How to Measure Facebook, Paid Search and Remarketing with FouAnalytics

Since Google won't allow third party tags to measure the paid search ads themselves, we have to place the FouAnalytics tag on the landing pages or website to which you are driving the clicks. Similarly, Facebook doesn't allow third party tags on Facebook or Instagram. So you have to use FouAnalytics on-site tags on the landing pages.

Turn off search partners and audience networks

To avoid 90% of the fraud, you can turn off "search partners" and "Facebook Audience Network." If you have already done so, you probably don't even need FouAnalytics on your landing pages. If you don't turn off search partners, most of your paid search ads will end up on parked pages which use bots to click on the paid search links so the parked page makes money on the CPC (cost per click). If you don't have Facebook Audience Network (FAN) turned off, most of your ads will run on crappy sites and mobile apps outside of Facebook, which use fraudulent means to click on the ads so they appear to be working. Note in the pairs of donut charts below the difference in dark red versus dark blue between no audience network (left side of each pair) versus when audience network is not turned off (right side of each pair).

That said, if you add FouAnalytics to your website and landing pages, you can also tell bot or not in your direct traffic and organic traffic. For the most part, this should be relatively low in bots because bots do what they get paid for. They typically won't waste time and resources loading your landing pages if they don't get paid for it. If you have a lot of valuable content, the bots will come to scrape (i.e. steal) your content.

Check retargeting campaigns for bot fraud

If you have retargeting campaigns running, bots will first come to your site to collect cookies, thus making them appear to be "intenders." Many advertisers assume that if a user visited their site before, they must have expressed interest. This is the exact thing that bots take advantage of. By visiting your landing pages first, they make themselves appear to be "intenders" so they can earn higher CPMs from retargeting, when they visit cash out sites and cause your ads to load there. So if you are running retargeting/remarketing campaigns, be sure to have FouAnalytics on-site tags on your sites, so you can check for this form of ad fraud.

Check for phantom traffic / false clicks written into Google Analytics

Finally, by having FouAnalytics on your site next to Google Analytics, you can check to see if adtech vendors are writing false data into your Google Analytics. It is trivial to do this, and adtech vendors write fake clicks and traffic into your Google Analytics to make it appear that the campaigns you buy from them are working splendidly. For example, when you buy CTV campaigns, the remarketing vendor writes fake clicks into your Google Analytics to make it appear that your CTV campaigns are working SO well that one advertiser stupidly took ALL their digital ad budgets and handed it to this vendor. Over the years, we've documented cases where this vendor just took the customers' money and didn't even run the ads. But the campaigns still appeared to be performing well because of all the false clicks they wrote into their customers' Google Analytics. FouAnalytics has security measures to prevent false data from being written into it. So if FouAnalytics did not record or detect the pageview, it didn't happen, even if your Google Analytics appears to show the pageview. This is how advertisers use FouAnalytics to detect if their vendors are ripping them off.

Optimize towards humans, and away from fraud

When you have FouAnalytics on the landing pages, you can also easily see the RELATIVE quality of the clicks arriving from various paid media sources. Dark blue means confirmed humans and dark red means bad bots.

If you compare the three different display sources -- A, B, and C -- you can clearly see the differences in quality. With his high level summary, you can already make optimizations. For example, you would decrease budget to A to optimize away from the dark red, and increase budget to C to optimize towards the dark blue. These simply budget allocation optimizations will allow to your improve the outcomes of your campaigns because you will be showing more ads to humans and fewer ads to bots. That's a good thing, right?

Further, you can see that both paid search sources -- D and E -- are pretty close in quality. So no action is needed. Paid social -- F versus G -- should be very clear what your optimizations can be. And you may consider turning off H entirely.

Advertisers, I hope the above is a useful summary of how to use FouAnalytics on your website/landing pages to see the quality of clicks coming from various paid media sources and make simple optimizations.

Please let me know if you have further questions.