Facebook’s revelation that it had miscalculated several metrics upset and perplexed marketers and PR professionals who measure social media.
Perhaps more important for the long-term, Facebook said it is exploring additional third-party reviews to validate its reporting. It is partnering with Nielsen to include Facebook video and Facebook Live viewership in Nielsen’s Digital Content Ratings (DCR) and it is now working with its Client Council members and other business and measurement executives to form a Measurement Council.
Measurement Bugs Uncovered
Facebook revealed that it had “uncovered a bug” in its Page Insights that overstated organic reach since May. Its report showed seven-day or 28-day organic page reach as a simple sum of daily reach, counting repeat visitors more than once.
The corrected, or “de-duplicated,” seven-day summary will be 33 percent lower on average and the 28-day summary will be 55% lower on average. The company will fix the error within the next few weeks, and it does not impact paid advertising. Data in other fields are unaffected.
Facebook will change how it calculates video completion rates, or video watches at 100%, which may increase that metric 35 percent. Determining precisely when viewers finished watching videos is difficult to determine due to mismatch in audio and video syncing across different operating systems and devices.
It has over-reported average time spent on Instant Articles by 7 to 8 percent since August 2015. “We were calculating the average across a histogram of time spent, instead of reflecting the total time spent reading an article divided by its total views,” the company stated, noting it fixed the error.
Facebook also miscalculated the referrals metric in its Analytics for Apps dashboard, overstating the number by about 6% on average. The metric should reflect the number of clicks to an app or website. Instead it was showing a count of all clicks on the content in the posts, including clicks that open photo or video content on Facebook. It is still working on the issue.
A Question of Trust
“A handful of miscalculations can go a long way to eroding trust and may have implications for trust in the broader digital advertising ecosystem,” comments Ginny Marvin at Marketing Land. It’s more likely, however, that admitting mistakes, correcting them and increasing transparency will create more confidence in Facebook’s measurement over the long run.
“Facebook is taking steps to make its wide array of metrics more clear to advertisers,” Debra Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer, told Marketing Land. “It is changing the names and descriptions of some metrics, to better fit the way things have evolved on Facebook. That will definitely help marketers make better decisions and hopefully drive more ad spending on the platform.”
In September, Facebook admitted that it substantially overestimated the average time users spent watching videos.
The reporting errors may have some effect on social media measurement for PR since many of the measurement services utilize the reported Facebook data for reach, views and average time spent. The Facebook fixes will cause reductions in reported viewership with a noticeable drop sometime in coming months followed by lower reported numbers each month. On the whole, however, the growing number of Facebook users worldwide and their increased usage of Facebook should result in up trending numbers in the months after Facebook implements the fixes.
Although marketers may be troubled, as well as confused, by the miscalculations, they should remain calm, according to HubSpot. “Most of the metrics in question are what we’d call vanity metrics,” said Daria Marmer, HubSpot’s social product manager. “Views and impressions are important, but don’t have a huge impact on your business at the end of the day. We really encourage marketers to tie their social efforts to more concrete metrics, such as website visits, downloads, new leads.”
Bottom Line: News that Facebook miscalculated several metrics probably raised concerns among marketers. However, the company’s forthcoming statements and efforts to resolve the issues likely calmed fears. Its plans to increase transparency may help increase confidence in its measurement practices over the long term.
Michael Kling is manager of public relations, marketing and social media at Glean.info, a media monitoring and measurement service that provides customized media monitoring and PR analytics solutions.
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