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!