Bugs affect Facebook insights for pages

Facebook has discovered that its "pages" feature, which allows businesses and websites to share their information with millions of Facebook users, has a slight issue. There were some bugs that were discovered after Facebook launched a "comprehensive engineering audit" on their pages product. The bugs caused the impressions and audience reach reports to return incorrect information to businesses and websites.

Facebook says that while the actual delivery and reach were unaffected, the reports of how many people being reached were under-reported. Fixes for the Facebook system began rolling out on Friday,and will continue rolling out this weekend. Facebook pages should be reporting the correct information starting on Monday.

After the fixes are rolled out, your reported reach should increase compared to previous reports, however there is also a chance that your page's reach was unaffected by the bug in the first place. Your organic reach should either increase or decrease depending on the number of subscribers to your Facebook page, as well as how often you make a post. For those who purchased a paid-ad campaign through Facebook, there should definitely be an increase in your reports. There has been a change in the metrics extracted from your Facebook page's reach and impressions. Finally, Facebook has implemented new measures in order to prevent bugs from misreporting your page reach in the future.

Starting Monday, Facebook suggests analyzing your page's data, including looking at your organic, paid, and viral reach in order to view how affected you were by these bugs. Since the bugs affected Facebook's logging system, there's no way Facebook can restore the real data in past posts. Despite this bug affecting your statistics, it might actually be a good thing, because your Facebook page, and your business, could be doing a whole lot better than you had expected.

[via Facebook]