Facebook made mistakes when measuring reach figures

Facebook has admitted that there were multiple errors in the statistics that Facebook page owners can look up. As a result, the site exaggerated its page reach by 55 percent, while also reducing the time readers spend on Instant Articles.

Facebook forgot to remove the duplicates from the reach figures, causing many people to double-count if they saw a post from the page on different days, Facebook says. The bug has been live for half a year, claims the social network. The counter that measures how many people have watched a video in total also turned out to be incorrect; he didn’t count people who had seen the entire video. That’s because the audio track ran longer and people already clicked away.

Facebook was also wrong in counting the time that readers spend on Instant Articles, although the difference there is not too high at 7 to 8 percent. Many Page owners use the statistics to track whether there is movement in the number of people they reach with posts, videos and articles, causing errors in many companies, organizations and artists.

The social network promises to improve, because in September it appeared that various figures from Facebook were incorrect. That’s why the company says it will have more third-party monitoring of its measurement methods in the future and has started a metrics blog for page owners.