Facebook will compensate Australian advertisers after some of the social media platform’s free tracking tools distributed inaccurate data for more than a year.
A coding error, which affected the Facebook Conversion Lift tool from between August 2019 and August this year, resulted in Facebook miscalculating sales from people who saw ads on the platform.
As reported by both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian¸ the issue is understood to have impacted thousands of advertisers globally. Facebook is now reportedly gifting advertisers who were “meaningfully affected” an ad credit coupon as makegoods.
A Facebook spokeswoman reportedly claimed the error had affected 0.1 per cent of the Australian advertising market. However, multiple industry sources told The Herald, on condition of anonymity, that multiple companies across large advertising agencies were affected.
Inudstry sources also told The Herald that Facebook had apologised to some advertising and media buying agencies in Australia for the error.
“While making improvements to our measurement products, we found a technical issue that impacted some conversion lift tests,” Facebook Australia director Paul McCrory told both outlets.
“We’ve fixed this and are working with advertisers with impacted studies. This impacted less than 0.1 per cent of advertisers in Australia.”
A spokeswoman added that all impacted clients had been contacted by the Facebook team.
The issue was first reported on by AdExchanger, which revealed Facebook had undercounted the number of conversions from people who were exposed to impressions on Facebook apps.
The outlet also reported that the makegoods must be used by 31 March 2021, and are being handed out on a “case-by-case basis” that depends on an advertiser’s use of the conversion lift product, and how much the bug impacted the results of their conversion testing.
According to The Oz, it is also understood that Facebook discovered other technical issues that it then fixed, while investigating the coding error.
These included a “probability error” that reportedly affected users who conducted multi-cell studies between 21 September and 23 November.
In addition, another issue affected Facebook’s statistical models for some studies between 15 June and 26 July this year, The Oz reported.
Featured image source: iStock/bombuscreative
