Understanding Facebook Ads Holy Grail: Relevance Score

In Facebook advertising, the relevance score is a metric often overlooked and overshadowed by conversion rate and cost per click. However, it is one of the most important (if not THE most important) metric to look at.

What exactly is Facebook’s relevance score?

In layman’s terms, Facebook’s relevance score is just that: how relevant your ad is to the audience that you are targeting. It reflects how likely your targeted audience is to like or interact with your ad. Of course, how Facebook actually determines this relevance score isn’t public.  But most agree that it is based on how much engagement an ad gets, taking into account the obvious likes and comments, but also views, time in someone’s feed, etc.

Why is the relevance score so important?

It’s simple really. Facebook wants to show the most relevant content to their users because they want people to stay on their platform for as long as possible consuming content. That is how Facebook makes money and how they themselves stay relevant.

So naturally, they prioritize content (even ads) that are getting better engagement, that are more relevant. Facebook wants customers to enjoy, read, and engage with the content in their feeds. Their goal is to incite the reaction “Wow! That is awesome and exactly what I’m looking for!” when they display ads to a user, rather than “What the H#!%? Why are they showing me baby formula? I’m not even pregnant!”

This is to their benefit, and yours. You’ll get better visibility, with your ads being served more often, along with lower costs. Not to mention, when your ads are relevant to the audience you are targeting, they are more likely to convert.

What relevance score should you shoot for?

A good relevance score would be anything above a 7. We typically shoot for a 9 or a 10 before we really start to scale our ad budget.

How can ecommerce advertisers increase their Facebook relevance scores?

You can take advantage of Facebook’s relevance score by creating ads around interesting content. In fact, your ads should not even seem like ads.

If you have a large, engaged audience, we recommend starting the ad as an organic content post. Ask your audience a question to initiate interaction and get a response from them. This will immediately give you a high relevance score for that post. Then you can boost your organic post to reach the rest of your audience. This is a great way to kickstart engagement.

Once you have that high relevance score with your followers, convert that piece of content to an actual ad and expand it to lookalike audiences.

These types of content ads are great at the top of the funnel. Then, once a potential customer engages with one of your Facebook content ads, you can retarget them with another relevant piece of content, like a video ad. After that, you’ll follow up with people that engaged with your video ad with a promotional offer. This is one particular marketing funnel within Facebook that we’ve seen great success with.

There are lots of tips and tricks to improve your relevance scores, but in the end it’s simple. Facebook wants their users to see relevant content so that they stay on the platform. So, make your ads relevant and encourage audience interaction. Make them more like content posts than hard-selling ads. You can’t go wrong if you think about it this way. Your relevance scores will go up, and your ads will have better results.