Facebook Reveals More Ad Metric Snafus

Another day, another mea culpa from Facebook regarding ad-metric inaccuracies, and what it considers to be "improvements. “The latest update involves the social giant’s estimated reach methodology, a tool in the ad creation flow that shows advertisers the number of users they can expect to reach with potential ad campaigns. “We’re now using a methodology less reliant on sampling/extrapolating our audience sizes, which in most cases should show advertisers a less than 10% change (increase or decrease) in the audience sizes shown in the tool,” a Facebook spokeswoman explained on Friday. Additionally, “We misallocated the extra reactions per user that happened during the live broadcast to the ‘Reactions from Shares of Post’ section,” the spokeswoman said. Mistakenly, Facebook had been counting them in the “Reactions on Post” section. Finally, Facebook has identified a discrepancy between the counts for the Like and Share buttons via its Graph API, and the counts when a URL is entered into the search bar in its mobile app.
“We're in the process of resolving this issue so that the Like and Share button metrics and our mobile search tool metrics match up,” she said.