6 {{ upvoteCount | shortNum }}
6 {{ upvoteCount | shortNum }}

Am I a victim of Twitter ad click fraud?

by joshearl
5 replies
I'm running a campaign titled on Twitter to drive traffic to an opt-in page that I created with LeadPages.

The campaign seems to be doing fairly well--I'm getting a sustained engagement rate of 1.85% and generating hundreds of clicks. But ...

Only a handful seem to be making it through to my opt-in page. The LeadPages analytics report anywhere from 30-50% fewer hits than I'm paying for on Twitter.

I've noticed this disparity when looking at the landing page stats, so yesterday I installed the Twitter conversion tracking script on my landing page to track page views as conversions. (The landing page is hosted by LeadPages.)

My Twitter stats for today show an even larger gap between clicks and conversions. As of right now, my campaign has received 54 clicks today, but only 12 of those are reported as conversions.

The LeadPages analytics also report a significant gap--only 35 hits from 54 clicks.

My campaign targets only desktop users, so timeouts due to slow mobile connections shouldn't be an issue here.

Is it common for landing pages to receive 30-80% less actual traffic than clicks?

This is making it very hard to calculate my ROI for these ads. I'm only paying $0.87 per signup right now due to low CPC, but I'd like to know where all that traffic is going before I dump more money into this campaign.
#click #fraud #twitter #victim
  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    I'm not quite sure how Twitter's model works - hasn't been released in my home country. So take my attempt at explanation with a pinch of salt.

    If the promoted tweets are like normal tweets, they'd have their own page within Twitter. Maybe those extra clicks just mean that person has clicked the tweet open for whatever reason.

    If you really had 12 conversions for 54 clicks, that sounds like an excellent result. 20% conversion is high.
    Signature
    Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
    Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

    What's your excuse?
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9065571].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author joshearl
      Your theory about opening the tweet makes sense--that's not something I normally do, but maybe others do.

      To be clear, the 12 "conversions" were just page views, not signups. But I did get 8 signups from the 54 clicks, which is almost 15%. Not bad. My LeadPage is converting at 23%, so I want to make sure I get all the traffic I'm paying for...
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9065730].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author joshearl
    I contacted Twitter support about this, and they confirmed what nettiapina suggested:

    Hello,

    "Clicks" within the Promoted Tweet Dashboard are defined as follows: clicks on the URL, hashtag, Tweet copy, avatar and username, or the expand button.

    Please let us know if you have any other questions.

    Thanks!
    That's pretty disappointing. They're charging me for their UI design choices--"Let's hide stuff people want to see, then charge advertisers when users unhide it!"

    Grrrr....
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9069586].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    They're charging for those clicks? That's just complete and utter BS. You've got an opportunity to sell your stuff with max 119 chars (a link takes 20+1), and the tweet is just a dead end.
    Signature
    Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
    Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

    What's your excuse?
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9072321].message }}

Trending Topics