If you’ve been running Facebook ads with impressions over 500, you’ve probably noticed that each one is attached to a Facebook ad relevance score.
This score is important because a higher Facebook ad relevance score has a direct correlation with lower ad costs. The more relevant your ad is to the user, the more likely it will be displayed.
Today, I'm showing you what we're doing in our agency to get Facebook ad relevance scores of 9 and 10, even to cold traffic. If you're taking the right measures to make your ad relevant, you can still get high relevance scores, regardless of traffic temperature.
What is a Facebook Ad Relevance Score?
Let's start the conversation by talking about what a Facebook ad relevance score is.
According to Facebook:
Relevance score aggregates various ad quality and relevance factors to give you an idea of how relevant your ads are to the people in your target audience compared to other ads targeting that same audience.
In short, the Facebook ad relevance score is a number Facebook gives your ad, between 1 and 10.
It gives us an idea of how relevant our ad is and whether we’re providing a good experience to users. Our objective is to get the highest relevance score possible.
Now, the score between 1 and 10 is a logarithmic scale. That means it's harder to go from a 9 to a 10, than it is from a 1 to a 2. So as you get towards the top of the scale, it gets harder to increase to that next number. But if you're getting relevance scores of 10, you're doing really well.
Here’s an example of what it looks like in your Ads Manager:
You can view your revelance score after clicking on the ad you want to view > Columns > Customize Columns > Relevance Score.
The average relevance score is 5. It's based on other advertisers targeting the same audience. So if you've got a high relevance score, that means you're doing better than most advertisers who are targeting that same audience by creating ads that are relevant to those particular people.
But remember, your relevance score shouldn't be your primary metric. Your number one goal shouldn't be to increase your relevance score, but it's something that you should use to troubleshoot and identify whether your ad is relevant.
Why Your Facebook Ad Relevance Score Matters
Your Facebook ad relevance score matters because it can lower the cost of reaching people with your Facebook ads. The higher an ad's relevance score is, the less it will cost to deliver that ad to more people.
A great example of high relevance scores leading to lower ad costs comes from AdEspresso. This was their relevance score for an ad with poor targeting. It cost them $0.142 per click.
To help boost their score, they targeted a custom audience of people who had visited their site in the last 90 days. Doing this increased their relevance score to 8.
This was using the same exact ad. But with better targeting, their new cost-per-click went down to $0.03!
Factors That Impact Your Facebook Ad Relevance Score
Before we dig into how to increase your relevance score, let's think about what factors actually impact your relevance score.
There are positive factors and negative factors. The more positive factors you get, the higher your relevance score, and the more negative factors, the lower it goes down.
Positive Factors
Positive factors that impact your relevance score are things like:
- Link clicks
- Other clicks on the post
- Video views
- Conversions
- The amount of time somebody spends looking at your ad
The more of those things you can get, the higher your relevance scores are going to be.
Negative Factors
The negative factors are things like:
- People clicking “Hide ad”
- People clicking “Hide all posts from this advertiser”
- People clicking “Report ad”
Those actions all negatively affect your relevance score. You want to get more of the positive factors and less of the negative.
How to Increase Your Facebook Ad Relevance Score
So how do you take control of your relevance score? How do you get more positive factors and how do you reduce the number of negative factors?
Target the Right Audiences
Targeting is one of the biggest factors in increasing your relevance score. If you're not putting the ads in front of the right people, it doesn't matter what you do. You're not going to get your relevance score up.
Because remember, relevance tells us how relevant the ad is to the audience we’re targeting. So targeting the right audience is really important.
In order to do that, you want to spend time doing research. Find out who your ideal audience is and test lots of different interests, custom audiences, and lookalike audiences.
If you’re unsure of how to create a custom audience, I outlined the process in this blog post. Testing is the key to finding the right audience to target.
Use Video in Your Ads
The second way you can increase your relevance score is by using video. Facebook says people spend 5x more time watching video than static content.
Source: Facebook
Remember we talked about view time and video views both being positive factors in contributing to your relevance score? If you use video in your ads, you get more people watching your ads instead of scrolling through the newsfeed.
That tells Facebook that people are watching your ad for a long time, and that it must be good.
