Numbers can be difficult to work with, especially when they are many of them. The sames goes to Facebook. The social giant admitted that it screwed up its ads metrics, and for that it needs help in auditing them.
Several Facebook representatives that include Carolyn Everson, the company's VP of global marketing solutions, visited the board of the Association of National Advertisers on February 9th, 2017 to "deliver a presentation."
On its blog post, the company explained that it is committing an independent auditor by the Media Rating Council in order to "verify the accuracy of the information we deliver to our partners." The company had problems in delivering some key metrics to its advertisers, after many have sought explanation about posts' reactions, search numbers, reach count and others.
In 2016, Facebook admitted that it has overestimated a number of key metrics, like for example, the Average Duration of Video Viewed by 60 to 80 percent in over two years period. Months later, it also admitted that it was also not accurate in reporting some engagement metrics.
It also under-reported traffic figures to analytics company comScore. This has caused the overall numbers for the ad publishers to diminish.
While the metrics don't necessarily cost advertisers that were billed by Facebook, but it certainly made them confused about what kind of engagement they were really buying. They've decided to ask for more data and better transparency, something that Facebook isn't good at providing.
For free services like Facebook as well as many others, advertisements play a key role in making revenues. For Facebook, ads accounted to more than 97 percent of the company's revenue.
For anyone that is willing to advertise on a platform, it's necessarily important to know certain metrics to understand how ads are performing the platform. This way, advertisers can compare results to other advertising strategies they may have to see how things work out.
As for Facebook, with many ad-dollars spent on the platform, advertisers want to trust Facebook. But with flawed metrics, it would be difficult for them to really know what they're paying and getting in return.
Facebook had all of its statistics calculated by its own, without outside and independent verification. With its move to make itself audited by others for the first time, Facebook could make itself more confident in the future regarding its ads' performance.
Facebook has also laid out its plans to give more detailed information regarding ads on both Facebook and Instagram, including metrics of time an ad is shown on screen in milliseconds, and also announcing new options for buying video ads. Advertisers can opt to purchase sound-on ads, or pay only for ads watched to completion.