What is “Relevancy Score?”
It’s no surprise that all digital platforms have a system in place to score ads based on quality to improve the user experience, but to also reward advertisers that are using tailored and relevant ads within each platform with lower cost per clicks, thereby reducing the cost per conversion and improving ROI.
Google have been doing this for years with something known as “Quality Score” and advertisers have grown accustomed to how the system works and what they need to do to improve their ads quality score.
However, the challenge is with Facebook which uses something similar to Google called “relevancy score” that is often overlooked and ends up being very costly in the long term. Facebook give minimal input into how this works exactly, but there are steps that you should take to test and measure the impact of each creative to maximise relevancy score overtime and reduce CPCs on Facebook.
Without testing, Facebook will be expensive and it won’t always work from the start as your core audience will always respond and behave differently on Facebook compared to other platforms.
How to improve relevancy score
One – The community
The single biggest impact on relevancy score is the community itself (and by definition the ad), Facebook users feedback could help dramatically improve and reduce the relevancy score. This means it’s not only vital to have a very good creative tailored for the target audience for the Facebook ad, but it’s also equally important to have a strong social presence with community managers that respond to users feedback and comments. This is the easy way to approach Facebook and it helps drive the user experience and thereby will also reduce CPCs (if it results in more positive feedback or reduces negative feedback).
Two- The Targeting & Creative
Be as specific with targeting as possible, this means narrowing your settings to age, demographic, interest and depending on the brand even geo location to ensure you’re not reaching areas to the country that may not be applicable for you.
With the targeting nailed, it’s now up to the creative and the call to action to drive performance and help improve relevancy score to reduce CPCs. Creative needs to be tailored to your targeting, if it’s not tailored then that will actually decrease your relevancy score as users are less likely to respond with your ad.
Creative testing is a must for Facebook; all campaigns need to be run with an A/B test when first launching to monitor what image and messaging is resonating with the Facebook audience. Without A/B testing, there is no way to know to if it’s the targeting or creative that’s driving the relevancy score up/down and what impact that has on CPCs.
The call to action is something that Facebook have recently been keeping a close eye on, it’s designed to improve user experience. Facebook wants to ensure that the call to action alerts the user for what to expect when they click an ad e.g. If you’re using a “Learn More” call to action but your site is trying to sell that consumer a product, then that will be a negative impact on the relevancy score.
Finally, it’s important to refresh your creative or Facebook will overtime reduce relevancy score if you’re using the same messaging for weeks.
Three – Facebook Custom Audiences
Finally, using Facebook custom audiences is the best way to improve relevancy, reach your audience and expand your reach. This works by uploading consumer email (or mobile phone numbers) into Facebook to match CRM data to Facebook.
By doing this, Facebook also then creates something called “similar audiences” which uses the audience profile of your core user base to find others that are similar. This is a great way to expand campaigns and utilising similar audiences can lead to lower CPCs and improved conversion rates.
Conclusion – How relevant is relevancy score?
Very relevant, as demonstrated it’s all about the user experience and it’s essential to ensure that you’re doing statistical testing on all Facebook campaigns to improve relevancy score, reduce CPCs and overtime allow you to scale more on the platform.
