Facebook's Big Video Metric Mistake
& What It Means For Marketers

 

The globe's most popular social network has once again been placed under the microscope - this time around the issue of miscalculating an important Facebook video metric - the "Average Duration of Video Viewed".

As a result, the statistics associated with this metric have been grossly inflated - and for over two years. The implications for ad buyers and online marketers have been profound, particularly for those who have spent large amounts of money, and based entire brand strategies on the flawed data provided by Facebook Insights.

Facebook's Response

Vice President of Business and Marketing Partnerships, David Fischer's official statement read, "The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video. But it didn't. While this is only one of the many metrics marketers look at, we take any mistake seriously."

The Solution

The good news is twofold. For starters, the tech giant's equally large oversight does not affect affect any of the other metrics. In addition, their mistake does not affect billing, which is a fortunate outcome for marketers who have spent a fortune on promoting video content on Facebook.

Facebook's solution is to replace the "Average Duration Of Video Viewed" metric with the Average Watch Time" metric, which promises marketers a more accurate means of measurement.

Although this news has presented quite a blow to online marketers, brands are still faced with the same set of questions: who is watching my videos, how long do they stay engaged - and what does this all mean for my brand?

Along with digital communication tools like Facebook, and the many others that have joined the team, strategies for both meaningful content creation - and the ways in which we measure it's efficacy - need to be constantly refined.

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