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Facebook Says It Found More Miscalculated Metrics
- malloreon 10y agoHow much of the money they made from these bugs (the new ones and the older ones) will they be returning to their advertisers?
- pryelluw 10y agoDo they have a contractual obligation to do so? Im curious.
- huac 10y agoit might get tied into some SLA?
- bomdo 10y agoYes, if proven. If someone promises 1000 clicks for your dollar and delivers only 999, they are at fault, have not fulfilled the contract and either you should be reimbursed or they have to deliver the missing click. That Facebook talk publicly about this issue (naming it a software bug) either means some lawyer business is already happening in the background, or the difference between what they promised and delivered is so obvious that it is just a question of time. This article is bad for Facebook's image as an advertisement platform and there is no reason to publish something like this, other than liability. That said, Facebook has good lawyers and will obviously make it exceptionally hard for customers to prove Facebook is at fault. Additionally, their terms of service for the self-serve ads[1] is filled with blurry statements such as "we are not responsible for [...] technological issues [...] that may affect the cost of running ads", which will make legal battles lengthy and boring. [1] https://www.facebook.com/legal/self_service_ads_terms https://www.facebook.com/legal/self_service_ads_terms
- NoodleIncident 10y ago> None of the metrics in question impact Facebook’s billing, said Mark Rabkin, vice president of Facebook’s core ads team.
- woliveirajr 10y ago> None of the metrics in question impact Facebook’s billing, said Mark Rabkin, vice president of Facebook’s core ads team. This is the point. Might not impact the billing, but might lead announcers to miscalculate which campaign to use, for how long, for which audience, in the ending resulting in bad contracts with Facebook. That will be billed correctly.
- FussyZeus 10y agoKind of like how service providers constantly have issues with their infrastructure and support, but the billing website and auto-billing system? That's always working. Shows you where their priorities are.
- YCode 10y agoTo be fair, those systems have drastically fewer users connected and it's comparatively easy to scope usage and subsequently resources for them. Whereas with production systems usage and troubleshooting is far more unstable.
- FussyZeus 10y agoI was thinking more along the lines of teleco companies but I see your point.
- wang_li 10y ago>To be fair, those systems have drastically fewer users connected and it's comparatively easy to scope usage and subsequently resources for them. Something that one voluntarily chooses do do being hard is not an excuse to do it poorly or in a way that places inappropriate burdens on others.
- gertef 10y agoEh, some how the "purchase service" page is far more reliable than the "downgrade or cancel my service" page.
- gthtjtkt 10y agoThat reminds me, did they ever address the Click Farm problem that was essentially rendering likes and views worthless for many advertisers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag Or the rampant Freebooting? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q
- forgetsusername 10y agoIt's hard to imagine them doing so, because up until a certain point (advertisers leaving, which we ain't there yet) it's not in their interest. It brings me back to something I complained about on these boards years ago. I was working with a fairly small social gaming company about 10 years ago, during which time Facebook was boasting about "300m, 400m, 500m users!". Meanwhile, we were learning that almost half the users in our game were "fake" accounts. It was a major issue, but wasn't in the interests of Facebook to disclose during their hyper-growth. In fact, they made a point to state that fake accounts was not an problem. Clearly Facebook will use the metrics when they are convenient, despite their invalidity.
- hinkley 10y agoI had to learn the hard way that any number the development team gave the marketing group would be used in a way we would come to regret. It's a big part of my cynicism about the industry. People remember numbers but lose the context. Especially people whose bonuses depend on misunderstanding them.
- snomad 10y agoThanks for mentioning this. It bothers me immensely that they report 1.79 billion MAU. Is that discounted for social game mining accounts / spam bots? If not, that seems like a material issue in their reporting.
- chinathrow 10y ago"Lastly, Facebook said it plans to form a Measurement Council made up of marketers and ad agency executives, and will also roll out a blog to more regularly communicate updates about measurement." I read that as "we have no idea on how to measure, so please tell us what is important for you guys".
- philipov 10y agoI instead read it as "We'll give you buy-in so that next time you'll have a vested interest in not being blamed." This is a PR move and should not be interpreted sincerely.
