The errors affected more than 418,000 advertisers on the professional networking platform for over two years. LinkedIn said a pair of glitches discovered in August inflated its metrics. The company said 90% of the advertisers affected had overpaid by less than $25 and would receive credits for future ad campaigns.
LinkedIn said Thursday it discovered a pair of measurement errors that led to more than 400,000 advertisers overpaying for campaigns on the professional networking platform.
In a blog post, the Microsoft Corp.-owned company said its engineering team found and fixed two measurement issues in its ad products, which led to overreporting of video views and ad impressions on sponsored-content campaigns. The bugs affected more than 418,000 advertisers over the course of more than two years, it said.
With video ads, LinkedIn discovered that some organic videos and video ads would play while they were off-screen on Apple Inc.’s iOS devices.
If a LinkedIn user scrolled past a video ad while the video was buffering, for example, the ad would autoplay even when out of view, but still be tracked and logged as a video view or completion.
That may have resulted in overstated measures including video views and view-through rates, as well as overcharging advertisers paying by the view, according to a LinkedIn spokesman.
The company also said it may have been over-reporting impressions on sponsored-content campaigns in the LinkedIn feed—for example, in cases when users would rotate their phones or quickly move to other parts of the app, the spokesman said.
After uncovering the issues in August, LinkedIn fixed them this month, the spokesman added.
Overall, the company said more than…
