Facebook advertising is recognized as one of the best ways for businesses to connect with potential customers. And, now that companies’ organic reach on the network has decreased, it’s more important than ever to master the best practices that drive engagement and sales.
As advertisers learn more about its platform, Facebook has accelerated the pace of innovation.
One feature that’s absolutely crucial to success: Relevance Scores.
Relevance Scores are somewhat analogous to the Quality Scores used by Google to rate (and price) advertising. It’s essential to monitor your Relevance Scores throughout an ad’s life and make changes accordingly. To do so, you first need to understand them.
What You Need to Know About Relevance Scores
Relevance Scores are an automated metric that rates how relevant a given advertisement is to your target audience. While the concept of relevance remains somewhat mysterious, it relates to how “on-target” your ad is and whether your target users like it.
When ads are flagged, reported, or marked “not relevant,” their score takes a hit.
As your ad gathers feedback, the results are aggregated and an overall Relevance Score will be assigned to the ad. The lowest possible score is 1, while the highest score is 10 – another aspect that may remind experienced PPC marketers of Google AdWords.
Brand new ads can receive a relevance score based on expected performance. This gives you the opportunity to test new creative collateral, including text and graphics, before it goes live on the platform. While a high score doesn’t guarantee success, it is usually considered a good start!
High Relevance Scores Make Advertising Easier
Higher Relevance Scores offer several benefits:
- They reduce the overall cost from your ad campaign;
- They help you reach more people and raise visibility;
- They make it easy for you to monitor an ad’s quality.
In the age of scientific marketing – where consulting analytics is an essential daily task – there’s a refreshing simplicity and candor to the Facebook approach. Rather than providing a selection of many different metrics and making you synthesize a complete picture from all of them, it lets you stay focused on a single score. Plus, you lose nothing by testing alternatives at any time.
The importance of relevance scores can be bypassed somewhat by buying ads with guaranteed delivery. In the long run, however, it will usually be more cost-effective to master Relevance and use it to your advantage. That’s especially true if you have multiple campaigns.
A Relevance Score of 7 is a good goal to aim for when setting up new ads.
With Relevance Scores, Facebook is making its platform more accessible for repeatable, high quality marketing approaches. Take time to check your scores today.