Facebook Says It Found More Mistakes In Metrics Reported To Advertisers
Facebook Says It Found More Mistakes In Metrics Reported To Advertisers
Consumerist
Mary Beth Quirk
So, remember that whole thing about Facebook mistakenly telling advertisers for two years that users were watching videos much longer than they actually were? It turns out that wasn’t the only advertising metric the social media company got wrong.
Facebook announced an update today regarding its reporting of metrics to partners and advertisers, saying that after a thorough review, conducted in the months since it first admitted overstating how long folks were watching videos on the site, it had found four other situations where it miscalculated reach.
For example, it overstated how long people spent reading Instant Articles, noting that the average time spent per article had been over-reported by 7-8% on average since August of last year.
“This was caused by a calculation error: 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,” Facebook says, adding that the issue has been fixed.