Fb announces another metric crisis...again.
It started a few months ago, and it kept happening, fb keeps having different kind of troubles with its metrics and the way they are measured. Although each and everyone of those problem was repaired at the time, they kept popping up again and again.
It began with videos, in September, when Facebook revealed it had a problem with its video views measure, apparently, the number were overestimated, creating a grear distortion.
The problem there was a mathematical one, the formula that Facebook was using for calculating the views had a mistake, and that mistake cause the distortion, they announce the problem and fix it quickly.
That first time, the announcement was quite shocking for the world of advertisement, a lot of agencies, marketers and brands had been trusting Facebook video metrics for their strategies and suddenly they found out a considerable part of those metrics was not true. I wasnt using videos at that time, but I imagine several of you had some hard time explaining your clients that those 2000 views were actually less.
Facebook was really going all-in with the video niche, and this cause them a mayor setback.
But now it has happened again, Facebook has just announced that it discovered a bug in its pages insights, a bug that was causing troubles since May. Apparently, the 28-day organic page reach, was being miscalculated, insights was counting every visitor twice, creating a huge distortion on the metrics. Although the main problem with this new bug were the fanpage visitors, it also affected another areas, including the videos (again), the instant articles metrics (a huge setback, since this was a new feature), and referrals.
Facebook worked quickly to solve this new bug, and although it seems their credibility was not harmed, they should really take care and avoid future inconvenient like this.
They have this in mind, thats why they are working so hard to improve their metrics systems, specially the ones related to ads, they want to add more credibility and transparency to the system, so marketers can trust their numbers wont suffer any distortion.
They also claim to be working to implement third-party measuring protocols, as another way of increasing their security and credibility, as part of this process, they started working with Nielsen, one of the word leaders in views measurement, we will have to wait and see what cames up of this partnership.
These new changes are actually a good news for us marketers, all the changes that contributes to secure our metrics and make them more exact and accurate will be a great help in our work.
It began with videos, in September, when Facebook revealed it had a problem with its video views measure, apparently, the number were overestimated, creating a grear distortion.
The problem there was a mathematical one, the formula that Facebook was using for calculating the views had a mistake, and that mistake cause the distortion, they announce the problem and fix it quickly.
That first time, the announcement was quite shocking for the world of advertisement, a lot of agencies, marketers and brands had been trusting Facebook video metrics for their strategies and suddenly they found out a considerable part of those metrics was not true. I wasnt using videos at that time, but I imagine several of you had some hard time explaining your clients that those 2000 views were actually less.
Facebook was really going all-in with the video niche, and this cause them a mayor setback.
But now it has happened again, Facebook has just announced that it discovered a bug in its pages insights, a bug that was causing troubles since May. Apparently, the 28-day organic page reach, was being miscalculated, insights was counting every visitor twice, creating a huge distortion on the metrics. Although the main problem with this new bug were the fanpage visitors, it also affected another areas, including the videos (again), the instant articles metrics (a huge setback, since this was a new feature), and referrals.
Facebook worked quickly to solve this new bug, and although it seems their credibility was not harmed, they should really take care and avoid future inconvenient like this.
They have this in mind, thats why they are working so hard to improve their metrics systems, specially the ones related to ads, they want to add more credibility and transparency to the system, so marketers can trust their numbers wont suffer any distortion.
They also claim to be working to implement third-party measuring protocols, as another way of increasing their security and credibility, as part of this process, they started working with Nielsen, one of the word leaders in views measurement, we will have to wait and see what cames up of this partnership.
These new changes are actually a good news for us marketers, all the changes that contributes to secure our metrics and make them more exact and accurate will be a great help in our work.