 authored by OS BH-LabsOS BH-Labs

UPDATED 08/12/2013: The editor of Indie Review Magazine, spoke with Facebook on 08/12/2013, and it was confirmed that the technical difficulities with the advertising account have been resolved.

 

They will be assisting in an investigation to handle the troll problem with the magazne's page, and the other difficulties the page has been experiencing as a direct result of the stalker's harassment.

 

Attached you will find screenshots of various ads that we've released on Facebook.

 

The conclusion:

The software predicted a performance for all of the ads pictured of 0.01 - 0.03. Prior to having major issues with negative "SEO" tactics on our facebook page the software's predictions for advertising perforamnce was extremely accurate. 

 

After we began experiencing the troll problem, the advertisements began to perform in a very unpredicatble, sporadic, and oftentimes schizophrenic fashion. 

 

The same ad, with the swimsuit model, showed a sustained performance of 0.08 earlier in the day, and later in the evening, after a series of technial difficulties on Facebook's end (with our page) the perforamance of the ad shot down to 0.19. 

 

We took video of the ads from the moment they began to run until we paused them after the money started to deplete at an alarming rate, and what we found was shocking. 

 

In the first 30 minutes our page was growing at a rate of around 3 likes a second (which is what is expected for the predicted growth rate of the ad - 0.01 to 0.03). This rate of growth had been sustained for days in the past with a very similar ad. 

 

Then suddenly the ad performance plunged to dismal numbers that do not accurately reflect the rate at which our likes were initially gained. Not on the specific day in question nor in the past (with the same or similar ad and page content).

 

At this time, we have paused all of our facebook ads and plan to thoroughly analyze this data. 

 

As stated in a previous article, which is linked below, we cannot comment directly on the internal workings of Facebook's advertising platform as we do not have access to that system - but our data highly suggests that if someone is using bot accounts they can significantly impact page performance.

 

We have been relying heavily on our custom software pagacke to anaylze the sitaution, and with the help of my neural networks we were able to identify patterns which revealed problem areas and allowed us to adjust our advertising strategy so that our page would be less suspectible to negative SEO tactics. 

 

UPDATE: 08/10/2013 Facebook will be speaking with the editor of Indie Review Magazine, they indicated that there were experiencing technical difficulties. These technical difficulties have been impacting our page for days, thus we've halted our experimentation and will update with another figshare article, once more information has been obtained.

 

Reference: 

1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/08/01/facebook-investigating-claims-that-80-of-ad-clicks-come-from-bots/

2. Previous figshare article: http://figshare.com/articles/Potential_Issues_with_FB_Advertising_Algorithms_/767331

 

 

 

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