From introduction of “Reactions” to Facebook Live feature, Facebook has come up with so many updates this year. But the miscalculated metrics have really fluffed up the marketers trust.
Back in September when Facebook disclosed about the number of measurement errors, the news has definitely cause terror among the marketers. It has affected the trust of advertising agencies across the world, which they earlier had in the social networks. Let’s check out what all the experts have to say about this!
For the marketers, it is obvious to feel disappointed about Facebook’s lack of transparency. Last month, when the company announced that it had been overstating the organic reach of the Page posts, several marketers who were running different campaigns to make people more aware of their brands were found in fear.
The early game…
A number of digital marketing agencies have been using the social platform to run campaigns to outreach their target audience. One of the reasons for choosing such an undertaking is the proficiency to measure how many people were exposed to the campaign. It included a number of factors like who organically saw the ad or video, who got it via a friend sharing or commenting, and so on.
The erroneous story…
From the time Facebook has admitted to misreport the metrics, the publishers and marketers who have been using, the platform and metrics, both to measure reach and engagement for their posts, seems to be in dubitable state. While the world’s largest social network blamed the ‘Bugs’ for the discrepancies, the undercounting or over-reporting of metrics has raised many questions.
From the time Facebook has admitted to misreport the metrics, the publishers and marketers who have been using, the platform and metrics, both to measure reach and engagement for their posts, seems to be in dubitable state. It was majorly about the average watch time, organic reach and video completion rates, which were misinterpreted. While the world’s largest social network blamed the ‘Bugs’ for the discrepancies, the undercounting or over-reporting of metrics has raised many questions.
After the announcement of the measurement errors, Kevin Wright, the director of Digital agency Blitz’s expressed his concern after one of the brand the agency was working with questioned about investment in Facebook campaigns, calling for a reason that the measurement of the posts’ reach might be incorrect.
Even the CEO of Deep Focus, Ian Schafer, articulated it to be a state of complete confusion which could lead marketers to be more incredulous of Facebook’s advertising data and business intelligence data. To this he also added that advertisers are going to be more skeptical about what Facebook is telling them after the repeated acceptance of errors.
Then there is an agency having Facebook’s to play a huge role in their digital advertising strategy. While they were found to be “screw-up of this magnitude”, their clients found it to be an easy excuse to discredit them.
Though Facebook believes it to be not ‘affecting’ the billing much, yet in the digital world the news of errors have caused tremors, which certainly somewhere causes the marketers to worry. In the year, where it was expected to receive better ROI from the social media giant, this was little bit disappointing. However, after the announcement of plans to increase third-party verification, improve transparency, and bring in a new measurement council to overcome the challenges to its metrics, there is a ray of hope that we, along with the entire digital world, will be able to hit the road again very soon!
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