Metrics question
Engagement on Facebook stories is going up but Ads revenue is going down. What will you do?
- Meta
- Metrics
- Hard
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Whether you can diagnose a metric divergence by examining the mechanism connecting engagement to revenue rather than assuming they should always move together.
How to approach it
- Clarify: confirm both trends are real and not measurement artifacts, checking the ads revenue tracking separately from engagement tracking.
- Hypothesize a mechanism: rising Stories engagement could be organic content crowding out ad slots, or ad load in Stories being too low relative to feed.
- Check ad load and fill rate: has ad frequency or advertiser demand in Stories specifically dropped even as views increased.
- Check ad relevance and pricing: an influx of new or different users engaging with Stories might have lower advertiser demand or lower CPMs for that segment.
- Segment revenue by surface: isolate whether the ads revenue drop is concentrated in Stories specifically or across the whole platform.
- Propose an action once diagnosed, for example increasing ad load in Stories carefully, or improving targeting for the new engaged segment, while monitoring user experience guardrails.
What a strong answer includes
- Does not assume engagement and revenue should move together, correctly treating this as two potentially disconnected metrics needing separate investigation.
- Proposes a specific, testable hypothesis, like insufficient ad load growth in Stories relative to engagement growth.
- Balances the fix with a user experience guardrail, since increasing ad load carelessly could hurt the very engagement that grew.
Common mistakes
- Assuming engagement and revenue must correlate and looking for an unrelated cause.
- No segmentation by surface to isolate where the revenue drop is actually occurring.
- Proposing to simply add more ads without checking user experience impact first.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you decide how much to increase ad load without hurting the engagement you just gained?
- What would you check first to rule out a measurement error?
More metrics questions
- How would you measure the success of Facebook Likes?Meta · Metrics · Medium
- How would you measure improvements made to Facebook messenger?Meta · Metrics · Easy
- Imagine you are the PM in charge of Reactions on Facebook - the new way to interact with posts by using “love”, “haha”, “wow”, “sad”, and “angry” reactions. What would success look like in terms of number of non-like reactions per post at launch and how do you come up with this? Would this number differ by reaction? Why or why not?Meta · Metrics · Hard
- You launched a new signup flow to encourage new users to add more profile information. A/B test results indicate that the % of people that added more information increased by 8%. However, 7 day retention decreased by 2%. What do you do?Google · Metrics · Hard
- Define the metrics for YouTube search.Google · Metrics · Medium
- You are the PM of Instagram app. The MAU has been constant but DAU has declined. What will you do?Meta · Metrics · Medium
More questions from Meta
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop