Meta needed advertisers to consider its ecommerce advert product, Outlets adverts, was outperforming the competitors, per a whistleblower grievance filed in a U.Okay. court docket.
The previous worker alleges the social media large artificially inflated return on advert spend (ROAS) by counting transport charges as income, subsidizing bids in advert auctions, and making use of undisclosed reductions.
The grievance, seen by ADWEEK, was filed with the London Central Employment Tribunal on Wednesday (August 20) by Samujjal Purkayastha, a former product supervisor on Meta’s Outlets adverts staff. The doc claims Meta artificially inflated efficiency metrics to push manufacturers towards its fledgling ecommerce advert product.
The corporate’s motivation, the grievance says, was partly to fight Apple’s 2021 privateness adjustments that lower the troves of iOS monitoring info that had lengthy powered Meta’s advert machine.
Meta’s former chief monetary officer (CFO), David Wehner, mentioned the adjustments would value “on the order of $10 billion” in losses in the course of the firm’s This fall 2021 earnings name. Person purchases on Fb or Instagram Outlets pages would supply extra first-party knowledge, nevertheless.
Purkayastha, who joined Meta (then Fb) in 2020 as a product supervisor on the Fb Synthetic Intelligence Utilized Analysis staff, was reassigned to the Outlets Adverts staff in March 2022 and remained on the firm till Feb. 19, 2025.
He alleged that in inner critiques in early 2024, Meta knowledge scientists discovered the return on advert spend (ROAS) from Outlets adverts had been inflated between 17% and 19%. This discrepancy stemmed from Meta counting transport charges and taxes as a part of a sale, though that cash by no means went to retailers, he alleged.
The corporate’s different advert merchandise exclude these figures, in keeping with opponents like Google, the grievance reads.
With out together with the charges and taxes, Outlets adverts carried out no higher than Meta’s conventional adverts, Purkayastha claimed.
“This was vital,” the grievance reads. “Along with the ROAS efficiency metric being overstated by practically a fifth, it meant that, quite than having exceeded our main goal, the Outlets Adverts staff had in actual fact missed it as soon as the determine was lowered to take account of the factitious inflation.”
Purkayastha introduced these considerations to senior management throughout a number of conferences between 2022 and 2024, in line with the grievance.
ADWEEK reached out to Meta for a response to the grievance. On the time of publication, they didn’t reply.
Charges and taxes in ROAS
The brand new ROAS quantity, in line with the grievance, got here right down to a quiet change in math.
Round mid-2022, Purkayastha found Meta was calculating ROAS for Outlets adverts utilizing a conversion worth that included transport charges and taxes within the sale worth. Against this, Meta’s commonplace adverts, in addition to rivals like Google, used “internet” figures that excluded these charges when reporting return on advert spend to consumers. The distinction, he claims, gave Outlets adverts an artificially rosy glow.
Advertisers had little method of realizing this, he claimed, as a result of Meta’s Adverts Supervisor dashboard displayed efficiency with out disclosing how Outlets adverts’ ROAS was calculated, masking the mismatch between merchandise.
The information, utilizing this new ROAS calculation, indicated that Outlets adverts have been a greater funding than its commonplace “enterprise as standard” campaigns, which drive customers outdoors Meta’s apps, in line with the grievance. Inside studies recommended 70% to 80% of Outlets adverts outperformed BAU adverts, nicely above the corporate’s 60% benchmark.
Restoration from Apple’s privateness adjustments
These alleged discrepancies, in line with the grievance, have been a part of a broader push by Meta to shore up advert efficiency following Apple’s sweeping privateness updates.
After Apple rolled out its App Monitoring Transparency (ATT) function in 2021, Meta executives scrambled for what they referred to as “resilient income” streams insulated from Apple’s privateness strikes. Outlets adverts, which saved monitoring and transactions inside Meta’s personal apps, have been billed as that resolution.
In its push to maneuver advertisers to its new product, Meta started subsidizing Outlets Adverts bids in auctions, typically by as a lot as 100%, to make sure they have been exhibited to customers extra usually than non-Outlets adverts, in line with the grievance. This additionally elevated the probability of conversion from Outlets Adverts, and would reinforce the phantasm that they have been performing strongly, Purkayastha mentioned.
Meta’s push to bolster advert efficiency additionally prolonged to its monitoring programs.
The corporate’s Aggregated Occasion Measurement (AEM) was designed to watch conversions for conventional campaigns with out violating Apple’s privateness guidelines. The primary iteration, AEM1, was launched in April 2021 and used machine studying to mannequin which customers may convert whereas respecting those that opted out of monitoring.
In keeping with Purkayastha, one other mechanism referred to as AEM2 rolled out shortly thereafter and linked exercise on Meta’s apps to looking and purchases on third-party websites utilizing deterministic matching, which relied on private identifiers comparable to names, emails, cellphone numbers, addresses, and IP addresses.
Within the grievance, Purkayastha mentioned he believed AEM2 bypassed restrictions imposed by Apple’s privateness framework, although it mitigated a lot of the lack of knowledge from the privateness adjustments.
Purkayastha was terminated from Meta in February 2025, in line with the grievance. His submitting with the employment tribunal is a part of an software for interim aid, requesting that his former place be reinstated.
