Facebook's ad metrics has revealed the full extent of the problems its been having with its internal ad metrics, and also laid out plans on how to fix them.
Recently, the social media website revealed that it had overestimated the average viewing time for its video advertisements for a number of years. Now, the company has admitted it also miscalculated over metrics that reveal how marketers regular ads have been performing.
Facebook penned a blog post about its ad metric problems, saying that it intends to fix the issue later this month so it can correct the tallies from video posts and their ‘shares’. In addition, Facebook says it’s working on a fix between discrepancies of “like” and “share” button counts that are calculated by its Graph API. Lastly, Facebook admitted that the totals generated by entering a URL directly into a search bar in the Facebook mobile app may also be inaccurate.
In its blog post, Facebook also said it plans to revamp the methodology it uses to estimate each advertising campaign’s reach. Once all of the updates and fixes have been applied, Facebook says ad-reach estimates should increase or decrease by no more than 10 percent.
"We are working to resolve this issue so that the like and share button metrics and our mobile search query metrics match up, and we will notify partners as soon as we have an update," Facebook wrote in its blog post.
Facebook’s inaccurate ad metric reporting came under scrutiny earlier this year after the company revealed an inflated number of average video ad view time metrics for the last two years. Facebook issued an apology for the errors, but also promised that the metric didn’t affect how it bills advertisers. Then, in November, Facebook admitted that four additional metrics were also being miscalculated - the number of full video views, time spent on Instant Articles and the monthly and weekly reach of marketers’ posts.
Facebook has now created a new page on its site devoted to letting advertisers and marketers know what’s happening with its new ad metric updates.