Found out our retargeting was targeting bots for 14 months

I was looking at our Facebook ad manager last Tuesday and something just felt off. We had been running retargeting ads for over a year and our click-through rate was actually decent. But I decided to dig into the actual conversions instead of vanity metrics. Turns out 78% of our traffic was coming from data centers in Virginia and Singapore. Bots. We had been paying $4,800 a month to show ads to machines. It took me about 6 hours to trace through all the audience settings and find the problem. Our pixel was firing on a staging site that search engines were crawling. Has anyone else found phantom traffic eating their retargeting budget?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancythomas4d ago

Did you check if your retargeting audience was using "engagement" as the source instead of "website visits"? That's a common bot magnet since bots click around and trigger those events just by loading pages. We had a similar mess with LinkedIn where their auto-generated audiences pulled in API traffic we didn't verify. Maybe your pixel was set to track all page views instead of just confirmed human visits? What event triggers were you using for your retargeting pool?

mark_mitchell4d agoMost Upvoted

Remember when my buddy thought his retargeting was working great until he realized his pixel was firing on every page load including bot crawlers from ad networks? He spent weeks wondering why his conversion rate tanked and it turned out his event was set to "any page visit" instead of something like "time on page over 10 seconds." Sometimes the simplest settings cause the biggest headaches if you don't double check what data the pixel is actually collecting.