Until last year, advertisers mostly accepted Facebook’s metrics with closed eyes. However, after admissions that a portion of its ad numbers were being misreported, all hell broke loose. Well, maybe that is an overstatement but after accepting that its numbers weren’t exactly accurate, Facebook lost a portion of the trust it had enjoyed in the industry.
The company has since then taken various corrective measures to make its systems more accurate and transparent. Along with announcing new measurement partnerships with third-parties, Facebook recently launched a new portal to compare ads on digital media, TV and print. Along the same, it has now agreed to an audit by the Media Rating Council to prove that the numbers it delivers to its assorted partners are now accurate.
Announcing the news through a blog post, Facebook said:
As a partner to over four million advertisers across a wide range of organizations and objectives, we want to provide transparency, choice, and accountability.
We are committing to an audit by the Media Rating Council (MRC) to verify the accuracy of the information we deliver to our partners.
The results of the audit will then be shared with the company’s advertising partners.
Along with announcing the audit, the company also said that it will soon be providing a ton of details about how long an ad is actually on-screen. The details provided to advertising partners will include:
- Milliseconds that an ad was on the screen
- Milliseconds that 50% of the ad was on the screen
- Milliseconds that 100% of the ad was on the screen
The company added that it will be providing a slew of new options to advertisers regarding how they want to purchase video ads across Facebook, Instagram and the Audience Network. The three options that the company plans to make available to advertisers include:
- Completed-view buying: advertisers will only pay for video ads that have been viewed in their entirety, for any duration up to ten seconds.
- Two-second buying: compliant with the MRC video standard, where at least 50% of an ad’s pixels are in-view for two continuous seconds or longer.
- Sound-on buying: advertisers will have the ability to buy sound-on video ads.
The company also reiterated the fact that it had increased the number of partners for ad-measurement to 24 globally. Let’s see if the companies efforts in the direction can help it regain the trust it has lost.
You can read more about the company’s future plans for its advertising partners, right here.
