Over the past few weeks, big affiliate advertisers on Facebook have reported a spike in fake clicks, but this is only part of where Facebook has faced challenges within its ad network over the past few months. The reason for the surge in fake clicks is a result of a number of things including the creation of Facebook ad scrapers that are being used to track advertisers’ ads on the site and what pages the ads are linking to.An Affiliate Land Rush Begins
Prior to exploring the current claims for click fraud, I thought it would be important to discuss some background. Back at the end of January Facebook switched their ad policy to allow the promotion of ringtones, dating, quizzes, freebies, work at home products, and surveys. While the exact reason for this is unknown, we can assume that it’s because Facebook wanted a taste of the massive affiliate marketing cash that’s available.
We’ve been exploring extreme affiliate marketing ads over the past few weeks in what we called the “race to the bottom” for ad networks and developers, but Facebook hasn’t exactly kept their hands clean in this matter either. For those that are unaware of what affiliate marketers are, they are the middleman (or middle-woman) between customers and product offers on the internet. Wikipedia defines Affiliate Marketing as “Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.”
Many of these affiliates have been in the space for a long time and have amassed large amounts of cash to the point that some were looking to spend upwards of $30,000 a day through Facebook’s ad network. The result is that upwards of a million dollars a day could be generated on Facebook through affiliate marketing ad spends. With Facebook looking to increase their revenue, this was most definitely a quick way to generate some cash and for a few lucky affiliate marketers, an opportunity to jump into an unsaturated market.
With Rules Relaxed, Advertisers Get Aggressive
As Facebook began to relax their rules on what advertisers could promote, the company witnessed a jump in revenue with the new surge in affiliate marketers. By March, Facebook had adjusted their advertising terms of service to include a new segment.
