Facebook takes a proactive approach to protect you from invalid clicks, and we are constantly improving our systems to identify invalid activity. With over 800 million users interacting with the site every month, we have a lot of data to analyze and help us identify invalid activity quickly. By combining this ongoing analysis with your ad’s click history and your targeting criteria, we are able to implement solutions quickly to ensure that you continue to have a reliable advertising experience on Facebook.

Our goal is to send relevant, genuine traffic to your site. Although we cannot guarantee that our systems will be absolutely precise, we try, for example, to detect and invalidate the following:

• Human clicks that don’t indicate a genuine interest in the ad or may be associated with ad testing, like repetitive or accidental clicks, or visits from the Facebook corporate network.
• Clicks generated through prohibited means, such as bots, scrapers, browser add-ons or other non-human methods.

We’re constantly working to refine our filters and continue to identify and invalidate duplicitous actions.

We use a variety of prevention and detection methods to try to identify suspicious or potentially invalid click activity on your ads. To reduce the risk of abuse and improve your ads’ performance, we use tactics such as capping the number of times any ad is shown to a user, regardless of whether a user clicks on the ad. We also try to detect and invalidate clicks that appear to be automated, repetitive, accidental, or otherwise abusive. Our methods involve looking at numerous data points for each click as well as traffic patterns across the site.

For specific instances of suspicious or potentially invalid click activity, if we detect or are alerted to the activity, our team will perform a manual review to determine the nature of the activity. You will not be charged for clicks that we determine to be invalid.

We do not disclose the specific methods and thresholds used to analyze user and click activity to protect the integrity of our filters and analysis and to limit abusive activity on the site.

Facebook Ads reports clicks. Many third-party reporting tools count page visits or views, which may not correspond directly to clicks. Additionally, your third-party reporting tool may not count certain clicks because the tool requires that the user’s browser have cookies, Javascript, and/or images enabled in order to record statistics. Your third-party tools may also count clicks that we have already identified and filtered out of your reports and charges. Please remember that statistics measured at daily intervals may be based on different time zones, resulting in different daily totals.

If your ad links directly to the site you're advertising, and you're trying to track clicks on that ad by looking at page visits with facebook.com as the source, it's likely that your statistics will be different from the reports we provide to you. In general, analyzing your Facebook ad campaigns by looking at referrer URLs does not provide the most accurate picture, and we encourage you to implement a different solution.

There are a variety of ways to make your website analytics more accurate than relying on referrer URLs. You can link your Facebook Ads to unique URLs that are only used for your Facebook Ads campaigns, or add an extra, identifying parameter to your URL. Please note that we aren’t able to provide any support or verification for any third-party tracking implementation or data collected, so we recommend you contact your third-party tracking provider for more information.

If you believe you’ve received potentially invalid clicks in the last two months, please fill out this contact form to request an investigation. If we determine that you were in fact charged for invalid clicks that we did not previously identify, we will credit your account accordingly.

When you contact us, please provide as many details as possible about the suspected activity, including raw server logs documenting the traffic to your site during the time period in question, so that we can compare our logs to the server logs and analyze any potential discrepancies. We cannot accept third-party aggregations or reports for this purpose because they don’t contain the level of detail needed for investigation.

A short impression applies to ads that are served on pages that are quickly viewed or reloaded. We will not count short impressions in your reports.

No. You will not be charged for short impressions.

We recommend that you visit the Success Stories and Best Practices section of the Facebook Help Center. This will particularly help you if you’re concerned with the amount of time visitors are spending on your site, or the number of conversions you’re receiving.