Facebook Replacing Ad Relevance Score With Three New Metrics

Facebook has announced that from the end of April marketers should expect a metric reshuffle, as it kills off a raft of obsolete reports. The most notable being Ad Relevance Score.

Relevance score launched in 2015 and has been an important, if not somewhat annoying, key performance indicator (KPI) ever since.

Ad relevance score is a bastardised version of Google Quality Score, with both supposedly providing online advertisers, or clients, with an insight to the quality of online campaigns they are running.

Both are meant to consider things like targeting, expected results, fatigue, interest, suitability, etc. However, unlike Google’s Quality Score, Facebook’s relevance score is actually quite unhelpful.

Thankfully, from the end of April, Facebook is rebooting with three new relevancy type metrics, instead of just one relevance score. These will be:

1. Quality ranking – How your ad's perceived quality compared with ads competing for the same audience
2. Engagement rate ranking – How your ad's expected engagement rate compared with ads competing for the same audience
3. Conversion rate ranking – How your ad's expected conversion rate compared with ads that had the same optimisation goal and competed for the same audience

As with the previous relevance score, these new metrics are not factored into an ad’s performance in the auction. Instead providing insights into how changes to creative assets, audience targeting or post-click experience may impact ad performance.

Marketers' Love/ Hate Facebook Relevance Score Relationship

As noted previously, relevance score is interesting, but not always particularly actionable.

On the other hand, for clients managing agencies or team activity, it does provide a high-level view of campaign performance, even if you are just boosting posts. Therefore, it can be handy for a topline overview.

For the uninitiated, relevance score is normally accessible at the Ad Level within a Facebook ad campaign, within Facebook Ads Manager.

A quick glance at your relevance score column gives you a figure out of 10 for each Facebook or Instagram ad you have run. Generally speaking, a higher score allows for cheaper ad delivery.

On conversion-centric activity it is not always a big deal if relevance scores are low, as long as the broader return on ad spend (ROAS) is positive.

However, for brand, awareness, reach or traffic led activity it is perhaps more important. In these examples we are normally looking to generate the greatest level of awareness or reach at the lowest cost. Hence, relevance score tends to matter more.

Check out this handy analysis from AdEspresso, which nicely sums up the interrelationship between relevance score, ad costs and expected results.

The problem with relevance score, as it has stood, is that it does not tell communicators WHY their ads have scored 2 or 8?

To date it has been more a case of: 'You are running rubbish Facebook ads, and here’s a metric to prove it’. Unlike Google’s comparative Quality Score, and Google Ad Diagnosis tools, which break down the WHY behind scorings, making optimisation easier.

Facebook’s new, and revamped, ad quality metrics are another welcome 2019 edition and something which will hopefully make it easier to boost flagging 2019 social marketing efforts.

Roll on 30^th April…