Facebook 'fesses up to fudged ad metrics … again Facebook has offered the advertising world an An Update on Metrics and Reporting that's needed because it's been counting things wrong, again. Sharp-minded Reg readers will probably recall that in September 2016 The Social Network™ sheepishly admitted that it had overstated average video viewing times by up to 80 per cent for …
Same problem with inflated metrics for Google Analytics. Our company ad has been shown all over our employees visited web properties for many months, even when they used private mobiles or work from iPads from their home. Interesting count of metrics. AdSense scripts were popping up exactly the same ad all the time, in various locations, even when I was on my vacation in tropics in the middle of an ocean, several times per day. Very annoying. Google thinks our employees are main customers of a fairly complex piece of B2B enterprise products we sell. We counted thousands of times overstatement in metrics, being a small size company with 100 or so people. Employees reported that each was shown our own ad repeatedly and everywhere for several months, tens or hundreds of time. Imagine metrics inflation for a bigger corporate company. It's a gold mine for web monopolies, this type of advertisement metrics counting. In my opinion could be called a fraud, if proved. Today monopolies themselves are counting these metrics. One who counts his own metrics, goes all the way to the bank laughing at naive customers. We stopped using AdWords since then.
Glad to get a confirmation of my own experience. We are a small firm and I started an internal poll so people could add a sighting every time they were served up our ad. It became clear that we ourselves were generating most of the traffic, so we killed the adwords and the advert and are none the worse.
... they have no real way to assess if the numbers of viewers are right, because the ad channel also has full control of the numbers. When you buy ad space, say, in a SuperBowl, you know more or less how many the viewer will be - and there's some grade of independent review (once I worked on a software used to check products placement on supermarket shelves matched what companies paid for - the review was independent from the supermarket companies)
Farcebook instead controls everything - and, strangely, almost always overstates data.... which usually means also more revenues, not less... probably these "fixes" come because in some way they got caught. It isn't the first site to "massage" visits data....
You go to a web page, it opens and a video starts playing - you close the web page. That's a "view"
Search for a youtube video, an ad starts playing, get bored and close the window - that's a "view"
Open a webpage, shift the window to the side to get all those annoying adverts off the screen - that's 40-100 "views"
They are saying that having Fakebook (damn autocorrect) measure the views is like marking your own homework - what a laugh, it's more like never doing any homework, just going partying instead.
"Marks? - no worries, go that covered, looks like I got a B+" (we want it to be believable) - my guess is that Fakebook spends more time trying to come up with "believable" numbers than actually measuring anything.
Put an advert in a paper. A person buys the paper but never opens the page. That's a "view" too. (I was going to say something similar about TV. But IIUC the way they measure it means that isn't the case.)
Note Facebook have a play to completion count of videos. That's one ways of coping with the problem of videos not being watched. (And they underestimated it.)
And increasingly ads measures whether or not they are visible. (We're getting new features to do this in HTML5/javascript because advertisers are clogging up web pages with crud to detect it.)
"Put an advert in a paper. A person buys the paper but never opens the page. That's a "view" too."
Just speaking from my personal experience: I block ads on web pages, but when they do appear, they don't register with me. I believe it has become a learned behavior.
I also get a daily paper. The ads don't annoy me. My eye glances over the ad and if my interest is piqued, I'll read the ad.
I don't know why the difference - perhaps it is akin to that annoying person trying to get your attention that you ignore on general principle. My gut instinct is that the money spent on those online ads is money down the drain.
Oh, lay off the poor dears, will you? They are really going to make things better.
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