We often talk about the importance of collecting data, and it’s not just us. Most agencies involved in marketing have healthy obsessions with data. Without strong data, entire campaigns can amount to little more than guesswork.
Rigorous and accurate metrics provide objectivity to human behaviour and response, which is key to strategic growth and efficient management of ROI. For that reason, it’s important that your data collection be reliable. If your numbers lie, your ROI and productivity will suffer.
But staying on top of your data isn’t as simple as learning the basics of Google Analytics and then “letting things be.” You have to be an expert (or hire some). Even the largest companies on Earth can get their metrics wrong.
Facebook, for example, recently admitted to unintentionally overstating their metrics (by as much as 55 percent in some cases).
Facebook’s data errors – what went wrong?
Facebook attribute many of their metric errors to attributing certain events incorrectly. For example, counting clicks to view ads on the platform as clicks to visit the product website.
The social media juggernaut have, understandably, been rather quiet about the cause of these mistakes. They’ve chosen instead to focus on future solutions and their plans to improve metric reliability in future. You can read all about it here.
These kinds of errors are incredibly easy to make. Without expert eyes, they may go unnoticed for a long time. That’s why it’s so important to ensure your metrics are accurate (and that you’re tracking events correctly).
For Facebook marketers
For those who have been advertising through Facebook and relying on their metrics, here are some of the incorrect figures you may be interested in:
- Repeat visitors were counted as unique visitors in the 7 and 28-day page insights summary reports (organic reach). Facebook expects the true 7-day figure to be 33% lower than projected, and the 28-day report to be 55% lower.
- Time spent on instant articles has been overstated by 7-8% since August.
- 30% of referral clicks counted were actually clicks to Facebook content.
Facebook’s plan for the future
Facebook’s solution is largely centred around third-party verification. Facebook have worked with industry leaders such as ComScore, Moat, Nielsen and Integral Ad Science for a long time, and will continue to do so.
Their proposed solution also includes a “Metrics FYI blog”, where they intend to post regular updates about their metrics strategy and progress. This will be a resource worth following for business owners interested in metrics at a high level.
