Facebook Will Now Tell You How Relevant Your Ads Are

Facebook announced on their blog today the rollout of “Relevance Scores for Ads.” These scores are designed to assist businesses running ad campaigns on Facebook to better judge the relevancy of their ad to their targeted audience. These scores are calculated on Facebook’s expectations of positive versus negative actions taken by the audience they are delivered to. Relevance scores are also updated, in real-time, as “people interact and provide feedback on the ad.” Positive indicators would be actions that support the campaigns objectives (video views, conversions, page likes, etc.) while negative indicators would be “the more times [Facebook] expect[s] people to hide or report an ad.” Facebook went on to say that, in some cases, it would mean a lower delivery cost to advertisers.

Facebook outlined why relevance scores matter for advertisers:

1. It can lower the cost of reaching people.
2. It can help advertisers test ad creative options before running a campaign.
3. It can help optimize campaigns already in progress.

Facebook did caution that relevance scores alone will not dictate preference in deliverability nor should they be used as the sole metric of an ad’s effectiveness. In Facebook’s effort to deliver relevant ads to the right audience, relevancy will be a factor in determining which of two ads targeting the same audience will be delivered but bidding is still an important factor.

Facebook offered up the following example:

“Say, for instance, you own a pizza shop and want to run a campaign that drives people to order through your website. Achieving the desired outcome — in this case, driving sales online — is ultimately more important than your relevance score. If you have an average score but your ad is working, you may not want to change anything. Or you may consider tweaking the ad to see how you can get lower cost of delivery by improving the relevance score. Or you might monitor your relevance score, along with the sales you’re driving, to learn when it’s time to update your campaign.”

The addition of an additional metric with which dealers can use to better optimize their Facebook ad campaigns is welcome. Relevancy scores appear to be an easy way for a dealer to test different ads as well as different targeted audiences to generate more efficient ads, increase desired actions and potentially lower costs.