> The first is that the traffic coming in had JavaScript disabled. If this was the case then the JavaScript analytics software would not detect the incoming traffic and therefore would not be able to log the result at all.<p>Did you read their post? To quote:<p>> Here's what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn't have JavaScript, it's very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What's important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a <i>page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it</i>.<p>Emphasis added.
I was hoping the article would be a little more informative and definitive according to the title. It is based on assumptions itself with a little theory behind it.<p>As for the statement - "The first is that the traffic coming in had JavaScript disabled. If this was the case then the JavaScript analytics software would not detect the incoming traffic and therefore would not be able to log the result at all." You can track incoming requests outside of javascript through the server. That is possibly what they had wrote.
Here's another possibility that popped into my head while reading this article. What about browser prefetches? Is it possible that a browser, say Chrome, is prefetching linked pages and that prefetching is being detected by Facebook as an ad click?<p>I'll admit I know little to nothing about how prefetching works.
All the Facebook campaigns I have run use url parameter tagging to track clicks (i.e. for Google Analytics append &utm_source=facebook...) to the url.<p>I think this is fairly standard practice so it seems unlikely to me that they'd have to use the referrer exclusively
Umm... the facebook post already stated that javascript analytics could only verify 20% of the traffic. They also explained that they wrote their own analytics sans javascript to verify that javascript was disabled.<p>How did he miss that? Self-inflicted black-eye for simplereach.com