Fake Orders From Audience Network — The Real Cause and the Fix
If the ratio of fake or wrong-number phone entries in your orders looks unusually high, check your ad placements first. This shows up most in COD stores, since a fake COD order costs you a wasted delivery attempt — a prepaid order with a bad number at least gets caught at payment. This is a pattern we’ve seen consistently across multiple ad accounts.
What’s Actually Happening
By default, Facebook Ads automatically includes Audience Network — third-party apps and websites where Facebook shows ads, outside of Facebook and Instagram itself. On these placements:
- Click quality is significantly lower
- Accidental clicks (like an app tap that happens by mistake) are common
- People filling out order forms often have no genuine intent
Result: an order comes in, but when you check the number, it’s wrong or fake.
The Fix: Set Placements Manually
When building your ad set, instead of using “Advantage+ Placements” (automatic), select manual placements and keep only:
Within both, select specific positions (Feed, Stories, Reels) — but completely uncheck or omit Audience Network.
What About Existing Campaigns?
If a campaign is already running with Audience Network included:
- Edit the ad set and remove Audience Network from placement settings
- After saving, give it 7–10 days of patience — the pixel needs time to re-learn
- CPR may be a bit unstable during this period — that’s normal
How to Actually Confirm It’s Audience Network, Not Guess
Before assuming placement is the cause, verify it directly in Ads Manager: open the campaign’s results, add a Breakdown by Delivery > Placement, and compare order volume and cost per result across Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network separately. If Audience Network is showing meaningfully more orders at a lower CPR than Facebook or Instagram, that gap itself is the tell — a placement generating “cheap” results that turn out to be fake orders looks like great performance right up until someone actually calls the customer. This five-minute check is worth doing before touching anything, since it turns “we think it’s Audience Network” into “we confirmed it.”
Why Audience Network Specifically Causes This
Audience Network shows ads inside third-party mobile apps and websites, often as interstitial or rewarded-video formats — the kind of ad someone sees between levels of a game, sometimes with a countdown before they’re allowed to close it. A real share of the resulting clicks aren’t purchase intent at all: a mistimed tap trying to close the ad, or in some cases actual incentivized traffic where an app rewards users (in-game currency, extra lives) for interacting with ads regardless of what’s being advertised. Neither of those describes someone who actually wants your product, which is exactly why the order form gets filled with a fake or mistyped number — there was never real intent behind the click in the first place.
If You’ve Already Excluded It and Still Get Fake Orders
Audience Network is the single biggest lever, not the only one. If fake orders continue after excluding it:
- Check for a giveaway or contest angle in the ad itself — creative promising something free or heavily discounted attracts low-intent clicks regardless of placement
- Look at Lookalike audience quality — a lookalike built from a thin or low-quality source list (covered in our lookalike audience guide) can resemble the wrong kind of person even with clean placements
- Consider a confirmation step at checkout, the same verification-call approach covered in our return rate guide — placement fixes reduce the volume of fake orders, but a manual confirmation step catches whatever gets through regardless of cause
Retargeting vs. Prospecting: Does the Rule Change?
For cold prospecting campaigns, excluding Audience Network entirely is close to a default best practice given the click-quality issues above. For retargeting campaigns showing ads to people who already visited the site or engaged with a product, Audience Network’s risk profile is somewhat lower — the audience already has some demonstrated interest, so accidental-click noise matters less proportionally. Even so, most stores get cleaner data keeping retargeting on Facebook and Instagram only too, unless a specific test shows otherwise for a particular account.
Is This a Guarantee?
No — fake orders aren’t caused by placement alone, but excluding Audience Network is the biggest and easiest fix we’ve tested. Combined with the placement breakdown check above and a confirmation-call step at checkout, most stores see a real, measurable drop in fake and wrong-number orders within the first couple of weeks. We’ll cover other fraud signals (like device ID and IP tracking) in a future article.
Setting a Realistic Expectation for the Fix
Don’t expect fake orders to drop to zero immediately after making this change — some existing campaigns still have residual Audience Network impressions delivering for a few days even after the setting is updated, and any campaign launched fresh afterward needs its own learning period regardless of placement settings. Track the fake-order rate weekly rather than daily for the first month after the fix, since day-to-day noise in a small sample size can look like the fix didn’t work when it actually did — a weekly view smooths that out and shows the real trend more clearly.