TL;DR — Q: Does Twitter Ads Team have a bot that crawls tweets and clicks bitly links?
I’m not a Twitter API developer (yet). I’m just an end-user. I got about 20-ish tweets so far. All sent manually via the web. Each of those has a bitly-fied link.
For marketing analytics reasons, I’m in the habit of checking my bitly link click counts diligently. Before I tweeted my most recent tweet (manually, on the web), roughly 15 or so out of the aforementioned 20-ish bitly links had zero clicks. The rest had varying numbers of clicks from the recent past.
The next day morning after my most recent tweet, when I rechecked my bitly links, each of the 20-ish or so bitly links each now had between 18-20 more clicks than they had when I’d just checked them the night before!
None of the “Referrers” for the new overnight clicks are from Twitter. All of the “Referrers” are from “Unknown”. The thing is, these links are published nowhere else but in my Twitter tweets.
Also, they all have the exact same “Location” (“United States”).
This looks suspicious to me. It is difficult for me to imagine that one person took the time to visit all of my 20 or more tweets and clicked on every single bitly link therein — in one sitting.
It might or might not be related. But my last, most recent tweet acquired 100 or so impressions overnight (roughly 8 hours). With 1 “Like”, 1 “Retweet”, 1 “Media engagement” and 1 “Link click”
Also, a few days ago I had an online chat with the Twitter Ads team asking them how I can start an ad campaign. I didn’t hear from them for days after that initial chat. After I noticed the anamolous increase in link clicks, I checked my email to see if there were any clues in my Inbox.
Coincidentally, the Twitter Ads Team had finally replied with next steps for kicking off my ad campaign.
So here are my questions:
- Does this sound like something some kind of programatic “bot” would do?
- What might be the ultimate purpose for such a bot?
- Is sending a bot out to click bitly links, something that the Twitter Ads Team does to verify an account prior to starting an ad campaign?
Thanks in advance for answering.
