Another metrics mistake affects Facebook's Instant Article publishers

For the third time in two months, Facebook announced another metrics-related issue with the latest reveal saying that the social media giant experienced problems providing accurate numbers to publishers on its Instant Articles service.

Instant Articles are fast-loading interactive articles that can be loaded directly in the Facebook News Feed -- a format which is used several media publishers.

According to a report in Tech Crunch, Facebook uncovered an issue that affected a "small group" of Instant Articles publishers, causing those numbers to be underreported. The problem was brought to Facebook's attention by media measurement and analytics company comScore.

Facebook said the issue only affected those publishers who were using its "legacy comScore integration" who also supported HTTPS on their websites.

From September 20 to November 30, this caused Instant Articles' iPhone traffic numbers to be underreported, though iPad and Android traffic was not affected.

The company now claimed that the error has now been fixed and is working with comScore to provide updated estimates to the group of partners who were impacted.

Earlier this month, it announced issues with metrics affecting ad reach, streaming reactions and like and share counts.

In November, it found problems with video and Page metrics, referrals in Analytics for Apps and Instant Articles.

--IANS

sku/sm/vm