In a pursuit to its arch rival Facebook, Twitter has today quietly acknowledged that it is also faltering on the metrics front. This mistake and miscalculation in video ad counts makes for an embarrassing situation for both the social networking giants, which are heavily relied on by advertisers to push their products to the masses.
Shedding light on the issue, Twitter has published a blog post saying that a bug in the most recent Android app update caused the metrics to get skewed. This led the platform to overcharge some of its advertisers over a span of about a month, until December 12. Talking about the discovery of this Android-specific bug, the official blog post states,
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 issue has been fixed but we wanted to share more details on what the impact was to our advertising partner.
While Twitter might have been forthcoming in detailing the problem, the faulty video ad metrics were discovered by Business Insider’s Alex Heath who released his story before the company’s disclosure. The said report, citing a source familiar with the matter, mentioned that the micro-blogging platform was overcharging its video ad publishers and was showing ad metrics inflated by as much as 35 percent.
The company has already resolved the said technical issue with the Android application and advertisers have been notified of the problem in their metrics. It isn’t explicitly stated but Twitter has already started remitting refunds to those who were affected by this process. But other publications like VentureBeat are of the opinion that they have and the majority of refund amounts can be as low as $1, which shows that a lot of people are not spending much on ad campaigns on Twitter.
There is no mention of any prominent ad publishers affected by the issue, who’ll be receiving humongous checks from the micro-blogging service. This confirms that the platform is still struggling to not only court users but also advertisers to market their product to the stagnant but loyal user base. It is, however, planning to introduce major changes to the platform including the executive exodus — which will enable them to bring a fresh vision to the table.
