Christmas is over, countless letters of thanks should probably be written to people who gave you things you didn’t really want, but it’s all too much of a faff.

At least that’s what I was hoping. I thought I’d give Facebook ads another go for postednot.es to try to convince all those intrinsically polite, but lazy people that I could give them just what they needed.

Tl;dr: 35% of my budget seems to have gone to Russian bots, and Facebook seems to think that there is nothing they can do about it.

To make a slightly longer version of the Tl;Dr: I was paying about $1 a click, which is fine but 35% of those clicks were coming from a single source in Russia. That person/bot clicked the Facebook advert 25 times on the day in question. My beef is that for all Facebook’s fancy data analytics, that they aren’t able to filter out that kind of user and keep their advertiser (i.e. me!) a bit happier. I’d love to know if this experience is replicated across other campaigns.

This is basically just me complaining, but it’s cathartic.

Most of what follows is methodology and analysis; it’s not very exciting. I didn’t need to do anything magic to separate the clicks driven by facebook from the ones that came ‘organically’ as there weren’t any of the latter type!

This is what Google Anlytics thinks my traffic has looked like.

The advert is targeted specifically at a UK audience. more specifically:

So that’s a pretty specific bunch.

[caption id=”attachment_1732” align=”alignnone” width=”434”] More detailed session information. The plot thickens![/caption]

This is taken from the Facebook help page:

So it looks like this is a known thing. I doubt that there are any ways to get Facebook to care about it - but if it happens on a larger scale then I’d imagine that people would get sad if 35% of their ad budget goes to serial clickers in Russia.