How Bad Did Analytics Bugs Fool Facebook Pages? Reach Looked Down 14% When It Wasn’t
Months of mysterious Insights bugs duped Facebook Page owners into
thinking their reach was plummeting. The median Page’s analytics showed
it reached 14.39 percent fewer people than it actually did, according to
early data and graphs from EdgeRank Checker,
a Facebook analytics startup that gave us the first look. The bugs may
have caused people to mistakenly undervalue their Pages, change
strategies or buy ads to make up for “lost” reach.
Facebook announced
the bugs last week. During its efforts to speed up its iOS and Android
apps in August and December, it accidentally stripped out the markers
used by Page Insights to count impressions. This and other bugs led
several metrics to be underreported. Fixes and bug-prevention systems
are now in place, and accurate data began flowing into Page Insights
yesterday, making today the earliest opportunity to get a concrete sense
of the glitch’s impact.
EdgeRank
Checker analyzed 1,000 Pages who posted both last week when Insights
was still wrong, and yesterday with reach reported accurately. How much
reach was underreported depends a bit on the Page’s fan count, as those
with 500,000 to 1 million Likes were led farther astray.
A Page with 750,000 fans would have been reaching 47,000 fans per
post (6.24 percent), according to the broken analytics, when in reality
they were reaching 78,000 (10.35 percent). That means Insights was
underreporting reach by a massive 66 percent. The impact was more subtle
for a Page with 100,000 fans. The buggy Insights would have shown them
reaching 10,000 of their fans per post when they were actually reaching
11,000, with reach underreported by 10.2 percent.
The most stunning part of the data was that the median Page’s viral
reach according to Insights went up 275 percent after the fix. EdgeRank Checker‘s
CEO Chad Wittman believes Facebook also fixed a bug that caused viral
reach to exclude the impressions from posts re-shared by a Page’s fans.
Once there’s a whole month of accurate data, we’ll get a more precise
look at the effect of these bugs. Facebook tells me it doesn’t
calculate the aggregate impact, but didn’t dispute EdgeRank Checker’s
findings. However, it did note the day-over-day data may look a little
more extreme, and the data may even out a bit with time.
While in some ways Page admins should be relieved, some are certainly mad. Though Facebook snapped into action
squashing the bugs as soon as they were discovered, it still didn’t
disclose the issues for the three weeks while it fixed them.
Some admins have complained about wanting refunds for ads they bought
during the bug period, because they wouldn’t have paid for them if they
knew their real reach was higher than shown. If Facebook wants these
Pages to keep filling it with content and buying its ads, it can’t have
any more slip-ups like this.
JADID TECH