Facebook, Twitter Grapple With Ad Glitches

Apparently, Facebook is not the only social giant with an ad measurement problem. Due to a software glitch, Twitter just admitted to overstating the frequency with which video ads are viewed on Android devices.

“We discovered a technical error due to a Twitter product update to Android clients that affected some video ad campaigns from November 7 to December 12,” the company reported on Friday. “The issue has been fixed, but we wanted to share more details on what the impact was to our advertising partners,” Twitter said.

Facebook, of course, recently came clean about several ad-metric inaccuracies, and what it considers to be "improvements."

The more recent update involved the social giant’s estimated reach methodology -- a tool in the ad creation flow that shows advertisers the number of users they can expect to reach with potential ad campaigns.

“We're now using a methodology less reliant on sampling/extrapolating our audience sizes, which in most cases should show advertisers a less than 10% change (increase or decrease) in the audience sizes shown in the tool,” a Facebook spokeswoman explained on Friday.

In addition, “we misallocated the extra reactions per user that happened during the live broadcast to the ‘Reactions from Shares of Post’ section,” the spokeswoman said.

Facebook had been mistakenly counting them in the “Reactions on Post” section.

Facebook also identified a discrepancy between the counts for the Like and Share buttons via its Graph API, and the counts when a URL is entered into the search bar in its mobile app.

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