TLDR: Imagine: You work in a commercial enterprise that no one, in fact no one, can independently control. If your measurement systems produced error after error, for whatever reason, which error would be your favorite? 80%, or 33%, 20%, 35%, 8%, 30%... always in your own favor? Here is an error list from the colleagues of Marketing country. If you already control your online media data in your own systems, you don't have to deal with it. To all the others, we wish you success in the shell game - with these and other online KPIs.
1st error: Average watch time of Facebook page videos
Effect:
Average viewing time of Facebbok videos 60 to 80% too high.
Reported:
September 2016, revealed by The Wall Street Journal and addressed by Facebook the next day.
Error:
Facebook calculated the average time people spent watching a video by dividing the cumulative time spent watching it by the number of views. But it only counted views that lasted at least three seconds, which set an artificial minimum for the measurement.
Correction:
is done.
Error 2: Organic reach of Facebook Page posts: Part 1
Effect:
Average organic reach of all Facebbok content too high by 33 to 55% (Source: Facebbok).
Reported:
November 2016.
Error:
When gauging the total number of people who saw at least one of a Page's posts organically over a seven-day or 28-day period, Facebook did not de-duplicate that audience when reporting a Page's organic reach in its Page Insights dashboard. In other words, if someone saw a Page's post on Monday, and then another post from that Page on Tuesday, Facebook counted that person as two people.
Correction:
erfolgt.
Error 3: Organic reach of Facebook Page posts: Part 2
Effect:
Average organic reach of all Facebbok content too high by another 20%.
Reported:
November 2016.
Error:
When measuring Page posts' organic reach, Facebook didn't consider whether those organic posts actually appeared on someone's screen.
Correction:
Announced by Facebook
4. facebook video ad completion rate
Effect:
Average number of "Video Completes" ("100% Views" = view of last video seconds, even after skipping) too low by about 35%.
Reported:
November 2016.
Error:
Sometimes Facebook streams a video ad for "a fraction of a second" longer or shorter than the video's actual length because the video's visual and audio don't line up, leading it to mis-time when the end of a video has been watched.
Correction:
is done - in whose interest?
5. average time spent on Facebook Instant Articles
Effect:
Average viewing time of Instant Articles too high by about 8%.
Reported:
November 2016.
Error:
Facebook was supposed to calculate the amount of time people spent reading an Instant Article by dividing the total time an Instant Article's entire audience spent reading by the total number of times the Instant Article was opened. But it didn't. Instead it took an average from a histogram it made plotting time spent.
Correction:
[email protected]
6. referral traffic from Facebook to websites & mobile apps
Effect:
Link clicks (referrals) from Facebook to mobile apps and websites 30% too high.
Reported:
November 2016.
Error:
The "referrals" metric in Facebook's Analytics for Apps - an analytics tool Facebook offers for third-party mobile apps and websites - was supposed to report how many times people clicked on a Facebook post to open a business's mobile app or visit its website. It was supposed to report only that number. But it didn't. Given that those posts linking to a business's mobile app or site could also include a Facebook-native photo or video, Facebook incorrectly counted clicks on those photos or videos as referral clicks, even though these clicks didn't send anyone to the business's app or site but only enlarged the photo or video.
Correction:
Announced
7th Error: Like, Share and Comment Counts for Off-Facebook Links
Effect:
FB internal measurement differences not quantifiable.
Reported:
Discovered & confirmed December 2016.
Error:
Facebook's Graph API can report the total number of engagements (shares, likes and comments) a link received on or off Facebook, including when people paste the link into a Facebook status update and when they click the Facebook like button embedded on the link's actual web page. Facebook's mobile search results can report a subset of the Graph API total, specifically the number of shares and comments on Facebook. But sometimes the mobile search number is larger than the Graph API number, which should never be the case.
correction:
no
8. reaction breakdowns of facebook page live videos
Effect:
"Reactions on post" 500% too low, "Reactions on post" 25% too high.
Reported:
December 2016.
Error:
Facebook's Page Insights dashboard breaks down the number of "reactions" a Page's Live video generated by whether the reactions happened while people were watching the live stream - "reactions on post" - or whether they were received on others' posts that included the Live video - "reaction on shares" - such as when someone shared, or Facebook-retweeted, a Page's Live video post to their friends and those friends clicked the like/reaction button on the friend's post after the live stream had already ended.
The "reactions on post" number was supposed to measure only one reaction per individual live viewer, and it did. But people may react multiple times to a live video, such as by clicking "haha" each time the stream makes them laugh. Facebook incorrectly included those extra reactions to the "reactions on shares" figure, even though they weren't reactions on shared posts.
Correction:
[email protected]
9 Errors. Video Carousel Ad Link Clicks
Effect:
Erroneous calculation of posted clicks to 0.04% of all impressions.
Reported:
May 2017
Error:
For a year, Facebook mixed-charged some advertisers for clicks on video carousel ads. Facebook was only supposed to bill these advertisers when people clicked on a link to the advertiser's site, but it mistakenly also charged them when smartphone users on Facebook's mobile site clicked to play the video at full screen.
Correction:
[email protected]