Facebook Ads Introduces ‘Relevance Score’

Big news at JBi today as we finally got access to Facebook’s newest tool for advertisers. The new metric, announced 2 weeks ago, is set to save business page owners money as adverts are only served to relevant Facebook users.

What are the new relevance scores for Facebook Ads?

Facebook ads will now be tagged with a relevance score. Unlike Google Adwords’ version of this, it takes into account the real time feedback of Facebook users who have seen and engaged with the ad, rather than just relying on how relevant the ad is to the content on the page it links to. This follows Facebook’s introduction of allowing users to leave feedback when they block certain ads, making for better targeting, a more efficient use of budgeting and the bonus for users that their timeline becomes less ‘spammy’.

This is a big step for Facebook, who have famously been remiss in the past to give advertisers that much insight into how their audience is receiving in an ad. The scores are based on a scale of 1 to 10, here is the official statement on how they work taken from the Facebook Blog:

“The score is updated as people interact and provide feedback on the ad. Ads with guaranteed delivery — like those bought through reach and frequency — are not impacted by relevance score. Relevance score has a smaller impact on cost and delivery in brand awareness campaigns, since those ads are optimized for reaching people, rather than driving a specific action like installs.”

Here at JBi we really hope that this will help our customers save money on Facebook advertising. As Facebook business page owners are becoming more and more reliant on promoted posts to reach their followers and attract new followers – any method of optimising this is becoming very appreciated.

How to take advantage of this?

Our top recommendation on how to make use of the new metric for Facebook ads is to utilise more A:B testing. Does certain wording, use of imagery or video increase your relevance score? It also means that you need to really think about they way you target your adverts.

If your ads are being served to lots of users to whom they are irrelevant, they will tell Facebook this and the ad will receive a bad score. You can see how this will have a roll on effect, so that users to whom the advert would be relevant, still won’t be shown the ad.

Already have experience in using the new relevance score? Got any interesting stories about them? We’d love to hear more in the comments section.