Facebook Confesses to More Reporting Miscalculations
- Wednesday, November 16th, 2016
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Following a report in September that Facebook had been misreporting its video view time metric, the social network has acknowledged another series of issues with its ad metrics.
Perhaps the most notable of these is a basic calculation error in reporting average time spent reading Instant Articles, which has caused the metric to be over-reported by an average of seven to eight per cent since last August.
An issue with the Facebook Analytics for Apps dashboards Referrals metric has also been uncovered. While this metric was meant to count clicks that led directly to an app or website, Facebook failed to exclude other clicks, meaning referrals were overstated by approximately six per cent. However, Facebook is careful to point out that this same error does not apply to referral metrics in other areas, including its ad reporting tools.
Since May this year, Facebook has also been miscalculating the organic reach of Pages over multiple-day periods, by failing to deduplicate repeat visitors – though, again, the bug does not affect paid reach metrics. Facebook is rolling out a fix in the next few weeks, which it anticipates will cause pages counts to drop on average 33 per cent for the seven-day summary and 55 per cent for the 28-day.
Finally, an issue with the video watches at 100 per cent metric was discovered by third-party verification partner Moat. An occasional problem with the audio track failing to line up with video can mean that some completely-viewed videos are not registered as such. This actually results in the metric being reported lower than it is, and after fixing Facebook expects a boost of around 35 per cent.
These bugs were announced alongside as Facebook announces an overhaul of its metrics and reporting offering, extending beyond fixes to a whole host of other changes. These include the ability to verify display impression data through third-party viewability verification partners; a partnership with Nielsen to include Facebook video and Facebook Live viewership in Nielsens Digital Content Ratings; the formation of a Measurement Council; a new internal review process to ensure metrics are clear and up to date; and improvements to how metrics are described and calculated across the board.