Facebook Announces Update to Metrics

Facebook(NEW YORK) — Facebook announced it is updating its metrics after discovering several mistakes in reports to partners and advertisers.

“We know that having access to reliable metrics is important to the millions of partners who use our services to grow their businesses,” Facebook said in a press release Wednesday. “As our products evolve to meet the needs of the people and businesses that use them, our metrics will also evolve.”

Facebook also said it vows to be more transparent about errors in the future, “so that our partners can focus on doing what they do best — serving their customers — with the best insights possible.”

The social network conducted a review after discovering three months ago it was overestimating how long people were watching videos on their site. Now, Facebook says it found four other instances of overestimation in their metrics.

One was time spent reading Instant Articles, which is a way for a publisher to create fast, interactive mobile content on the site. Facebook reported an overestimation in this metric by an average of 7 to 8 percent since August of last year. This was caused by calculating the average across a histogram of time spent as opposed to total time spent divided by total views, according to Facebook.

Another was in Facebook’s Analytics Apps’ dashboard, where the “Referrals” metric that evaluated all posts produced by people via an app or website was miscalculated.

“We meant to count clicks that went directly to an app or website,” Facebook said. “However, we’ve also counted other clicks on those posts via the app or website, including clicks to view photos or video,” which has led to approximately a 6 percent overestimation of the metric on average.

The updates announced by Facebook on Wednesday in order to combat these metrics issues are having more descriptive names, clarified calculations, more consistent definitions and better categorization.

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