Robert_Charlton - 9:44 pm on Aug 12, 2012 (gmt 0)

Last week, digital distribution firm Limited Press (sic) alleged that, based on its own analytics software, 80% of clicks on its advertisements within Facebook had come from fake users.

Hard to know where to begin on this one, and whether it merits its own discussion. It's also part of this story, and of Facebook's mishandling of customer relations overall.

Limited Run, a niche music marketing company wanted to change its FB page name from Limited Pressing to its new Limited Run, and along the way did some testing which on the surface seemed careful... but it apparently wasn't careful enough... and it came up with some sensational figures that got widely publicized, and perhaps resulted in some major corporations dropping their Facebook advertising.

CNET reports the basic background, and quotes the now deleted Limited Run blog about what Limited Run had observed....

Firm ditches Facebook for Twitter, claims clicks are bots
|July 30, 2012
[news.cnet.com...]

The quoted blog post is worth looking at, because it illustrates the frustration of a small company trying to deal with Facebook.

In reaction, AimClear (which handles a lot of Facebook advertising), brought some stricter analysis to the situation and was critical of the 80% bot click figure in a SearchEngineWatch post...

Facebook Ads 80% Bot Claim, Examined! Why You Shouldn’t Lose Faith Just Yet
August 10, 2012
[searchenginewatch.com...]

AimClear was apparently more careful in identifying bot traffic, looking, eg, at time and date stamps across time zones... and also took issue with the 2% javascript disabled figure. Finally, AimClear also took issue with the possible sample size and challenged Limited Run to provide more data.

On its Update blog, on July 30th, Limited Run posted the following....

When we posted about leaving Facebook on Monday, we only intended our small group of customers and followers to know what was happening, and why. We had no clue it was going to explode like it did. But now, we’re just a very small company, that wants nothing more than to go back to work. We don’t want to be known for this, and we’re going to keep turning down requests for interviews. Facebook is in contact with us, and they’re going to look into the issues we had.