I’m guessing if you clicked on this post, chances are you don’t fully understand the Facebook Ads metric “Relevance Score”….
And that’s totally cool, because you’re not alone. There’s a lot of pros that don’t fully understand the metric.
Hey reader! If you prefer listening to reading, check out this 3 minute audio clip.
Personally, I don’t value the metric all that much. I look at it, and I use it as a barometer within a single ad account… but more on this in a little bit.
Let’s first define “Relevance Score”
What the heck is Relevance Score?
According to the mother ship…
In other words, Relevance Score is like a grade you got on your middle school book report. The grade you got is a reflection of the work already done.
Notice the part of the definition I highlighted, because it’s important. The score you get doesn’t help you get better grade, it’s simply a score to help you know how you did up to that point.
In other words, the score you get is retroactive, not proactive.
Relevance Score is lot like Weight Watchers’ point system
The main purpose of Relevance Score is to simplify a bunch of positive and negative signals into a single number to make it easier to compare ads.
It’s a lot like Weight Watcher’s point system. Weight Watchers turns complicated or multi-digit nutrition info into a single number to simplify how you track your diet.
In the case of FB Ads, it’s a lot easier to track a single digit Relevance Score than monitor and compare multiple performance metrics.
This is why I don’t value Relevance Score that much
Every ad account is different for a multitude of reasons.
I manage an ad account with relevance scores of 9 and 10. I also manage an ad account with 5, 6, and 7’s.
Both accounts do really well.
Why does one account have higher Relevance Score than the other?
One account is mostly focused on top of funnel / soft promotional / audience growth content. The kinda stuff that gets A LOT of likes, comment, shares, video views, and landing page views.
The other account already has huge audiences. Over half of their ads are Catalog Sale ads or Conversion Ads, which by default, won’t get the quantity of engagement that beefs up a Relevance Score. They might have lower Relevance Scores, but the conversion numbers don’t lie.
I’ll take a Return On Ad Spends of 9 to 32 allllll day.
The primary goal isn’t to raise your Relevance Score for the sake of raising your Relevance Score. If it were, you would just be sharing memes.
The other reason…
At this point in my career, I’m very comfortable navigating Facebook Ads metric tables.
In order to judge an ad’s “relevance”, I prefer to look at…
- Drops in CTR (Unique CTR vs CTR or CTR over different periods)
- Increases in CPAs
- Frequency
- Drops in # of conversions
Here’s when I value Relevance Score
When you know your average Relevance Scores, it can be smart to compare scores within your own ad account.
It’s a way to get a quick snapshot on your ads.
Of course, you can do that with all the other metrics I listed above… but you can do that with Relevance Score too.
In conclusion…
Relevance Score is a score of how your ad has performed to-date. It doesn’t affect the performance of your ad.
You also shouldn’t compare Relevance Scores across ad accounts because every business / account is different. Only compare Relevance Scores within a single ad account.
What do you think about Relevance Score? Do you look at it often? Chime in below.
