How to Stop Bots from Wasting Your Ad Spend on Facebook

Bots on Facebook and Instagram? Feels like old news, doesn’t it?

Everyone’s pretty much aware that a large portion of social media accounts are fake or automated by now.

In fact, it’s estimated that 95 million Instagram accounts and 270 million Facebook accounts are either bots or fake profiles. Despite the widespread impact of fake news, disinformation, and troll accounts, we’ve almost learned to live with it. It’s easy to ignore—until it’s your money at stake.

For digital marketers, the presence of bots on Facebook hits where it hurts most: the wallet. And with the amount of cash involved, it’s not a problem you can just brush off.

Let’s break down what these Facebook bots and dodgy audiences look like and what they’re doing to mess with your ads.

Types of Audiences & Bots on Facebook

When we talk about “bad audiences,” we’re referring to any social media account with little to no chance of converting. These accounts either serve another purpose or aren't even human. Here’s what we’re up against:

Bot Accounts

It’s surprisingly easy for even an amateur coder to create a bot account on Facebook or Instagram. These bots are then used for all sorts of tasks, from spreading fake news to artificially boosting engagement on certain profiles.

One wild story I’ve come across involves a vending machine in Moscow selling Instagram followers and clicks for just a few bucks. While researching click farms, I even spoke to a couple of people who showed me their Instagram bots in action. It’s that simple.

Duplicate Accounts

Not all duplicate accounts are bots. People might have multiple profiles for reasons ranging from managing a business to stalking an ex.

While not necessarily fraudulent, these accounts have a lower chance of converting because they serve specific purposes unrelated to genuine engagement.

Zombie or Compromised Accounts

Zombie profiles come from accounts that are either abandoned or belong to people who’ve passed away. Social platforms try to clean these up, but many stick around.

Sometimes, these accounts get hacked or compromised by bots, turning them into part of the problem.

Cyborg Accounts

Then, there are cyborg accounts—fake profiles designed to amplify or spread disinformation. Russian troll factories are infamous for this, but it happens everywhere. These accounts use a mix of bots and humans: bots post, share, and inflate numbers, while humans interact with real users to make the accounts seem legit.

This often results in extra ad impressions—unfortunately, not from anyone you want to reach.

Malware Clicks

Facebook’s Audience Network is a popular advertising tool that places ads on third-party apps. The problem? Not all those clicks are genuine.

Take DrainerBot, for example. This malware could view video and banner ads even when the infected app wasn’t in use, generating fraudulent clicks.

Malware like this hijacks genuine user activity, rerouting clicks to ads—often without the user’s knowledge, a practice known as clickjacking.

Data Center Traffic

Data center traffic can come from legitimate web scraping tools, like those used by Ahrefs or Google. However, not all scrapers are harmless. Some inadvertently generate impressions on Facebook ads.

Then you’ve got fraudulent botnets like 3ve and Methbot, which used data center traffic to hide the bots’ true locations, making it harder to detect their activity.

What’s an Ad Impression Really Worth?

If you’re running ads on Facebook, you care about impressions. The question is, how many of those impressions are real?

Facebook itself deleted 2.2 billion fake accounts between January and March 2019, double the amount from the previous year. Yet, the problem persists across both Facebook and Instagram.

How Bots Are Wrecking Your Ads

No matter how much you spend on Facebook Ads, there’s a high chance some of your traffic comes from bad audiences. This not only wastes money but also messes with your campaign in other ways:

Skewed Analytics

If bot traffic isn’t filtered out, your analytics take a hit. Many businesses focus on KPIs like traffic and engagement. When the numbers look good, it’s easy to throw more cash at the platform.

But when you’re aware of bots on your Facebook Ads, you get a clearer picture of your performance and can adjust your targeting to exclude bad audiences.

Bad Retargeting

It’s bad enough targeting fake accounts once, but retargeting them? That’s a money pit. You’re essentially paying multiple times for useless impressions and clicks.

Fake Leads

Bots are getting better at imitating real user behaviour, including filling out forms or generating downloads. These fake leads not only mess up your analytics but can also lead to wasted retargeting and even direct sales inquiries.

Cart Abandonment

E-commerce sites suffer from high cart abandonment due to bots. This distorts your inventory and reduces your ROI on ads.

Carding

This scam involves bots using stolen card details to attempt purchases. Beyond skewing your metrics, carding leads to fraudulent sales, disputes, and legal trouble for sellers.

How to Block Facebook Bots & Bad Audiences

More and more marketers are waking up to the impact of bots on their Facebook Ads. Filtering and managing invalid traffic has become crucial—especially for platforms like Google Ads.

But Facebook Ads aren’t immune, either!

If you want to take back control of your ad spend, you need to start using fraud prevention software. Solutions like Tapper not only block bots but also offer insights into how your ads are interacted with. You can see which factors trigger fraudulent clicks and where they’re coming from.

As the top-tier click fraud prevention tool, Tapper is trusted by marketers and major global brands. With its ever-growing blocklist and best-in-class fraud filters, Tapper makes blocking invalid traffic a breeze.