The metric it gave advertisers for their average video view time incorporated only the people who had watched the video long enough to count as a “view” in the first place, inflating the metric because it didn’t count anyone who didn’t watch, or watched for a shorter time.
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According to the WSJ, Facebook told major ad agencies and ad buyers that the way Facebook had counted viewing time had artificially inflated the average viewing time by between 60 percent to 80 percent, because it only counted video views of more than three seconds.
“This metric is one of many our partners use to assess their video campaigns”.
In recent years, Facebook has been placing increasing emphasis on video content, especially through its Facebook Live service.
In a memo to clients, however, the ad company that first got Facebook to reveal the severity of the “error” slammed the social giant, writing, “Two years of reporting inflated performance numbers is unacceptable”. However, by failing to include these lost views, the company was swelling view times, and therefore, overstating the engagement videos were receiving.
Publicis added that the problem highlighted the need for third party firms for tagging and verification purposes on Facebook.
Facebook said: “We apologize for the inconvenience and we hope that these new metrics, in addition to other video metrics available in reporting will help you better evaluate your ad performance”.
“This error has been fixed, it did not impact billing”, Facebook said in a statement. “We also renamed the metric to make it clearer what we measure”, the company reportedly said.
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Facebook shares fell $1.78 to $128.30, or 1.3 percent, in after-hours trading after the Journal reported the error.
