The price of moving fast is that you have more mistakes. So you may have noticed some weird stats in your Facebook analytics. For example, today is November 26, but we have a post that is on December 1st:

And then there’s one of our client pages that reports almost 300,000 new fans in one day:

Though we all wish we did get 300,000 new fans in one day, it turns out to be a bug.

Sometimes there are holes in the data. In this case, we show a zero for one metric for one day.  The impact of this is that it looks like we lost all our fans in one day and then gained them back:

The moral of the story– watch your stats carefully. Don’t trust data blindly. If you see one stat that is off, check the related stats to corroborate. For example, if we really did get 300,000 new fans in one day, you’d see a massive increase in impressions, likes, storytellers, and other metrics.

This is a common issue with pulling data Facebook API data, as well as what you see in the web-based insights. But a strong data analyst won’t be fooled. Two of the above images come from our tool, which pulls from the various Facebook APIs, while one is a screenshot from the web insights.

What have you seen in the data?

Dennis Yu

Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads. He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations. You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel. You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.

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