Facebook will count one person as two on its platform | Hacker News Reader

Facebook will count one person as two on its platform

indiehackers.com

51 pointsheymax05441 comments

This is spreading misinformation:

> we may see advertisers being charged double for their ads.

Can you please dive deeper into this? Advertisers can either pay for clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM). Neither of these are tied to "humans" or "accounts". How does this change double charge for ads?

[0] - https://www.facebook.com/business/help/716180208457684?id=17...

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edit

> An impression is counted as the number of times an instance of an ad is on screen for the first time.

> If an ad is on screen for someone 2 different times in a day, that counts as 2 impressions.

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/675615482516035?helpr...

It can be tied to humans/accounts. Facebook has a "cost per 1000 people reached" derived metric: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1461718327429941?help...

Facebook changing their definition of what a person is (outside of the normal societal definition) was the real issue here.

EDIT: Removed the "double" and the whole price reference because it caused confusion.

> An impression is counted as the number of times an instance of an ad is on screen for the first time.

> If an ad is on screen for someone 2 different times in a day, that counts as 2 impressions.

Facebook's website [0] says impressions aren't tied to accounts or persons and the explicitly provide an example how a single account (and person) could count 2 impressions. Can you please provide a source where Facebook says CPM is accounts or persons?

[0] - https://www.facebook.com/business/help/675615482516035?helpr...

Here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1461718327429941?help...

Thank you for pointing this out, though. The purpose of the article was to make people more aware of the change and how it can potentially mislead advertisers. I edited the section you quoted to make things more clear.

That does not look like the primary basis for billing, it's just a derived metric.

Advertisers are not paying for reach, they are paying for CPM and CPC. Advertisers are not double charged for clicks or impressions, because neither metric promises a unique person.

Facebook already documents this issue with their biz account vs personal accounts:

> For example, this means that if someone saw a post while using their business Page and then switched to their personal profile and saw the same post, we may count this as 2 people reached

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/283579896000936

Removed the price reference to focus on the article's main point. Honestly it's a bit frustrating when you've spent hours researching something and reached the HN front page to have someone tear you apart over a small speculation at the bottom of the piece. But that's HN, I guess.

Thank you for the correction.

To some extent, if I read an article where I don't know about 90% of it, but the 10% I do know about is wrong, I will discredit the whole thing. To many people with ulterior motives pushing misleading narratives to assume good faith mistakes on things.

The whole premise is that this change is a change we should care about, but I'm not seeing how its a difference to status quo.

> First of all, understand that when you advertise on Facebook, you are reaching accounts, not people.

This has always been true, since biz views were counted differently than personal. Facebook has never claimed otherwise.

> we may see advertisers misled in many ways, such as thinking they're reaching more people than they are if they look at their unique link clicks metrics.

Why would advertisers be misled? You linked to the documentation on how Facebook is transparent with their accounting. Advertisers can clearly see how this is calculated.

You're making a lot of noise about nothing...

> Advertisers can clearly see how this is calculated.

Do you have any evidence that the average advertiser can "clearly see" how this is calculated? Try this: Go to any Facebook Ads group, DM 10 advertisers and ask them if the "Impression" metric tracks accounts or people. See what % of them reply confused.

Second, it appears that you haven't ran Facebook Ads at all. When you see your ad set performance, one of the primary columns you see is "Reach". If you hover over, you'll see this:

> Reach > The number of people who saw your ads at least once. Reach is different to impressions, which may include multiple views of your ads by the same people.

My argument is that Facebook is changing the definition of "people" to "accounts". If you are the SAME ad both on Facebook and Instagram, Facebook will report your reach as "2" (compared to "1", as it was before the change). How is this "noise about nothing"?

Third, the documentation you linked me to has been recently updated to reflect the news release Facebook announced. This information hasn't always been there.

Your arguments made sense at the beginning (with regards to the "double pricing" argument) but they appear extremely biased now.

Facebook, Google[0], Yelp, and every other digital advertiser define "impression" as a view, not a unique human. If Facebook did anything other than that, then that could be considered misleading.

We already discussed: "The number of people who saw your ads at least once."

Facebook provides a link to what they define is "people" and provide an example of this specific situation we are discussing [1]. We can even look back to Dec 2020 to see this definition [2], which is way before the announcement published.

Unfortunately, Facebook seems to of shuffled around their biz documentation page, so I can't easily find a direct source on wayback machine, but reachlocal.com in 2017 [3] published a blog article describing Facebook impressions as per view.

Please explain what there is to be mad about? There are no definition changes. Advertisers have always known that impressions were views. Advertisers have always known that there can be duplicate "reaches" due to 1 human managing multiple accounts (biz vs personal).

[0] - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6320?hl=en [1] - https://www.facebook.com/business/help/283579896000936 [2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20201223180727/https://www.faceb... [3] - https://blog.reachlocal.com/facebook-advertising-terms-you-n...

Again, there ARE definition changes.

From [1] (an article you referenced):

> When a person has more than one account and takes > actions (such as liking photos or adding comments) on the separate accounts, these actions may be counted separately even though they were made by the same person.

Notice the "may be counted" part (which is pretty vague and it's hard to argue the definition hasn't changed on a vague statement). Judging by the their latest announcement [2], by mentioning "may be counted" in [1], they probably meant this:

- If that persons' email was the same on two or more accounts, or they used the same mobile device, we'll count it as the one person

- Otherwise, we'll count it as a different person

Again, I'm quoting this part from [2]:

> For example, if someone used the same email address across their Facebook and Instagram accounts or accessed both platforms from the same device, we counted them as one person when they interacted with ads.

