Facebook Discloses New Measurement Errors, Continues To Hone Its Math (marketingland.com)

An anonymous reader shares an article on MarketingLand: For the third time since September, Facebook is disclosing new measurement errors. The two new errors affected the reaction counts Facebook reports on Pages' Live videos, as well as the engagement figures Facebook reports for off-Facebook links; the latter link engagement metrics were recently used in investigations by BuzzFeed and The New York Times into fake news articles' performance on Facebook. In addition to acknowledging the two new errors -- of which one has been corrected and one is still being inspected -- Facebook has refined a measurement marketers may reference when buying ads through the social network. None of the aforementioned metrics had any impact on how much money Facebook charges advertisers for their campaigns. But they may have informed brands' Facebook ad-buying strategies as well as brands', publishers' and others' Facebook-related content-publishing strategies.

Comments

Imaginary benefits of social media advertising

[sinij]

It doesn't really matter how Facebook measures engagement and so on, much bigger problem is complete lack of results of all social media advertising. This is not 1-2% response ineffective, this is 10^-20 ineffective. It is quite likely that the entire Facebook advertising haven't sold a single thing today.

Re:Imaginary benefits of social media advertising

[fpophoto]

The local garage sale groups in my area do pretty well though. It's probably the only regular use I get out of Facebook these days.

Re:Really

[Pseudonymous Powers]

Last sentence makes no sense. They have informed of what?

When they say "they informed... ad-buying strategies", they're saying that the erroneous metrics were used by companies to make strategic decisions, which may now turn out to be invalid.