A few years ago,
Facebook introduced the Relevance Score as an attempt to ‘grade’ your ads on
how relevant they are to your target audience.
Unfortunately, it
was not always clear exactly how this scoring system worked and it left many
users confused on how to improve their scores, which was a pretty big deal considering these scores seemed to have some impact
on the performance of your Facebook ads.
Now Facebook is
rolling out a new system to show advertisers how their ads are performing in
terms of relevance to your audience. Instead of the Relevance Score, you will
now see three new metrics that combine to determine relevance.
- Quality ranking: your ad’s quality and how it’s
perceived from the particular target audience
- Engagement rate ranking: the expected engagement rate for
your ad and how it compares with other competing ads
- Conversion rate ranking: the expected conversion rate for
your ad and how it compares with other competing ads
How Does This Help Your Facebook Ad
Campaigns?
Facebook claims
that these new ad relevance diagnostics will not factor into an ad’s
performance in the auction, unlike the previous version – but that doesn’t mean
that these metrics can’t be of assistance in optimizing your ads. This update
can be considered as Facebook’s attempt to improve trust with advertisers by
offering more detailed insights on what makes a successful ad.
For example, if
you see that your conversion ranking is low while the other metrics remain
high, you can see that Facebook perceives your post-click experience to be
lacking – aka your landing page experience. With this information, you can
focus on improving that experience while leaving the ad itself alone.
In theory this
removes some of the guesswork for which portion of the ad journey is hurting
the overall performance of your campaign.
Why Did Facebook Make This Change?
Facebook has been
scrutinized in the past for not providing valuable data to advertisers on how
to make the most out of their ads causing more and more advertisers to spend
less on their platform or at least diversify their ad spend.
Data behind ad
performance is essential in today’s competitive environment and the updates
from Facebook provide advertisers more actionable information, and granular
data, compared to just a relevance score. This will allow advertisers to narrow
their focus when optimizing ad campaigns, make better decisions around how they
choose to spend their ad dollars, and understand how to best tailor specific
campaigns, saving valuable time and resources.
If advertisers
are more confident that the platform is spending their ad budget wisely, the
more they’re likely to spend with Facebook.
Facebook
continues to make updates to their ad platform all the time. Staying up-to-date
on these changes allows you to modify your strategies and evolve your
campaigns.
If you need help
with Facebook or any
other marketing strategies for growing your business, jump on a call with us at (407) 682-2222.