Following up on my previous post about bit.ly not checking for click-fraud and as i’ve recieved some comment about the “proof-less” post, here is a screenshot i took this morning. It’s clear (and i hope you’ll trust me on this one!) that it’s impossible that this single link recieved more than five-thousend-and-nine-hundred clicks.
In fact those 5919 clicks were all generated by a simple perl-script that i wrote and run locally from my own laptop. it doesn’t even handle cookies (so those 5919 clicks are all from the same cookie, all from the same IP address – at least within the same user-session – and all from the same user-agent). It would very easy to identify this clicks as fraudolent ones… but they don’t bother.
All i’m saing here: they don’t check for click-fraud practices, so in case you are planning to run advertising on social media and would like to measure campaign effectiveness with the url shorteners stats, keep in mind those data won’t be 100% froud-proof.