Last week, Facebook announced the rollout of Relevance Scores on ads, a newly surfaced metric ranking (on a scale of 1-10) how "relevant" your ad is to your audience. It functions similarly to Google's Quality Score, and is influenced by a number of positive and negative indicators depending on your advertising objective.
Since its release it's received a lot of press (well deserved), but there's also quite a bit of confusion and misinformation about the actual effects it will have on advertisers. It's been lauded (often incorrectly) for it's impact on delivery and made out to be a game changer. Let's take a look at what it really means for advertisers, and what it doesn't.
What's Changed - Delivery
The biggest misunderstanding I've heard in the marketplace is that the release of Relevance Score changes how your ads will be delivered. It doesn't. While it is true that ads with higher Relevance Scores can be delivered more efficiently, this calculation was already being taken into account on the back end by Facebook algorithms. It's just now being surfaced in the front end to advertisers. So there's actually no difference in how your ads are being delivered, you just have more insight into the resonance of each ad with your audience via an additional metric.
What's Changed - Reporting
While delivery hasn't changed, reporting definitely has. Relevance Scores should now start showing up for advertisers in their Ads Manager Dashboards. Some info on how Ad Relevance Score is reported:
Timing - Relevance Score is calculated after an ad has received at least 500 impressions
Hierarchy - Relevance Score ONLY appears at an ad level (not a post, ad set, or campaign level). Relevance Score isn't aggregated across any of these dimensions, but gives a separate metric for each ad (targeting & creative combination).
Paid Only - Since Relevance Score is calculated at the ad level, anything organic has nothing to do with the calculation. Paid impressions only determine the score.
How To Use Relevance Scores
As Facebook states, although relevance scores are an indicator of resonance, they should not be used as a primary KPI or objective (in most cases). The most important factor for success should still be your campaign objective (be that engagements, app installs, offsite conversions, or otherwise). Facebook algorithms will still optimize delivery to users most likely to perform those end actions (automated optimization). Your manual optimizations as an advertiser (bid, budget, and status changes) should also still focus primarily on achieving that objective.
Where I do see this new metric being very useful is in sentiment analysis for big brand advertisers. With Facebook investing so heavily in video and becoming more of a "pay to play" network; savvy advertisers are shifting budgets from Engagement goals to Reach goals. However when your goals are large-scale distribution of content, there is the potential for negative sentiment on your ads. This can be a concern when you have a brand to protect. In this case, brand advertisers can use Relevance Scores as a secondary KPI to control sentiment. You could set thresholds and manually pause ads below certain scores, or those with high amounts of negative feedback. This allows you protect your brand and shift delivery to those ads that are resonating.
Do you see any additional benefits or use cases for ad Relevance Scores? Share your thoughts in the comments!