Analyst accuses Facebook of exaggerating its ad reach numbers

[midian182]

With around 240 million users in the US alone, advertisers know that Facebook offers them a massive potential audience. But the social network has been accused of inflating the figures when it comes to how many people see video ads on its platform.

A Pivotal Research Group analyst said Facebook Ad Manager’s claim that it can potentially reach 41 million 18- to -24-year olds and 60 million 25- to -34-year olds is inaccurate. The reason? The United States doesn’t have that many people in those age brackets.

US Census data shows there were 31 million people between the ages of 18 and 24 last year, ten million fewer than what Facebook claims it can reach, while the 25-34 age group consisted of 45 million people, a difference of 15 million compared to Facebook’s numbers.

Pivotal Research Group’s Brian Wieser wrote that while Facebook’s “measurement issues” are unlikely to deter its advertisers, they will go some way toward justifying the existing budgets of traditional TV ad space sellers and could hinder Facebook’s growth in video ad sales.

Defending the figures, Facebook said: “they [reach estimates] are designed to estimate how many people in a given area are eligible to see an ad a business might run. They are not designed to match population or census estimates.” It added that estimations are based on factors such as user behavior, user demographics and location data from devices.

Facebook has been called out for its ad measurement data in the past. Last September, it was reported that the company spent two years exaggerating the length of time users watched video ads. Because it was only counting videos that were watched for at least three seconds, Facebook was overestimated average viewing times by between 60% and 80%.

“Measurement issues at Facebook have been top-of-mind [...] over the past year given revelations around over-stated average video viewing time, video viewing completions, miscalculations of organic page reach and other data which impacts how budgets are planned,” states the Pivotal report.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/70869-analyst-accuses-facebook-exaggerating-ad-reach-numbers.html

 

[Uncle Al]

Nothing new here .... newspapers and magazine's have been doing it for years. As far as I know the Arbitrager book does not cover advertising over the internet, which is unfortunate since it has been considered the leading authority on advertising traffic since it's creation.

 

[JaredTheDragon]

Out of those 240 million users, 140 million are bots, feds, or duplicate "alt" accounts. You heard it here first.

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

There's nothing like extolling the virtues of your garbage because there are millions of suckers who'll believe it.

 

[p51d007]

DUH...charge more if they do.

 

[kapital98]

I advertise on Facebook. I used a 45 second spot for about a year in a rural area. They offer comprehensive metrics to determine how many people see you're ads.

The main problems is that most of their metrics are useless. The only metric that really matter is who watches your add for longer than a given period of time and, much more importantly, how many people click on your ad. By default, ads run on Facebook. So people scrolling through your feed will 'see' your ad. But it's only the people that click on your ad, and listen to the sound, that results in people really being interested in your product.

This leads to a lot of gaming the system by clever advertisers. First, you make catchy transitions or jump cuts. Second, you put subtitles in. Third, you make everything a video (no photos or real responses -- always videos). If you're really disingenuous, then you put stupid clickbait-ish ploys on top of that.

My ad was an intentionally boring, dry old--school attorney spot. Just my name, what I do, and to call me. For the money, it was well worth it. If you are super focused on your market, Facebook advertising is very inexpensive. Especially compared to traditional media (like local newspapers).

 

[kapital98]

One of the most difficult things for small businesses is determining what forms of advertising result in sales. There are some really great articles out there about this. This is a huge deal right now for indie developers who sell their games on steam on similar services.

Mid-sized or large corporations with ample advertising budgets can hire firms to do all the analytics and make smarter investments. Small businesses barely have the time or energy to do advertising. Let alone quantitatively analyze the cost-benefit of each ad. Almost all of them wing it based on general assumptions.