Hidden behind the #facebookapocalypse of 2019 (where Facebook’s suite of apps went down for the longest time in over four years), was a seemingly simple announcement: Facebook is replacing its relevance score.
Although it may seem small, this release has big implications for marketers around the world. Relevance score, which offered advertisers insight into how relevant their ad may be to the audience it targeted, then displayed as a single score between 1-10, is set to sunset by the end of April. To replace this singular score, Facebook shared that it will be rolling out three new metrics between now and April 30th:
- Quality ranking: How an ad’s perceived quality compares with ads competing for the same audience.
- Engagement rate ranking: How an ad’s expected engagement rate compares with ads competing for the same audience.
- Conversion rate ranking: How your ad’s expected conversion rate compares with ads that had the same optimization goal and competed for the same audience.
While the ad relevance diagnostics will still not be factored into an ad’s performance in the auction, this new level of granularity will offer reporting that’s more actionable for businesses. Variances between these three (new) scores will give advertisers more insight into whether changes to a creative asset, targeting strategy, or landing page experience might be able to improve an ad’s performance.
For example, an advertiser with a below average quality ranking score might want to invest more time in improving their creative assets, while an advertiser with a below average conversion rate ranking could either change an ads CTA to more accurately describe the landing page experience, target a higher or lower intent audience, or ultimately change the post-click experience.
Facebook also used this announcement to share that it would be removing some less actionable metrics as they introduce the newer metrics like the new ‘posts saved metric’ (so businesses can see how many people saved their ads) but will remove the ‘offers saved metric,’ as this stat will be counted within the newer metrics. More interpretations of a given ranking combination can be found within Facebook’s Help Center.
A full list of of metric updates can also be found in the Help Center.