Digital 2022: Changes in Meta’s Reporting
Towards the end of 2021, Meta made significant changes to the way it reports potential advertising reach for its various platforms.
This article provides details of these changes, and provides useful context for anyone tracking Meta’s advertising audience numbers over time.
The most obvious change has been a move to reporting potential reach as a range (e.g. 10,000–15,000), instead of publishing absolute figures (e.g. 12,500).
Because of this change, we now use the midpoints of these new published ranges as the basis for our calculations and reporting, as we already did for platforms like Snapchat and Twitter.
Revised numbers
It’s not just Meta’s approach to reporting that’s changed though; it seems the company may also have used the occasion of this shift to make some revisions to its base data.
Note that such revisions aren’t a new phenomenon, and the company appears to make “corrections” to its advertising reach figures on a regular basis.
However, this latest round of revisions was somewhat delayed compared with previous timelines, and the associated corrections appear to have been more aggressive than what we’ve seen in previous adjustments too.
Admittedly, with a difference of roughly 15 percent between the lower and upper limits of the company’s new published ranges, it’s tricky to know what the exact reach figures might be.
But comparing the midpoint of these new ranges to the absolute figures published in the company’s tools back in October 2021, it seems likely that Zuck and team engaged in some major data housekeeping in the last quarter of 2021.
For example, figures published in the company’s self-service advertising tools for potential Facebook reach have fallen by 7.3 percent (-167 million users) at a worldwide level compared with the figures published in the same tools in October 2021.
The new figures are also down by 3.4 percent (-75 million) compared with the absolute figures published this time last year.
However, it’s unclear whether these corrections to ad audience figures will also affect Facebook’s overall MAU figure.
For context though, it’s worth pointing out that the company has never published a drop in global MAU figures, even when it made previous corrections to its advertising audience figures [note: click here to understand why Facebook’s ad reach isn’t the same as its total active user base].
Country-level changes
Digging deeper, our analysis suggests that the most significant corrections to ad audience figures occurred across countries in Africa.
For example, the midpoint of the potential reach range for Djibouti is more than 20 percent lower than the absolute figure that the company published back in October, while Ethiopia, Rwanda, Benin, Guinea, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone all saw drops of more than 10 percent.
More developed countries also saw some meaningful corrections since October though, with the figure for the United Kingdom down by roughly 10 percent, and the figure for Malaysia down by more than 12 percent.
Indeed, based on the midpoints of the new ranges, only three countries saw the reported figure for potential Facebook advertising reach increase between October 2021 and January 2022: Malawi (+6.8 percent), the Northern Mariana Islands (+2.5 percent), and Papua New Guinea (+0.2 percent).
So, given the breadth and consistency of downward corrections, it’s likely that most changes are the result of changes in Facebook’s audience sampling methodology, rather than a drop in actual Facebook use.
There is a good chance that the company removed a meaningful number of duplicate and “fake” accounts at the same time, which may have contributed to some of these changes.
However, for clarity, we do not believe that these latest figures are indicative of any large-scale drop in genuine Facebook use.
Furthermore, with Facebook’s total ad reach still exceeding 2.1 billion even after these corrections, marketers can rest assured that the platform still offers some of the most compelling opportunities to reach and engage global and local audiences.
Want to learn more about Facebook use in 2022? Check out our full Digital 2022 Global Overview Report by clicking here.
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