Understanding Your Facebook Relevancy Score

and How to Improve It

Did you know that your Facebook ads are given a relevance score? It’s a score from 1-10 that looks at how relevant your ad will be to your target audience. This score is very important for your Facebook ad campaigns. Worried you’ll get a low Facebook relevance score? Fortunately, there are some simple steps you can take to improve your Facebook score and most of them aren’t all too time-intensive, so make sure you follow the steps below.

A simple numeric score might seem a bit arbitrary in regard to scoring ads, especially when much of it is done with AI rather than human grading. However, Facebook has crunched huge amounts of data and is generally quite accurate with their relevance scoring, so instead of seeing the Facebook relevance score as a challenge, look at it as an opportunity.

A high relevancy score is important for several reasons. First, it will lower costs as your ROI increases and Facebook charges you less to run the ads. Second, you’ll know that you’re on the right track. If your ads are not relevant or high-quality, you probably shouldn’t run them.

You can find your Facebook relevancy score through the Facebook Ad Manager, it will be under “campaigns.” Click on “ads” and then “relevance score.”

How Does Facebook Calculate Your Relevancy Score?

After your Facebook ad has run at least 500 times, Facebook will start calculating your relevance score. In other words, the actual performance of your ad goes a long way in determining the relevancy. Facebook will calculate the ad’s performance by looking at “positive” and “negative” feedback. Let’s compare the two.

Positive feedback generally means engaging with your ad in a positive way

Like or share your ad
Click on the Call-To-Action
Watch your ads video

Negative feedback generally means engaging with your ad in a negative way

Optout of seeing ads from your company
Hide ad

Beyond looking at the above factors, Facebook will also look at your targeting, image quality, and the text itself. With text, it’s important to avoid overly salesy language, to be grammatically correct and concise, and to have a clear CTA.

Keep in mind that your ad’s relevancy score can and will change over time. Even if you change nothing about your ad, the score could still change as the external environment and consumer conditions change.

Let’s look at how can you improve your relevancy score.

Target Your Audience

Targeting your audience probably seems like common sense. Problem is, a lot of people think they are targeting their audience simply by knowing who their audience is, but that’s not enough. You need to know your audience like the back of your hand. You need to know their habits, preferences, what types of CTAs they will react to, and everything else.

Here are some factors to consider:

• Demographics, such as age, education, occupation, and income
• What challenges or pain points they might face
• When they are most likely to be active online

If you don’t know how to get started check out Facebook Insights. This tool will show you the demographics of the people who have been interacting with your ad. It’s often fine to start with a general campaign, and to then hone in on the highest performing demographics.

Such targeting will increase performance. This means more positive interactions, which in turn means your relevance score will increase.

Test, Test Some More, Then Test Again

A/B testing is a digital marketers best friend. Often, you find audiences are acting in different ways than you thought they would. Maybe the CTA you thought rocked, they don’t like, but they might like the one you nearly overlooked. This happens all the time.

Sometimes one ad will perform great with one audience, but terribly with another and other times certain ads will do well on certain days, such as weekends versus weekdays. There are so many factors to consider that we can’t go over all of them.

With A/B testing, however, you can discover these factors and what works. Test everything, and test constantly because what works this month might not work next month. That ad that rocked in one country might fall flat in another and so on and so forth.

Ads Are About Quality Not Quantity

One mistake some new digital marketers frequently make is thinking that their budget is the most crucial factor. They set up a poor-quality ad, but figure that if they throw a lot of money into it, they’ll produce results. Huge mistake because more often than not, they end up throwing good money after bad.

High-quality ads are important, so spend money on them. Hire a professional copywriter or editor and pay for high-quality images rather than low-quality photos you took with your smartphone. Rewrite and edit text until it is perfect then test multiple CTAs and study which ones work best.

When it comes to marketing, increasing quality can produce huge increases in ROI. Not only will you produce more conversions and higher revenue, but you’ll improve your Facebook relevance score. In short, pay attention to quality, test, and utilize data such as demographics to your advantage.