The relevancy score is an assessment of the performance of your Facebook ad. Your relevance score provides a quick insight into how your ad has been perceived by your target audience, and is influenced by positive and negative actions carried out by people who have seen your ad.

The more positive reactions your Facebook ad receives, the higher your relevancy score will be, and the cheaper your ads will be.

How do Facebook relevancy scores work?

A relevancy score is a number assigned to each ad in your account after it has received a minimum of 500 impressions. The score is given out of 10 and reflects the positive and negative feedback Facebook expects an ad to receive from its target audience. The score is updated every time an interaction takes place – whether it’s positive or negative.

Facebook relevancy score

Why do relevance scores matter?

Similar to quality score in Google AdWords, a good relevance score ultimately results in a lower cost for you as an advertiser. To quote Facebook:

“Put simply, the higher an ad’s relevance score is, the less it will cost to deliver.”

Whilst the lower cost is an obvious benefit, there are a number of other benefits to having a good quality score.

1. It indicates how engaged users are with your content

For Facebook ads, engagement is one of the most important factors as to whether your posts are a success or not. If users are not engaging with your content – by this we mean clicking, taking action and converting – then Facebook will deem your ad as poor quality, giving you in return, a lower relevancy score.

engagement stats for facebook

2. Relevancy score helps you to judge the success of your ad

Once you’ve put your campaign live, and it’s had over 500 impressions, the relevancy score for your advert will be given. If your relevance score is poor, it is a quick indicator that something is wrong and that you should look into it further and make changes to the advert or audience set.

3. Reach more people using your budget

A higher relevancy score means that your ads are cheaper, so your budget can stretch further. A higher relevancy score can mean the difference between 44p a click, and 19p a click.  A high relevancy score means that you can reach more people using the same budget, achieving a greater value for money.

4. Changes in relevance score will allow you to monitor your message over time

If you monitor relevance scores within your Facebook ads, you will see the impact of any changes you make to your ads. A positive impact will show that your changes are helping to reach your campaign goals, whereas a negative impact will highlight a need to refine what you are doing.

5. Gives a greater insight into your ads when you perform testing

If you have multiple ads running, relevance scores can be a great indicator as to which ads have been best received by your target audience, and which message should be highlighted moving forward.

Positive and negative actions that affect your relevancy score

Positive actions

You can increase your Facebook relevancy score through increasing the likelihood that your ad receives the action that is required from it. The actions in which you will be assessed vary depending on the campaign goals that were set. For example, if you created a campaign trying to generate conversions, then the number of conversions generated and the conversion rate achieved will play the biggest factor in increasing your relevance score; whereas a campaign encouraging users to watch a video will be influenced by the number of times the video is played.

Negative actions

Ads on Facebook can be hidden or reported, both of which are classed as negative actions that will have a detrimental impact on the ad’s relevance score. These actions will be classed as a negative, regardless of your campaign goals. Another factor that could be considered a negative action, is a lack of clicks. However, this will vary based on campaign goals, as it’s less likely to affect campaigns targeting impressions rather than clicks.

What is a good Facebook relevancy score?

Earlier this year, I went to Facebook HQ for Facebook advertising training. There, they suggested that an advertiser would want to aim for at least 7/10 when it comes to relevancy score, although preferably, you should aim for an 8 or higher.

relevancy score data

How to improve your Facebook relevance score

There are a number of ways in which you can increase your Facebook relevancy score. Ultimately, the more engaging your ads are to users, the better the results you will see.

There are a number of components to relevancy score, as WordStream’s diagram shows:

Image source: WordStream

Ensure your target audience is defined

The essence of a relevance score, is that you need to be providing an engaging advert to the audience you’re targeting. The better you define and target your audience, the more specific you can be with what you are saying. Your ads will, therefore, be more relevant to your user. When your audience is described as “defined” by Facebook (as the below screenshot) this means that you’re on your way to creating highly targeted and relevant ads.

defined Facebook Audience Targeting

When creating your campaign, you can create and save different audiences to match your customer personas. By defining your different target audiences, you can then create Facebook ads that are specific and tailored to that audience.

2. Develop unique and exciting content for your ads

By diversifying your Facebook ads’ images and content and making them more relevant to the user, your users will be more engaged. This is one of the most important aspects of Facebook ads, as the more relevant your content is, and the fresher the content, the better your results will be. Relevancy scores can fluctuate on a daily basis: this means that you need to continue improving and updating your ads once they are live, to keep them fresh and engaging.

3. Decide on your marketing objective

When creating your Facebook advert, Facebook encourages you to choose your marketing objective when creating your ad. There are different marketing objectives to choose from, for each stage of the marketing funnel (awareness, consideration and conversion). See below the wide range of marketing objectives to choose from in Facebook:

Facebook Marketing objectives

Once you have decided on your marketing objective, you can then tailor your advert accordingly and include call-to-actions.

Facebook ad calls-to-actions

By adding a relevant call-to-action to the advert, this will increase the chances of the goal being achieved. Increasing your conversion rate is not only great for your business, but your ad will gain a higher relevance score.

Facebook Ads Split Testing

4.  A/B split testing your Facebook ads

When conducting Facebook ads, it’s important to test different advert copy and images. Images are the first thing that will draw the attention of viewers, and can, therefore, play a more important role in driving conversions than the text. Testing a variety of images across your ad set is a great way to ensure you are using relevant images that are both distinctive, and will help to increase your conversion rate.

Remember that your bids are still important

Facebook relevancy score is not the only factor which decides how well your adverts are placed. Like with AdWords, your bid and your daily budget are important factors. A high relevancy score, paired with a very low bid won’t necessarily beat a competing advert, as bids play an important role in the Facebook advertising auction.

To conclude

User engagement is key when it comes to gaining a high relevancy score for your Facebook ads. Developing and testing the best ads for your audience can be time-consuming, but also very rewarding with cheaper and more efficient ads.