‘Should advertisers pressure Facebook to be audited?’ – Marketing Land
Kevin Lee says, “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.”
This latest admission was the last straw for at least one unnamed media buyer, who fumed to Adweek that “if this were a TV network there would be scandal and lawsuits.”
Scandal and lawsuits aside, a consensus is building in the advertising community that Facebook — like any modern media company — and certainly a media company projected to bill more than $25 billion in 2016 — needs to be audited”.
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