Cool new trick to avoid bots

[georgik]

Hey everyone! I just discovered a cool way to avoid interests that are populated with bots!

So, this used to be the audience for my Spotify ads: https://i.imgur.com/K6WbtSO.png

I was just exploring my audience insights ( https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience_insights ) when I noticed something weird.... why is the audience I am advertising to such a huge fan of the page "BlackDoctor.org" ? I have never heard of it, unlike a lot of the other interests on there. So I clicked on it and guess what? It's a page with millions of fake likes and next to zero engagement ( https://business.facebook.com/BlackDoctor.org/posts/ )

DING DING red flags start popping up in my mind and I start removing my interests one by one until BlackDoctor.org disappears. And BOOM! That's how I discovered the "The National" interest is sadly full of bot accounts.

My new audience without The National: https://i.imgur.com/cSyeg3M.png

Notice how removing "The National (band)" interest also removed any trace of the "The National R&B Music Society Inc" page. Ironic, because WITH "The National" as an interest, that page has a higher affinity score than the actual official fan page of The National band itself! This just adds confirmation.

Also, notice how a lot of other weird, seemingly random/unrelated pages are gone too.

I encourage you to try this for yourselves and see which of your interests are associated with obviously botted pages like BlackDoctor.org. You could even post the results here!

[mpekim]

Thank you for sharing this info. I've seen Andrew complain often about bots, and as my saying goes: "If your products (edit: need) bots promoting it, then it's probably not a product worth buying".

In other words, if your product is actually good then you don't need to rely on aggressive advertising; happy customers will promote it organically (word of mouth, etc.). They'll leave good reviews or shout-outs, and along with some minor advertising you should be all set.

[wm428]

How do you view your audiences in that Insights page... did you create them there? I've created audiences in my https://business.facebook.com/adsmanager/audiences page, but when I navigate to the Insights page which you're referencing, it doesn't see my saved audiences...?

[georgik]

Yeah I think it's bugged or something. I just create them manually there. You can save the URL as a bookmark if you don't want to lose the audience you create there

[wm428]

Yeah I think it's bugged or something. I just create them manually there. You can save the URL as a bookmark if you don't want to lose the audience you create there

Got it, thanks!

[Hwinoree]

Hey georgik,

Just wanted to thank you for this cool trick you shared, I just tested it out on my own audience targeting and it does indeed tell you which interests you should avoid using.
It's strange that in FB Audience Insights and in Facebook Ads manager itself you can add XXXX (band) which basically makes you think that the algorithm makes a difference between fans of the said band vs just users being interested in other things that the said band name describes. But nope, sometimes it doesn't mean that at all!
I've had my suspicious once when I tried to add Tool (band) as an interest and saw the potential audience increase by 200 millions ha ha, so I never trusted it and used it, but it's cool to have a way to definitely test every interest, not just suspicious ones.
I never would have thought The National (band) audience would be the wrong audience, but I checked and I think the associations have gotten even worse since you've shared this!
Now I'll definitely be checking every single interest one by one, so thanks again!

[GreenKidd]

Im a bit new to this, how exactly can you tell if your audience is bots? Will this appear on Spotify? Or just on facebook?