The definition of "may be counted" will essentially change after Facebook implements their counting update to:

- If a person didn't link their accounts under "Accounts Center", we'll count them as 2 people

- Otherwise we'll count them as one person

So Facebook won't make any attempts to implicitly associate 2 accounts as 1 person using emails/device IDs as they did in the past.

Based on the available data, the definition of what Facebook counts as a "unique person" HAS changed.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/283579896000936

[2] https://www.facebook.com/business/news/an-update-on-how-we-c...

I mean, yeah... FB made an announcement informing everyone that there was a change. I don't see how this requires us to grab our pitch forks over Facebook trying to protect user privacy and making a negligible change to an estimated derivative advertising metric.

Advertisers already know that Facebook may double count unique humans (confirmed by the Dec 2020 documentation). No one is double billed. No one is misled. Facebook is being very transparent here. There isn't anything to see here.

I think that this is driven by joint FB-IG campaigns. Before this change, if they believed that it was the same user (presumably through some kind of model), they counted a pair of accounts as 1 person.

After this change, they would count them as 2, given that the accounts aren't officially linked. To be fair, I suspect that an awful lot of accounts (at least in my circle) are linked as I see a bunch of posts on FB which come from IG.

Overall, this seems pretty sensible. All other things being equal, you'll see an increase in actions per unique people, but given that most advertisers use CPA to track performance, this shouldn't really be a big deal.

While I do support this change from a users' perspective, I find it hard to believe Facebook's official reason to "honor users' choices". What's the real motivation behind this Facebook update?

"Your ad was shown to 2 people" but it was 1 person. Multiple that by however many haven't linked their accounts, and FB is charging you^W advertisers twice to show the ad to the same person.

TFA: >If only a small percentage of your target audience has linked their accounts, when you run Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, you'll (falsely) see that you're reaching double the number of "people" (i.e. accounts). After all, Facebook will count that one person as two, if your ad shows both on Facebook and Instagram.

I'll give you a hint: it starts with an M and rhymes with 'honey'.

Mummy..? I don't see what Egyptology has to do with this conversation.

I was thinking Mahoney. I can see the reasoning from FB, like why should all of FB’s products be counted as one view? If the same person goes to FB then YouTube, the advertiser should need to pay FB and YouTube. The same is true for Instagram.

We can’t shit on everything FB does.

Mummy doesn't rhyme with honey

It does in my accent?

"m" doesn't rhyme with "n" though, what accent is yours? I'd say money rhymes with honey but not mummy.

It would be wise to stop believing what corporations say. They tend to lie.

Do you really believe that Facebook doesn't know if someone has multiple accounts if they failed to seek out a Facebook setting to link them together? This is the same Facebook that lifts data from people's phones even if they opt out of giving them that data.

It’s a way to goose the numbers to make it look like more people saw an ad than really did. This type of tactic is usually employed when a company is facing a real decline in users/views, so they start coming up with “creative” ways to make numbers look better than they really are.

> What's the real motivation behind this Facebook update?

Money

The cause is likely not money or goodwill: it’s legal privacy rulings. GDPR and the FCO ruling [1] have made it so cross-platform data (like the IG-FB data here to guess if two ad spend users are the same) isn’t allowed without explicit consent. My guess is that’s what’s driving this.

[1]. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/7/18215143/facebook-whatsapp...

This is the right answer. Matching user data without consent is becoming fairly risky from a data regulation standpoint, as well as user perception.

yep, its because of the FCO ruling. The other thing I think everyone spouting money are missing is that FB would much rather be able to use the link between your FB and IG accounts to better serve you up ads based on that combined data.

It may have went like this:

1. Facebook believed that the best thing for users was to have one account and identity across all services 2. Users expressed that they thought this was terrible 3. Facebook reconsidered, now thinks it's best to support accounts that aren't linked

It would not surprise me at all if this was done from a legal defensibility standpoint... if Facebook said that the accounts remain separate, but then it was discovered that they were for all intents and purposes linked behind the scenes, that's an even bigger problem.

I wouldn't jump to an insidious conspiracy to boost impression #s a couple percent (given that it's not obvious to me this affects their billing at all).

Yes, I'd bet a large amount of money that this was done due to privacy compliance reasons.

So people are now angry that FB instead of using all the data collected to detect people using multiple accounts now is using only the data provided to them in their account linking?

Is this bad? For prices/ads obviously, but in general is it?

The motivation behind such a move is likely iOS 14 updates.

So, to compensate they do this.

It's really difficult these days to find anything positive about Facebook and related products.

This looks like shrinkflation, the practice where a product is reduced in size and sold for the same price. It's very common in packaged food products. There's one key difference:

> Facebook/Instagram ad prices are already skyrocketing due to Apple's update.

So that adds a little wrinkle. I don't have a FB account and certainly don't advertise there, just saying.

Can someone who works in the ad tech space give some context on how seemingly advertisers being less effective drove up prices?

Who are these advertisers that are happy to pay 25% more for less?

Its not a great for advertisers to be paying 25% more for less, but what are advertisers choices? Switch to Google? Create an ad on TV? Who else can provide a single interface with (great?) analytics dashboards to reach a massive segment of our population with various levels of granularity?

I'm curious how they would handle this with regards to lift tests. You can ask Facebook to not show your ads to faction of the addressable audience, and then calculate sales for the treated and control groups. If they don't make the randomization binding across platforms, it can several reduce the incrementality measurement (effectiveness of Facebook ads).

Just key the experiment diversion on the email address rather than an internal user ID. That way the experiment and control groups will be consistent across the apps, with the downside that a user changing their email might migrate between groups. But changing your email has to be a very rare operation.

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