- ethanbond 10y agoWasn't Facebook's whole value proposition is that they knew more than the traditional advertiser/publisher partnerships? Such a sham.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoI think the original proposition was: dumb fucks.
- sosborn 10y ago> I read that as "we have no idea on how to measure, so please tell us what is important for you guys". Which is a great way to improve their product.
- mtgx 10y agoI think Facebook has proven by now that even if they aren't doing this on purpose to trick advertisers into thinking their ads are much more effective than they really are, at least the product doesn't seem ready for primetime with so many "bugs" in measuring popping up. If you're a small business, Facebook may screw you over big time, so it's not worth the risk. I assume big companies just don't care.
- DougN7 10y agoThis isn't surprising if you've advertised on FB. I tried, and the results I got were dismal (to be fair, it was for B2B which I think generally does poor there).
- the_watcher 10y agoI run B2B Facebook ads, and they work just fine.
- tangue 10y agoI work in a mid-size company where "the computer guy" manages the Facebook page. One day my boss asked me "WTH does reach mean, you mean with 50 bucks we reached 100 000 people ?" Before replying, I read fb docs, a lot of blogs and for me it was gobbledygook. I said it was marketing bullshit and that we should focus on conversion rates. I felt guilty. Impostor syndrome kind of guilty. Until now.
- at-fates-hands 10y ago>> I said it was marketing bullshit and that we should focus on conversion rates. I always say the same thing when people are buying FB ads. Doesn't matter how people you reach, how people are you converting? Reminds me of an article that came out in 2010 comparing their add platform to a Ponzi scheme: http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme It also references PG's rant about how Yahoo! was doing the same thing in his 2010 article: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
- acchow 10y agoPG's article is looking back at the state of the internet in the late 90's. His claim is that back then most internet advertisers were themselves VC-funded, which made the whole thing a ponzi scheme. The first two ads I'm seeing right now in my news feed are Walmart and Banana Republic. I don't think 2016 is anything like 1998.
- the_watcher 10y agoYea, the only reason I ever pay attention to reach is when I have ads that are converting and I want to try and expand them. Reach tells me if I can just increase the budget/bid or if I'll need to find a new audience.
- nickthemagicman 10y agoDont affiliates get paid purely on click throughs? No conversion required? So reach is a useful metric.
- keketi 10y agoI guess they moved fast and broke things.
- snovv_crash 10y agoSo you're telling me that they don't have a test which provisions a Facebook with N users, calls the AJAX handlers for K clicks, from various users and then checks that the metrics show that K clicks were counted, from the correct users? That they don't do this for video watches, friend display-to-click conversions, and every other metric they use to make decisions about what happens on the site? Really?
- rahrahrah 10y agoYes really! And the reason they can get away with is that they have enormous number of users which means that many advertisers are still making a fortune. Welcome to advertising. Shady as fuck.
- gdulli 10y agoI don't believe in a conscious conspiracy within Facebook to defraud advertisers. I absolutely believe in a pervasive, semi-conscious but unspoken feeling that asking deep questions about the effectiveness of Facebook advertising or the validity of ad metrics would raise conclusions that would be definitively bad for Facebook, so it doesn't happen.
- notyourwork 10y agoAny internal team at least slightly aware of the problem would not have a good performance review for the year if their biggest project was to reduce revenue by x% due to efforts to address this.
- dworin 10y agoI think this is a fairly common pervasive, semi-conscious but unspoken feeling throughout many marketing and communications measurement organizations.
- ethanbond 10y agoI interned on Atlas (FB's enterprise advertising platform purchased from MS a while back) and this was the impression I got. Everything has a dollop of feel-good verbiage piled on top. We're not selling ads, we're "building more meaningful connections between businesses and their customers." The initial value proposition of online ads was click = confirmed intent. When not enough people click, they construct increasingly convoluted notions of purchasing seconds of mindshare at a time. Of course, at a certain point these purchases become as untestable as a billboard on a highway, a big difference being that highway billboards don't prop up industries, ecosystems, and even geographical regions like online advertising does. If someone calls shenanigans on online ads, it will be far more catastrophic than if they did the same on billboards/radio/TV ads.
