- A judge has negotiated portions of a Facebook case claiming that drivers knew an advertising measure had been blown up indefinitely.
- Managers ignored the request of employees to rectify this to avoid a “significant” sales success.
- Potential reach, the relevant criterion, shows advertisers a possible audience size.
- Visit the Insider Business Department for more stories.
Facebook executives have known for years that the “potential each” ads have been blown up and rejected an employee warning to adjust it to avoid a revenue hit.
On Wednesday, a U.S. District Court judge in Northern California revealed portions of a court document that had previously been embezzled as part of a class action lawsuit on behalf of DZ Reserve and other participating plaintiffs brought against Facebook in 2018. the social media giant has inflated its potential reach to mislead advertisers.
According to the newly revealed sections, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, acknowledged in an internal email of 2017 problems with the potential reach. Advertisers ‘regularly rely’ on the criterion – which shows the achievable number of people – when making purchasing decisions, the lawsuit claims. But employees said the measure actually measures the number of accounts, which include duplicate or fake accounts, causing it to be misleading.
A product manager suggested that the benchmark be changed by not reflecting the number of accounts that could be reached, but Facebook’s leadership team rejected the idea because it would have a “significant” impact on revenue , reads the submission. According to the lawsuit, Facebook discovered that removing duplicate or fake accounts from the total number would cause a 10% drop in potential reach numbers.
The employee who proposed the correction said: ‘This is the income we should never have made, as it is based on incorrect data,’ according to the documentation. Other Facebook employees also said the number was misleading.
“These documents are being placed to fit according to plaintiff’s account,” Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said in an email to Insider. “‘Potential reach’ is a useful campaign planning tool that advertisers never take into account. It’s an estimate and we make it clear how it is calculated in our ad interface and help center.”
Two years ago, the company adjusted the potential range, reports the FT. Instead of calculating the number of active users who showed an ad during the previous 30 days, Facebook set the benchmark by calculating the number of users that matched the advertiser criteria in that time frame, the report said. However, the false and duplicate accounts remain in the total number, the plaintiff claims.
The company previously said advertisers pay for actual ad impressions and clicks, not for the potential reach, reports the Financial Times. The social media giant has been under fire for its statistics before. In 2019, Facebook settled a lawsuit after revealing that viewing time for video ads had blown up due to an error in calculating statistics, reports The Wall Street Journal.