Facebook is sunsetting its ad relevance scores in favour of more 'granular' metrics
Facebook is to phase out its 'ad relevance score', replacing it with a series of more "granular" metrics it says will make it easier for businesses to tailor campaigns.
The platform will begin rolling out 'relevance diagnostics' over the coming weeks / Facebook
The social network first introduced 'relevance' as a single way of scoring advertisers in 2015. The measurement was also encouraged to force brands into making better, more engaging, ads.
Until now, scores have been calculated based on the positive and negative feedback the platform expects an ad to receive from its target audience. The more positive interactions Facebook expects an ad to receive, the higher the ad’s relevance score will be.
However, over the past three years, the way people use Facebook has changed and it's funneled spend into its video and mobile ad products; the increasing variety of formats means users may engage with a video ad in a different way than they would a still image or chatbot.
As such, Facebook says it wants to provide marketers with more "actionable" insights via a tool it's calling 'relevance diagnostics'.
Similar to relevance score, these new ad relevance metrics are not factored into an ad's performance in the auction and will measure relevance across three dimensions:
- Quality ranking: How an ad's perceived quality compared with ads competing for the same audience.
- Engagement rate ranking: How an ad's expected engagement rate compared with ads competing for the same audience
- Conversion rate ranking: How an ad's expected conversion rate compared with ads that had the same optimisation goal and competed for the same audience
"When used together, ad relevance diagnostics will help advertisers understand whether changes to creative assets, audience targeting or the post-click experience might improve performance," claimed Facebook in a blog post.
The platform will begin rolling out 'relevance diagnostics' over the coming weeks and will begin removing the previous relevance score metric starting 30 April.
Facebook has also made changes to its 'potential reach' feature, which lets advertisers know how many people can potentially be reached by a campaign. The tool will now only include people who were shown an ad on Facebook within the last 30 days. Previously, the forecast was based on the number of total monthly active users on Facebook.
Although the past few years have seen Facebook expand its list of third-party solutions to measure ad effectiveness, advertisers are still asking questions about why it should be on their media plans.
Following on from similar claims made in 2016, the tech behemoth found itself back in the dock over accusations that it over-inflated its ad view statistics by as much as 900% in order to entice brands to part with their cash.
Facebook categorically denies any wrongdoing and has filed a court motion to dismiss allegations of fraud.