Should advertisers pressure Facebook to be audited?

If you buy clicks, views or other engagements on Facebook, you’ve probably been paying close attention to recent disclosures about the network’s discovery of analytics “bugs.” The first such disclosure occurred in September, when Facebook admitted overestimating video views for the prior 24 months by up to 80 percent. While Facebook was quick to note that the error “did not impact billing,” the result was an embarrassment, plus at least one lawsuit alleging that the error caused the plaintiff to overspend on paid ads “on the belief that the advertisements were more successful than they actually were.” Just last month, Facebook divulged another ugly crop of metrics errors, this time affecting organic metrics — including reach, time spent and follower counts, all of which had been overstated. In its blog post, Facebook asked advertisers to “please note that we do not bill clients on the potential under-reporting/over-reporting metric issues mentioned below.”