Facebook admits to misreported marketing stats
10 Dec 2016
Facebook has admitted to inaccuracies in its marketing stats that companies looked to gauge the effectiveness of their efforts, in a blog post yesterday. The slip up comes as the third instance since September that the digital giant had revealed misleading brands.
The company had been miscalculating the number of likes and shares it showed for web links via its API, or application programming interface. It had also been misrepresenting the number of likes and reaction emojis marketers saw for their live videos.
Facebook detailed how it had slipped up, "In page insights in the column for "Reactions on Post," however, we show only one reaction per unique user. We misallocated the extra reactions per user that happened during the live broadcast to the "Reactions from Shares of Post" section, instead of counting them in the "Reactions on Post" section, so we're making a change to correct it.
"Note that total counts were and are correct; some of them were just captured in the wrong reporting column when broken out. The fix for this issue will apply to newly created Live videos, starting mid-December. It will increase "Reactions on Post" by 500 percent on average and will decrease them on "Reactions from Shares of Post" by 25 percent on average (actual impact to specific videos may vary).
According to commentators this was enough to raise doubts with the staunchest Facebook marketers.
However, the latest issues were not of the same level as the social network's problems like conceding that its video view metrics had been inflated or admitting to misreporting stats for Instant Articles.
The blog post also included an update to Facebook's ad-creation system, as it would now be able to estimate the potential reach of a campaign more accurately. According to Facebook, it had enhanced its accuracy for sampling and projecting the estimated number of consumers an appeal would reach.
