Facebook video: um...not so much
Perhaps, in your private quiet thoughts, you’ve reasoned the same thing – Facebook video: um…not so much.
Sure, it’s delightfully surprising when Facebook tells you in its Page Insights your videos garnered 55,000 views or more (or, for the big timers, millions). Turns out your instincts toward surprise might have been correct.
Facebook admitted publicly September 23 it has routinely “overstated” the actual viewership – therefore effectiveness – of videos posted to the social media juggernaut; maybe by as much as 60 to 80 percent. That’s quite an overstatement.
“The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video,” admitted Facebook. “But it didn’t – it reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number of ‘views’ of a video (that is, when the video was watched for three or more seconds). And so the miscalculation overstated this metric. While this is only one of the many metrics marketers look at, we take any mistake seriously.”
What that obfuscatory jibber-jabber means is: not as many people watched your video as Facebook said watched your video.
This also includes advertising videos, those sponsored and bought video time for which you paid good money and for which Facebook reported you got a pretty good return on your investment. Turns out, maybe you didn’t.
This “miscalculation” affected millions of dollars spent on Facebook, which has been working hard in recent years to get us all to pay big bucks for Facebook video ads (and other ads).
“We sincerely apologize for the issues this has created for our clients,” wrote Facebook’s David Fischer, vice-president of business and marketing partnerships. “This error should not stand in the way of our ultimate goal, which is to do what’s in the best interest of our partners and their business growth. We can only be successful if we’re providing clients with the tools to drive their business forward, and we’ll continue to deliver on that promise.”
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday major media buying company Publicis was told by Facebook that overestimate of actual video viewership might have been as great as 60 to 80 percent. That’s quite the overestimate.
FB said it “discovered” the problem about a month ago.
“As soon as we discovered the discrepancy, we fixed it,” insisted Fischer in his blog post. “We informed our partners and made sure to put a notice in the product itself so that anyone who went into their dashboard could understand our error.
“We have also reviewed our other video metrics on the dashboard and have found that this has no impact on video numbers we have shared in the past, such as time spent watching video or the number of video views.”
Wait…what? We discovered we have overestimated (60 to 80 percent) how much viewership our videos actually get but this error hasn’t affected what we’ve reported to you in the past. How’s that, again?
“We want our clients to know that this miscalculation has not and will not going forward have an impact on billing or how media mix models value their Facebook video investments,” said Facebook.
We didn’t actually read about an offer to refund any money. But Facebook did promise to do better in the future.
“This is about how seriously we take our partners’ commitment to our platform, and how their investments with us wholly depend on the transparency with which we communicate,” Fischer wrote. “We know we can’t have true partnerships with our clients unless we are upfront and honest with them, including when we make mistakes like this one. Our clients’ trust and belief in our metrics is essential to us and we have to earn that trust. That is why we also give marketers choice by offering third-party video verification options with companies like Nielsen and Moat. We want marketers to measure video with us in the way they feel most comfortable.”
So, yes, third-party verification by companies such as Nielsen and Moat help quite a bit – as Nielsen has for decades with traditional broadcast advertising and television viewership.
But this Facebook kerfuffle (scandal?) also begs a larger question about the overall effectiveness of paid advertising on the social networks.
And it comes only months after Wordstream, Wordstream, a digital advertising company, published an analysis of ad buys on the Google Adwords and found many advertisers were paying too much for their digital ad buys.
We are still in the wild, wild west of digital advertising in general and certainly advertising on the social networks.
Heck, when it comes right down to it we’re still pretty much in the frontier of social networking in general, let alone the added layer of actually buying ads on the social channels.
Let’s be honest, we’re far from having pat answers, proven formulae or locked-down strategies – and anyone who tells you they do is lying to you and probably just trying to separate you from a little of your cash.
One of the reasons for this is, of course, the wildly speculative and frequently changing nature of social network advertising in the first place. But another big reason – the most important reason – is that each and every business, organization or marketeer working the digital spaces is unique unto themselves. No one-size-fits-all strategy exists because online marketeers (businesses, organization, even major brands) are like snowflakes: no two are alike.
In total, marketeer’s goals, aspirations, objectives, requirements, resources, desires are as plentiful as the stars in the night sky.
What works for you might not work for someone else. What works for them won’t necessarily work for you.
While we understand the social networks and online companies finally figured out the best way to pay for operations is through advertising – it’s how we’ve always paid for media – and nothing is inherently wrong with the concept.
But given the fact that few consumers, potential advertisers and advertising buyers truly understand the complexity of renting billboards on the digital spaces it’s little wonder the companies selling that advertising today hold a distinct and, maybe even, exploitive position over those from whom they take ad dollars.
The question to ask, the question which must always be asked when it comes to advertising: is it working? And by that, we mean, are we getting what we paid for?
Answered in the most charitable way possible, we just don’t know.
Oh sure, we can know.
Analytics can certainly tell you if your advertising is paying off toward its intended goal, whatever that goal may be. But, let’s also be honest and explain when the analytics are run with precision the answer comes back way more often than not: no, we’re not getting what we paid for.
Google itself admitted in 2014 over half its ads (56.1 percent) were never actually seen by Internet users. Using that metric: buy $1,000 worth of ads on Google, waste $439. Is that a good business proposition?
A company called WhiteOps – which admittedly wants to sell you video ad verification software – estimated 25 percent of all “views” reported on video ads are fraudulent and speculates this fraud will lead in 2015 to over $6 billion in wasted ad spend.
A report published a year ago by Page Fair in association with Adobe, suggested nearly 200 million people now use ad blocking software a growth of 41 percent in the past year. As a result, publishers will waste $22 billion in 2015.
The Gallup organization produced a report way back in 2014 which suggested only 5 percent of all social media users paid any attention at all to advertising.
A more recent report from Integral Ad Science suggests that while fraud may be down slightly so is the viewership of online ads: over half of all online ads (56 percent) are never on any screen long enough to be seen and comprehended by online viewers.
But, Relevanza, one might fairly ask, aren’t you cutting off you nose to spite your face? Perhaps but Relevanza is in business to help clients succeed online – however they need or want to measure that success. And we hope we do that with integrity, which means finding the best ways, the most efficient, cost-effective ways to help them achieve goals.
Maybe digital advertising is – in some cases – the best way. But evidence to the contrary position is starting to build.
Maybe soon the online advertising sellers will also see integrity as an essential metric.
Yea, sure, we can hope.