14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has admitted to a click-fraud problem it has been experiencing for several weeks and says a fix is coming soon. Some advertisers complained that their own internal measuring didn't match up to the number of clicks Facebook was charging them.
The problem wasn't a usual click fraud in which bots are used by some website owners to create false clicks that mean revenue for the sites but, obviously, no sales for the advertisers. This time, though, there was a discrepancy between the number of clicks that the advertisers measured and what Facebook was reporting anywhere from 20 percent to more than 100 percent.
While the company has acknowledged the problem, there has been no explanation as to why it was happening. A possible explanation, though, is that a series of bots created to analyze the ads on Facebook were generating the false clicks, as detailed by All Facebook. Several developers are currently offering tools to advertisers to give better insight and those tools use a type of bot to go through Facebook's ad inventory. The launch of these tools also roughly coincides with the time the click-fraud problem started being noticed.
The company has added that a fix will be coming shortly and that all advertisers who have experienced it won't be billed for the false clicks. Facebook has lately seen a surge in revenue and is hoping to double its income this year to about $550 million, up from $280 million in 2008. In order to reach that goal, the company somewhat relaxed some of its rules concerning advertising on the site and, while it did, indeed, bring in new revenue sources, it possibly led to the “click-fraud” problem.