LinkedIn has an ad measurement problem

Class action lawsuit alleges 'unfair-competition, fraud, and breach-of-contract claims.'

David Nyurenberg ran a LinkedIn advertising campaign for his company Valor Digital, a digital vendor for agencies and brands. Nothing out of the ordinary, he said. A couple hundred bucks pushed through his personal account to get some awareness for his company. And then in November, he got an email from LinkedIn.

“Thank you for being a valued LinkedIn customer. 

We are committed to transparency and the integrity of our ads products, and want to let you know about two measurement issues that our engineering team discovered in August and have subsequently fixed. 

As a result of these issues, we may have over-reported some of your Sponsored Content metrics for impression and video views.” 

Oopsies. 

Last month, the company posted that it knew since the summer that there were measurement discrepancies for more than two years.

In August, our engineering team discovered and then subsequently fixed two measurement issues in our ads products that may have overreported some Sponsored Content campaign metrics for impression and video views. Together these issues potentially impacted more than 418,000 customers over a two plus year period. More than 90% of customers saw an impact of less than US $25, and we are currently working with all customers who were impacted to provide full credit to their accounts. 

On Monday, the law firm Keller Lenkner, on behalf of a class of plaintiffs, sued LinkedIn “alleging unfair-competition, fraud, and breach-of-contract claims on behalf of a class of plaintiffs who purchased advertisements on the platform.”

In a statement, Keller Lenkner partner Warren Postman said: "It is unacceptable for digital advertising platforms such as LinkedIn to misreport metrics that are crucial to marketers in deciding how much to bid on advertising slots, if at all. This lawsuit is being filed not just to stop LinkedIn's allegedly unfair and fraudulent business practices, but to increase transparency into whether LinkedIn's advertising metrics truly reflect user engagement with paid advertisements."

When asked for comment about the lawsuit, a LinkedIn spokesperson said, "We've seen the filing. Our post is the best source for comment - we are currently working with all customers who were impacted to provide full credit to their accounts."

LinkedIn is just the latest platform to misrepresent and miscount its ad metrics. In 2016, for example, Business Insider reported that Twitter found a bug that inflated video ad metrics byas much as 35 percent. Facebook, last year, settled a class action lawsuit from advertisers after admitting it overstated video metrics from 2015-2016, a moment in time that altered the media landscape as publishers ‘pivoted to video’ based on the efficacy of Facebook video metrics. 

And as we discussed on Monday, Facebook continues to have ad issues with some small businesses. 

The drumbeat of frustration from agencies and business owners gets louder each day, as they complain that platform ad management is getting worse because the platforms don’t allow for third-party verification. 

“At the same time all of them keep fucking up,” Nyurenberg said. “And who knows what they haven’t admitted to.  Meanwhile advertisers have no recourse.”

In September, Ryan Gellis, founding partner at digital agency RMG, started a conversation on LinkedIn: 

Theory: The LinkedIn ad network is full of fraudulent accounts and unchecked misclicks that artificially inflate the cost of advertising and result in poor performance compared to other ad networks.

This led to a 26-minute video Gellis posted on YouTube showing, as he says, that the

“LinkedIn ad network has fraudulent clicks and/or misclicks that don’t get attributed to the users that are being passed through as leads in campaigns.” 

According to the class action news website, Top Class Actions: 

TopDevz LLC, a named plaintiff in the class action lawsuit, reports using various types of LinkedIn ads to promote its business. The company says it was told by LinkedIn there was value in buying advertising space on the networking site and was promised “high-quality professional audiences.” 

TopDevz says in the class action lawsuit it was told users “are not just coming to LinkedIn in huge numbers; they’re engaging with a huge purpose … specifically to connect to networks, brands, and opportunities by engaging with high-quality content across the LinkedIn platform.”

The problem, according to the plaintiffs, is that there’s no way to verify these promises made by LinkedIn. Marketers buying LinkedIn ads are forced to depend on metrics provided by LinkedIn. 

MediaPost reports:

Realtor Drew Krisco, along with software and mobile app developer Livly, brought a similar class-action complaint against the company on November 20.

“Advertisers pay extortionary amounts to reach target audiences and rely on platforms like LinkedIn to be honest brokers in how they track, monitor, and charge for those ads,” Krisco and Livly allege in their complaint. “While advertisers have certain tools available to them to track their own ads, certain information can only be known and conveyed by LinkedIn itself, leaving advertisers in a vulnerable position to act in blind reliance on LinkedIn’s own metrics and reporting.”

As long as the platforms remain closed systems, not allowing for third-party verification, advertisers will have to ride out the vicissitudes of each platforms’ recurring metrics-reporting bugs. 

This is the cost of business, the platforms signal to advertisers: If you want to use the infrastructure we’ve built to market to your audience on our property, you have to pay this rent knowing that you may not get accurate data. Buyer beware. 

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Grateful Dead, “Deal”

Some interesting links:

For cool interactives:

• A virtual walking tour of NYC’s Chinatown over the decades (NYT)

• When will you be able to get your covid-19 vaccine? (NYT)

For accelerating change:

• Warner Bros. to Debut Entire 2021 Film Slate, Including ‘Dune’ and ‘Matrix 4,’ Both on HBO Max and In Theaters (Variety)

For platforms:

• Facebook to start policing anti-Black hate speech more aggressively than anti-White comments, documents show (Washington Post)

• Facebook to remove misinformation about Covid vaccines (CNBC)

• Federal Labor Agency Says Google Wrongly Fired 2 Employees (NYT)

• One of Google's leading AI researchers says she's been fired in retaliation for an email to other employees (Business Insider)

• YouTube makes changes to limit hate speech and boost inclusion (Axios)

For retailers-as-media-companies:

• Walgreens Introduces Walgreens Advertising Group (wag), a New Advanced Data and Technology-led Retail Media Offering for Brands to Deliver Personalized Experiences to their Best Shoppers (Business Wire)

For ongoing conversation of digital advertising efficacy:

• Does advertising work? (Freakonomics)

• The Digital Advertising Sector’s Original Sin, And How We Must Atone (AdExchanger)

For account wins:

• Visa hires Wieden+Kennedy, Publicis as global agencies (Ad Age)