Facebook Relevance Score
Facebook just recently announced a new feature to the ad manager called Facebook relevance score. The score is used to help Facebook determine how they will deliver ads to a targeted audience. Not only are they using this score to help Facebook, the company, but also to help the advertiser in understanding whether their ads are relevant to their targeted audience.
The relevance score can be found in your ad manager under reporting tools. Not everyone has the feature, but as of last week Facebook started to roll the feature out to advertisers.
If you are an advertiser, here’s what you should know about the relevance score.
How the relevance score works:
The score is first calculated based on the positive & negative feedback that Facebook expects to receive from the audience an advertiser is targeting. If the ad is expected to be highly relevant, the score will be higher, up to a 10 and if the ad is expected to be of lower relevance the score will obviously be lower. (Note: expected positive & negative feedback will be different based on the ad’s objective, which may include video views, conversions, etc.)
The relevance score will be updated as the ad begins to run. This will all be updated based upon how people interact with the ad. This means the feedback of Facebook ad from a targeted audience will be monitored and calculated to create the advertiser’s relevance score.
So you may be wondering how Facebook collects that feedback. Well if you surf through your news feed of Facebook, find a sponsored story, you will see on the top right of the ad a little arrow that you can click on to leave feedback on an ad.
Btw….If an advertiser creates an ad in which their bid is to reach a certain amount of people or frequency there will not be a relevance score provided in the report.
So why should you care about a relevance score?
Understanding the score can be a great benefit to you, the advertiser. If you have a high relevance score it will most likely result in a lower cost to reach your targeted audience. Very similar to a CTR. The higher the CTR, the lower the cost.
Facebook’s ad delivery system is designed to show the right content to the right audience. This will help further assist Facebook in their efforts to deliver ads that people want / or aren’t annoyed to see in their news feed and/or right hand side of their news feed.
This is not to say Facebook is only using a relevance score now to determine how they deliver ads. They will also still use the bid price from the advertiser. For instance, if two advertisers target the same audience and one advertiser has a high relevance score but the other advertiser has a lower bid, this does not mean the higher relevance score would necessarily win out on the ad space.
But, having strong a relevance score on an ad will help advertisers see more efficient delivery through the Facebook Ads system.
The relevance score can also help with split testing of ads. If an advertiser creates different ads with 5 different images, copy, or descriptions, the relevance score can help an advertiser determine which ad offers the higher relevance to their targeted audience. In that case the advertiser would want to highly consider using that ad and scale up.
Another great reason to pay attention to the relevance score is during the optimization process. If an advertiser starts to see an ad drop in relevancy, then it might be time to tweak the ad, recreate, or pause it.
Even though this is a great addition to the Facebook ad reporting, the relevance score should not be an advertiser’s only metric that is analyzed when it comes to performance.
The ultimate main factor should be…..that the ad is meeting the objective and the business is profitable.
An example in our business would be, leads & sales. If we created an ad and our main objective was to generate sign ups for a webinar and the objective was met at a reasonable cost to our business, then that result is more important that the relevancy score. Now if we were not meeting our objective, then something to look at would be the relevance score. If our relevance score was low, then we could consider targeting a different audience or changing up the ad’s image, description, etc., to try and raise that relevance score and lower the cost.
Again, the relevance score as of writing this is rolling out globally this month. It can be viewed in the ad reporting tools and is also available through ads API. Don’t ask me what API is, as that’s over my head. lol
Let’s just say it has to do with being a partner of the API and/or developer, none of which I am.
I hope you found value in this post and let me know if you have started seeing the relevance score in your ad reporting back office.
tags: advertising facebook, facebook ad examples, facebook ad cost,
