When I first heard rumblings about this I felt a bit of an 'eeek awkward' moment but when I read that the metrics that they had miscalculated was probably the single most important one that marketeers judge their success on I felt a sense of dread.
As this article outlines, the initial figures for the largest social media player launching their video offering were great, engagement was high - but it soon emerged that the average watch time was not as good as they claimed. And whilst the error was picked up and amended by them relatively quickly it did leave me pondering on how vulnerable marketeers are to the stats provided by the big players?
As the name suggests, the Average Watch Time shows advertisers how long people stay on their video. To illustrate, if a marketer is promoting a ten-minute video, and the average watch time is eight and a half minutes, it means that most of the people who are clicking on the video are watching it all the way through.
