And when to act on it!
Quite a while ago Facebook introduced a new way of measuring how well your ad is performing with the concept of a relevance score. The idea is that Facebook, using data like people’s positive and negative responses to your ads, have an algorithm that suggests how relevant your ad creative is to the audience you’re targeting.
What does it mean?
The relevancy score is a scale from 0-10. 0 being the lowest relevancy to your target audience, and 10 being the highest. If you know your target audience well then it’s quite obvious to you whether a piece of content is relevant to them or not, but now Facebook have their own algorithm in place that helps them decide on their end. Just by looking at an ad, you can usually tell if it’s going to have a good relevancy score by the amount of likes, comments and shares. But what you can’t see unless you’re the owner of the page is how many clicks the post has had, which has an effect on the relevancy score. You also can’t see how many people have chosen to ‘stop seeing ads from xyz’ after they saw the ad, and other actions like this.
Your ads don’t get a relevancy score until they’ve reached a minimum of 1000 people, to give Facebook enough data to put you on the relevancy scale. But the score your ad gets can play a huge role in it’s success.
How to use it, and when to act on it.
Now let’s get one thing straight before we talk about what changes you should be making to your targeting and creatives to improve your relevancy score. You should never be running ads with the sole aim to get a high relevancy score. You should be aiming for engagement, or website clicks, or conversions etc. If we’ve got an ad running for a client that’s getting them 10 sales for every £2 spent, but the relevancy score is only 3 do you think we’re going to change anything? NO CHANCE. We’re leaving that little gem alone.
However, when an ad isn’t performing very well using the relevancy score can be a good indicator as to why it’s not performing. You see if Facebook thinks your ad is a 10 on the relevancy score, they will be very happy to keep serving it up to your target audience as Facebook now believe the ad will give the user a positive experience. This has a positive effect on your CPM’s, CTR’s and other metrics that are important to you. So if an ad is under performing, check it’s relevancy score to see what Facebook think of it. If it’s low, you need to change things up!
How do I improve my ad’s relevancy score?
Creative! Always start with your ad creative. Pick it apart and be very critical about every aspect. Imagine you are seeing the ad in your newsfeed as part of your target audience (which you can do now with the preview link Facebook will give you). Is the image or video you’ve used enough to grab people attention and get them to react positively? Does the headline speak to your niche and is your call to action clear enough?
Audience. If you’ve worked hard on your creative and believe it’s the best it can be to get a positive reaction out of your audience, then you may need to look at your targeting methods. You don’t want to be showing an ad for guitars to people who aren’t guitar players (finally an explanation as to why we used today’s featured image). It’s easy to get targeting slightly wrong. Remember sometimes trying to drill in too closely to your audience can have a negative impact as there aren’t enough people for Facebook to optimise the ad on.