- 0xmohit 10y ago98% of all statistics are made up. Its ok, Facebook. -- Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12561302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12561302
- akerro 10y agoFacebook which supported Clinton finds those bugs just after elections that Clinton lost.
- aNoob7000 10y agoThe take away from all this is you should use Twitter, it worked for President Trump and it could work for you too. :)
- tyleraldrich 10y agoWhat do advertisement metrics have to do with the election? As far as I know, the story about "Facebook + US Election" was related to people posting/sharing/therefore make trending fake new stories, which is unrelated to the Facebook ads/ad metrics side of the business.
- hackaflocka 10y agoI look at Instagram metrics and compare them to Twitter metrics for the same account, same post. IG "Likes" are usually 100x to 1000x Twitter. Do the math.
- zackkrida 10y agoCan I ask what has prompted this "investigation" of sorts by Facebook? Just the election? I wonder who is putting pressure on them to straighten this out.
- overcast 10y agoPublicly traded, billions in revenue, I'm sure LOTS of audits are done, constantly.
- gdulli 10y agoSeeing a dangerously unqualified demagogue become president is a singularly dramatic event that calls a lot of attention to various flaws in various systems, this is just one. It demands a lot of introspection and you couldn't stop that if you tried. The pressure is coming from the elephant in the room.
- lxchase 10y agoAs an anecdote, I know that the ad industry lately has been talking about transparency and I'd like to think we're getting more advanced in tech that people start asking the right questions. Or maybe I'm naive to believe that.
- rhizome 10y agoThe ad industry will never be "transparent" (i.e. clear and colorless), because it has falsifiability issues. Transparency would mean that they admit that most of the industry is based on guessing, that there's no science behind huge commercial transactions.
- DashRattlesnake 10y agoCould be this: > Facebook’s efforts to fix its reputation with Madison Avenue may fall short of the demands from some ad buyers. > .... > One way Facebook could calm frustrated ad buyers would be to undergo an audit via the Media Rating Council, the media industry’s independent research watchdog. The ad buyers might have suspected something fishy and started pushing back.
- sfifs 10y agoI see a lot of commentary about conversion metrics and how does reach matter etc. So let me share some perspective from point of view of mainstream consumer products advertisers whose individual FB budgets easily push into hundred million dollars plus zone. The primary business objective of advertising for companies such as mine is to build brand awareness, product benefit awareness and brand identity (eg. are you partial to Coke or Pepsi? Nike or Addidas? etc). Doing this will influence your purchase when you next shop for our categories (eg. your next shopping trip to Walmart or Amazon). Note that we are looking to influence a future shopping trip, any "digital conversion" we may get (eg. click thorough to our product page or an online retailer) really is pure gravy from our point of view. The primary metrics of interest to us therefore are how many people did our impressions reach (people - not cookies or devices), of the ones we did, how many were in our desired target audience and what was our impression frequency to them (at some point, high frequency becomes excessive). We don't even really look at clicks or conversions unless there is a specific interaction based marketing program. Hope this helps explain how big advertisers look at media.
- flinty 10y agoAny good sources to read and learn more about this form of advertising? Thanks
- GuiA 10y agoGo work at a company with a $100M+ online advertising budget :) Sorry for the trite answer, but this kind of knowledge is so new and ever changing, and there is so little incentive for it to be documented externally, that if you're really interested in it, the best way is to become one of them.
- dhimes 10y agoI think this is rather old-school, actually. They are using FB in the same way they use TV and newspapers, etc. Positioning and maintaining status at top of mind in the consumers' consciousness.
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- dimino 10y agoIs it weird or normal for a company like Facebook to share this kind of information with the public like this? Feels oddly transparent. What is prompting this level of transparency?
- anonbanker 10y agoI bet "miscalculated metrics" is a really good replacement word for "ad click fraud".
- muad 10y agoFB has a history of falsifying metrics. Just look back at the armies of bots pretending to be "engaged" users pre-IPO. People give Zuckerberg the benefit of the doubt because he is young, but his track record speaks of someone who is willing to lie and manipulate in order to achieve his goals. This election cycle proved that FB is not be trusted with anything more consequential that cat pictures.