Here are a few quick tips to improve your view times in your video ads:
- Get right to the point at the start of the video (most people won’t stick around if they don’t get valuable insights right away)
- Make sure the content you’re sharing is highly relevant to your target audience
- Increase the production quality of your videos by making sure there’s plenty of light and that the audio is good. You can check out a few of my favorite video tools here.
Increasing your view time further feeds into your relevance score and the positive impact that it has.
Encourage Clicks on Your Ad
A couple of direct factors that impact your Facebook ad relevance score are link clicks and all other clicks that happen on your Facebook ad. This includes clicks on the Like button and the See More button for the text.
You want to increase the amount of clicks that happen on the ad because that's going to tell Facebook that people are interested in your ad, which will then increase your relevance score and in turn, lower your ad costs.
The first way we can do that is by writing ad copy in a way that encourages people to click the See More button.
The first bit of copy that people see before clicking the See More button should be really compelling. It should offer tremendous value, and it should lead to a cliffhanger or some kind of intrigue.
The example below captures this idea of intrigue perfectly, using the phrase “you’ll be shocked” in the ad to draw users in.
Source: AdEspresso
Create really compelling text that hooks people in and makes them want to keep reading. That's going to increase the click rate on your ads and help bring your relevance score up at the same time.
Make sure to also preview your copy on mobile and desktop, and think about whether it fits for the placement you’re targeting.
Check Your Conversion Rate
Depending on what objective you choose with your Facebook ads, Facebook will also look at your conversion numbers. How many leads are you getting? How many purchases are you getting from your ads? All of this factors into relevance.
If a lot of people are clicking your ads, that's a positive signal to Facebook. And if a lot of people are actually converting into leads and customers, that's another positive signal to Facebook that you're giving people a positive experience. They're going to bring your relevance score up as a result.
So if you can do things like optimizing your landing page and the experience for people after they click your ads, that can also feed back into your relevance score number.
Exclude People Who Have Opted Out (Or Already Converted)
One of the biggest things we've done recently to improve our relevance scores is exclude people from our ad sets who have opted out of our email list.
In your Ads Manager, you want to create a custom audience containing everybody who's opted out of your email list. You can do this manually by regularly exporting the list of unsubscribers from your email service provider, uploading them to Facebook, and then excluding them.
Or, you can use a tool like LeadsBridge to sync that automatically. Then you can go into your ad set and exclude those audiences.
So if someone unsubscribes from your list, they also stop seeing your ads. If an unsubscriber continues to see your ad, they’ll be more likely to click “Hide ad” or “Report ad”. These are negative factors with a huge impact on your relevance score.
Also exclude people who've already converted. This should be standard practice if you're running ads to an opt-in, a lead magnet, or a webinar. Once somebody converts or becomes a lead, make sure that they're getting excluded from your ads.
Source: KlientBoost
You don't want to show an ad for an ebook after someone’s already downloaded it. That's a waste of money and it's a poor user experience. There's a good chance converted users are going to click “Hide ad”, decreasing your relevance score.
Constantly Refreshing Your Ads
Something else you will notice is that your relevance scores will tend to decrease over time.
It’s not clear why this is, but it’s most likely because as we start to exhaust audiences and people start seeing our ads multiple times, our engagement drops. And we know that lower engagement leads to lower relevance scores.
That means you have to keep refreshing your ads to maintain high relevance scores.
The best time to do that is not when your scores have already decreased. The best time is to start refreshing ads before that happens. You should be creating new ads while your others are still doing well to make sure that when your old ads start to decline, your new ones are there to take up the slack.
Summary
In order to dramatically improve your Facebook relevance scores, make sure you’re doing the following:
- Encouraging more positive factors, like link clicks, video views, and conversions.
- Making sure you're finding and targeting the right audience.
- Using video and improving your average video view times.
- Encouraging clicks on your ad by writing compelling ad copy that draws people in.
- Constantly refreshing your ads, because relevance will decrease over time.
- Excluding everybody who's opted out of your email list and converted in order to reduce negative feedback.
We're doing all of these things in our agency every time we start campaigns, and we're getting 9s and 10s for our relevance scores fairly consistently.
What are your Facebook relevance scores looking like? Are you already using some of these practices? What’s your biggest struggle when it comes to increasing your relevance scores?
Let me know in the comments!