How to Improve Your Facebook Relevance Score
If you’re relatively new to Facebook ads but come from a background of Google PPC, you may think that you’re fully prepared to start really well optimised Facebook ads, but the two services are actually quite different.
So how does the Facebook ad platform work? Facebook ads have their own kind of version of PPC Quality Score, called the Relevance Score, but in order to achieve a high rating in that system, the targeting for the ads needs to be much more refined. Thankfully you have the ability to do this readily at hand, as Facebook’s platform can easily target people based upon the wide range of information that they put up on their Facebook pages.
The typical targeting of a PPC adwords ad would at the very least include keyword, either as an exact keyword match or broad match with accompanying broad match keyword modifiers and the location it should appear for. If you want to further refine results, you may choose to refine your ad placement based upon time of day, and day of the week/month. Thanks to great breadth of information that Facebook has on its users, with the Facebook ad platform you’re able to refine when and where your ad appears by location of the user’s home, their current location, their interests, their career and therefore their estimated yearly income, their relationship status, and many more factors still.
What this extraordinary breadth allows you to do is achieve a greater level reliability with your adverts, to a degree. Facebook is, and likely always will be, limited in comparison to Google Adwords due to how with Google, the likelihood of people actively searching to make a purchase is a lot higher. This is obviously reflected in the price though, so it is still worthwhile to use Facebook advertising.
Like with a quality score, a relevance score has a direct impact on the cost of your ad and how often it appears. If it has a high relevance score, it appears more and the clicks or impressions (whichever you’re using for the ad) cost less, and the reverse if it has a low score. To increase your score you’ll need to improve your targeting and the relevancy of your ad. The relevance score isn’t just determined by a computer based analysis either, as it also draws upon the response the ad receives from users, so the ad needs to be optimised for humans too.