Page Creation in Facebook went down by 10%. What would you do? Let us say you have solved it. Pages are up and back to normal. However, WAUs went down by 5%. What would you do?

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Page Creation in Facebook went down by 10%. What would you do? Let us say you have solved it. Pages are up and back to normal. However, WAUs went down by 5%. What would you do?

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

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Execution

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prisingh · Answer 1 · 2020-05-20T23:05:34+0000

Let me briefly describe FB pages and its goal and ask few clarifying questions.

FB page is a public profile specifically created for Business, brands and celebrities. A page gathers fans and keep them informaed about happenings of the business.

Goal: Goal of FB page is to ocnnect brands/business/celebrieties with their fans and keep them informed.

1.When you say Page creation went down by 10% did it went down for all types of pages or a specific one like from celebrities or brands? And this is for new page creations ?

2.Did this drop happen suddently like in a week or was it gradual over a period of say 6 months? -ans gradual

3. Are we seeing this on a particular platform like iOS or Android? - No

4. Are we seeing this in a specific geographic location ? - No

5.Have we seen this similar behavior in the past such e.g during specific months - No

6. Are we seeing 10% decline only in pages or we are seeing the drop also in creation of groups, events or across other FB properties? - No

7. Are we seeing any drop in DAU/WAU of existing pages? This might explain if something specific is going on with Pages both creation and viewing

8. Due to this is there a impact to DAU/WAU on FB platform and can that be isolated only due to pages?

Considering No for above questions. I will closely look at what changes if any has been made to Pages in the last 6 months

To create a page

1. one goes to FB/Pages and says create

2. You add the description, follow instructions and type of page and then click create

Questions

a. Did we made any changes in last 6 months that does not result in a page creation even when one completes the information and hits create?

b. Did we change the deisgn of page creation that is asking too many questions and making it harder for companies to create page?

c. Did we change Ads bidding process and now charging a lot for the ads that companies are not creating enough pages?

d. Did we change newsfeed such that Pages will now will not be surfaced higher demotivating new businesess to create pages?

I will look closely into all these to understand the reasons for fall in page creation. Considering we fix page creation now WAU dropped by 5%

Question: When you say WAU, do you mean users actively engaging with your page and by engagement I mean commenting, liking, sharing etc or you consider just visiting the page also as an activity under WAU.

1.Did this WAU decrease happen immediately over a period of couple weeks?

2.Can we isolate WAU decrease only to new pages that were created or across all pages?

3. Assuming no other changes made to newsfeed that is causing lower reach of pages.

4. Did we change anything in page insights that is not providing enough information to the business to target the right users, demographic etc.

5. Anything changed in how people comment, react etc that is demotivating people to engage. However, if thsi happened we would see this across the FB properties and not just pages.

6.Did FB change the anything in the page bot creation that is not letting customers now easily contact the business?

7.Do we see a decrease in activities across pages such as videos, Live videos etc that is not motivating people to engage with pages

I think i will go over these one by one to isolate the issue.

-------

This is a great question and I will definitely need feedback on this :)

Tushar · Answer 2 · 2021-06-14T19:14:31+0000

Lets focus on the page creation problem first

Clarify:

Validate: I would like to validate my understanding of page creation. I assume we are talking about the Facebook app. They are created by businesses, influencers, and community-driven for monuments, schools, etc. They provide information such as website, hours of operation, media content, description, and engagement of users on their timeline. These cannot be created by consumers for themselves. IVR: Yes
Is the drop sudden or gradual? IVR: Sudden
- Is it overnight, WOW IVR: WOW
Assuming this is happening across all platforms and globally? IVR: Yes
Assuming that the drop has been observed in the total creations and not an increase in page deletions IVR: Yes

Approach: I would start with the Fb mission and how page creations fits into it. Then I would analyse and look at some of external and internal factors that may have caused it. Once I find the root cause, I will look at remediation steps. Sounds good? IVR: Yes

Mission: FB mission is to build communities and bring people closer. Page is a fundamental feature for businesses, places and influencers to provide info to their followers and connect with them. It also entails media content and lists all the recent activities related to that business on the page.

A 10% WOW drop in creation seems to be huge considering that Fb has millions of pages.

INTERNAL FACTORS:

Absolute no.: Were there any events that actually triggered a spike in creation in past weeks
Metric: I will check if the way we measure the metric and data sources have changed
Recent changes: Any UI or recent changes (system level, page verification or capping) pushed
A/B testing: any other teams that are doing AB testing and impacting top of the funnel - registrations, signups
Marketing/Pricing: changes in promotions pricing or new pricing changes

EXTERNAL FACTORS:

Seasonality: how does it compare to last year if this is an expected trend
Competitor: New competitor or features or pricing by competitor that are attracting new businesses and influencers
Regulatory: New govt. regulations monitoring social media footprint for businesses fearing tax implications
Global event: pandemic or economy in shambles preventing people to open new businesses
Bad PR: affects the sentiment in users and so new businesses don't want to associate with FB. This would also impact other metrics
Third party: internet shutdown or latency because of translation/CDN providers. Unlikely as it would impact only a certain geography and would impact other metrics

Assuming that it occurred due to a recent UI bug confusing people how to create a page. After solving it, I will now focus on WAU

What does WAU mean? Does it mean that users who have logged in at least one time in the past week are considered as active? IVR: Yes

Assuming that the fix for page creations lead to this drop in WAU. We need to assess the tradeoff's here:

10% page creations Vs 5% WAU

Page creations:

Pro's
- Engagement: contributes to engagement between businesses, influencers and consumers thru tagging/chatting
- Revenue:
  - Ad revenue thru businesses
  - Premium profile revenue: businesses pay FB for getting insights abt trends, users
- User Segment Impacts: businesses directly and consumers indirectly as they have narrower selections of businesses to look/interact/transact with

WAU: Assuming this is happening across the board for both new and existing users (consumers/businesses). e.g.The creation change may be allowing more businesses to create pages and the spam activity/content/response time has been impacted irritating the users and not using FB

Pro's
- Engagement: drop means people are using FB less due to the change
- Revenue:
  - Ad revenue
- User segment: All

WAU contributes to the overall health of the FB ecosystem. More the number of active users leads to more conversations bringing in more ad $

I would look at the type of users that have dropped being active, look at their demongraphic and check to see how much revenue did they bring thru the network effect (difficult to measure). Compare it with page creations and personalize the experience for the demographics - set of people(superfans) bringing more ad revenue and network would have feature change for drop in creations

- set of people(no fans) bringing in low ad revenue and network (likely will be new users) would see feature change to lift creations

Looking at the data and proxy metrics, I would make a decision.

Please provide feedback. Thank you!