Updates to Facebook's Relevance Score You Need to Know
In addition to guest posting on the UpCity blog, RevLocal is featured as one of the Top Digital Marketing Agencies in the United States. Check out their profile here.
As Facebook continues to make updates to their ad platform, its metrics are changing, too! Recently, Facebook announced that they replaced their ad relevance score with new metrics as well as updated how potential reach is calculated. Although this may seem like a big change, it will be extremely beneficial to business owners. Here’s what you should know.
From Old to New: Updates to Facebook’s Ad Relevance Score
You may know Facebook’s ad relevance score as a number between 1-10 (10 is the highest and one is the lowest). This number tells you how relevant your ad will be to the audience you’re targeting. However, as of April 30, 2019, this is no longer how your ad’s relevance is scored. Instead of looking at just one metric to calculate the score, Facebook now uses the following three metrics:
- Quality Ranking
- Engagement Rate Ranking
- Conversion Ranking
All three of these rankings look at your ad’s perceived quality, expected engagement rate, and the expected conversion rate, respectively. When the three metrics are used together, they create higher quality relevance diagnostics that improve ad performance.
To put it in layman’s terms, these new metrics provide businesses with better insights, which ultimately helps them figure out what’s working and what’s not working when it comes to their Facebook ads.
Additional Changes
The ad relevance score wasn’t the only update Facebook decided to do. Potential reach is also calculated differently now! In the past, Facebook’s potential reach was calculated based on the total monthly active users. Now, potential reach only includes people who were shown an ad on Facebook within the last 30 days. Keep in mind that you will still be able to see the estimated audience in real time when creating your ads.
The update to potential reach started rolling out on March 12, 2019. If you’re an agency that manages client campaigns, you may have seen this update across accounts gradually instead of all at once. Facebook noted that they would notify you after potential reach was updated on an account.
One other major change that Facebook implemented was replacing less-actionable ad metrics. In total, seven metrics were replaced (including the relevance score update mentioned above). Here are the metric updates:
- Offers Saved and Cost per Offers Saved were removed and replaced with Post Saves. The main reason for this change was because marketers wanted more data about when their ads were being saved. The new metric offers more inclusion and counts the number of times your ads are saved.
- Messaging Replies and Cost per Messaging Reply were replaced with two different metrics: New Messaging Connections and Messaging Conversations Started. Feedback was given to Facebook that marketers found it more useful to have new conversations or ones that occurred after a period of inactivity, which is what sparked this change.
- Mobile App Purchase ROAS and Web Purchase ROAS have been combined into one metric called Purchase ROAS. Since every customer’s buying journey is different and may not happen on the same platform, Facebook decided to consolidate all the Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) metrics and aggregate this data across all channels.
Benefits of These Changes
With Facebook’s old ad relevance score, marketers stated that it was confusing how scores were determined and how to improve them if they were low. However, now that Facebook uses three metrics to calculate the score, it’s less ambiguous and provides more actionable insights for marketers and business owners. And when you have more actionable insights, you have better success on your campaigns.
'When you have more actionable insights, you have better success on your campaigns.' - Lauren Snyder, RevLocal Click To Tweet
Change in the digital world is inevitable, so it’s time to embrace it! Facebook has made numerous updates over the past few months, but these changes were much-needed. These new metrics give business owners better insights into their Facebook ads, which ultimately helps them run successful campaigns.
About the author
Lauren Snyder
Lauren graduated from The Ohio State University in 2016 with her bachelor’s degree in English and minor in Professional Writing. Shortly after, she joined the RevLocal team as a Digital Content Specialist focusing on blogging and social media for clients. She recently transitioned to her current position and loves writing for RevLocal and small businesses throughout the United States. Lauren has always had a passion for writing and even completed National Novel Writing Month three times.
In addition to guest posting on the UpCity blog, RevLocal is featured as one of the Top Digital Marketing Agencies in the United States. Check out their profile here.
As Facebook continues to make updates to their ad platform, its metrics are changing, too! Recently, Facebook announced that they replaced their ad relevance score with new metrics as well as updated how potential reach is calculated. Although this may seem like a big change, it will be extremely beneficial to business owners. Here’s what you should know.
From Old to New: Updates to Facebook’s Ad Relevance Score
You may know Facebook’s ad relevance score as a number between 1-10 (10 is the highest and one is the lowest). This number tells you how relevant your ad will be to the audience you’re targeting. However, as of April 30, 2019, this is no longer how your ad’s relevance is scored. Instead of looking at just one metric to calculate the score, Facebook now uses the following three metrics:
- Quality Ranking
- Engagement Rate Ranking
- Conversion Ranking
All three of these rankings look at your ad’s perceived quality, expected engagement rate, and the expected conversion rate, respectively. When the three metrics are used together, they create higher quality relevance diagnostics that improve ad performance.
To put it in layman’s terms, these new metrics provide businesses with better insights, which ultimately helps them figure out what’s working and what’s not working when it comes to their Facebook ads.
Additional Changes
The ad relevance score wasn’t the only update Facebook decided to do. Potential reach is also calculated differently now! In the past, Facebook’s potential reach was calculated based on the total monthly active users. Now, potential reach only includes people who were shown an ad on Facebook within the last 30 days. Keep in mind that you will still be able to see the estimated audience in real time when creating your ads.
The update to potential reach started rolling out on March 12, 2019. If you’re an agency that manages client campaigns, you may have seen this update across accounts gradually instead of all at once. Facebook noted that they would notify you after potential reach was updated on an account.
One other major change that Facebook implemented was replacing less-actionable ad metrics. In total, seven metrics were replaced (including the relevance score update mentioned above). Here are the metric updates:
- Offers Saved and Cost per Offers Saved were removed and replaced with Post Saves. The main reason for this change was because marketers wanted more data about when their ads were being saved. The new metric offers more inclusion and counts the number of times your ads are saved.
- Messaging Replies and Cost per Messaging Reply were replaced with two different metrics: New Messaging Connections and Messaging Conversations Started. Feedback was given to Facebook that marketers found it more useful to have new conversations or ones that occurred after a period of inactivity, which is what sparked this change.
- Mobile App Purchase ROAS and Web Purchase ROAS have been combined into one metric called Purchase ROAS. Since every customer’s buying journey is different and may not happen on the same platform, Facebook decided to consolidate all the Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) metrics and aggregate this data across all channels.
Benefits of These Changes
With Facebook’s old ad relevance score, marketers stated that it was confusing how scores were determined and how to improve them if they were low. However, now that Facebook uses three metrics to calculate the score, it’s less ambiguous and provides more actionable insights for marketers and business owners. And when you have more actionable insights, you have better success on your campaigns.
'When you have more actionable insights, you have better success on your campaigns.' - Lauren Snyder, RevLocal Click To Tweet
Change in the digital world is inevitable, so it’s time to embrace it! Facebook has made numerous updates over the past few months, but these changes were much-needed. These new metrics give business owners better insights into their Facebook ads, which ultimately helps them run successful campaigns.
About the author
Lauren Snyder
Lauren graduated from The Ohio State University in 2016 with her bachelor’s degree in English and minor in Professional Writing. Shortly after, she joined the RevLocal team as a Digital Content Specialist focusing on blogging and social media for clients. She recently transitioned to her current position and loves writing for RevLocal and small businesses throughout the United States. Lauren has always had a passion for writing and even completed National Novel Writing Month three times.
