Facebook Announces More Metrics Fixes

Facebook announced more metrics updates Friday, this time affecting estimated reach, Reactions counts on posts and a discrepancy involving its like and share buttons. The social network said it is changing the methodology it uses to calculate the estimated reach of their ad campaigns, and advertisers should see changes of less than 10 percent either way in the audience sizes generated by the tool, adding in a Facebook for Business post: To help advertisers get a better view of the number of people they can expect to reach with ads, this week we are updating how we calculate the numbers that appear in our estimated reach tool--found when creating an ad. When an advertiser begins creating a campaign, the tool provides them with an estimate of both the potential overall reach and the estimated daily reach of their ad campaign. Note that this tool does not reflect reach for campaigns that have already run, nor does it affect any other reach metrics. We’re improving our methodology for sampling and extrapolating potential audience sizes. This will help to provide a more accurate estimate for a given target audience and to better account for audiences across multiple platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network). Facebook also said it had only been counting one Reaction per user on Facebook Live videos, rather than multiple Reactions those users may have added while streaming those videos, adding in the Facebook for Business post: We misallocated the extra Reactions per user that happened during the live broadcast to the “Reactions From Shares of Post” section, instead of counting them in the “Reactions on Post” section, so we’re making a change to correct it. Note that total counts were and are correct; some of them were just captured in the wrong reporting column when broken out. The fix for this issue will apply to newly created Live videos, starting mid-December. It will increase Reactions on Post by 500 percent on average and will decrease them on Reactions From Shares of Post by 25 percent on average (actual impact to specific videos may vary). Finally, the social network discovered a discrepancy between the counts for its like and share buttons via its Graph API and when URLs are entered into the search bar in its flagship mobile application, adding: To clarify, our like and share button metrics pull: The number of likes of a URL off Facebook. The number of shares of a URL off Facebook (this includes copy/pasting a link back to Facebook). The number of likes and comments on stories on Facebook about a URL. We have found that there may be a difference between what these metrics count and what the mobile search query counts. We are looking into why inputting the URL as a search query in Facebook’s mobile app might have corresponding numbers that can be higher or lower in certain cases. We are working to resolve this issue so that the like and share button metrics and our mobile search query metrics match up, and we will notify partners as soon as we have an update. Facebook also stressed that none of the metrics addressed in Friday’s updates are billable. Readers: What are your thoughts on Facebook’s latest metrics-related announcements?

Social Pro Daily

Facebook Announces More Metrics Fixes

Facebook announced more metrics updates Friday, this time affecting estimated reach, Reactions counts on posts and a discrepancy involving its like and share buttons.

David Cohen

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David Cohen