11 ways to improve your Facebook ads!

As the Facebook advertising platform matures, Facebook has been looking for ways to improve the quality of ads shown to customers.

If you’re familiar with Google Ads, you probably know about the Google Ads Quality Score:

Like Facebook’s relevance score, Google’s system is designed to assess the relevance and quality of the ads they show to users, thereby providing a better experience. Facebook introduced the relevance score in 2015 and has been continuously refining it ever since.

This article will take you deep into the relevance score, the benefits of improving your ad relevance score, and provide some insights on how to improve your ad relevance score.

What is the Facebook Ad Relevance Score?

Facebook believes that serving ads that are annoying or irrelevant to customers will hurt them over time because no one wants to keep seeing ads for products and services they are not interested in.

Each ad’s relevance score is displayed in Ads Manager > Performance and Clicks. The page content is as follows:

Each ad is scored on a scale of 1-10, with ads scoring 3 or less receiving a lower score. For these lower-scoring ads, companies need to pay a higher price for marketing promotion. Even so, ads with lower relevance scores will not be shown to as many users as ads with higher relevance scores, so simply raising bids is not a good strategy to increase impressions.

The following is the scoring system breakdown:

Relevance score 1-3: Irrelevant, gets low impressions, requires higher bids.

Relevance score 4-7: Relevant, high number of impressions, average bid.

Relevance score 8-10: Very relevant, gets a lot of impressions, and has a low bid.

The relevance score is an effective tool for Facebook to screen advertisers and display ads that are relevant to their users. The ads that are displayed are often those with higher bids and higher relevance.

This is a win-win for the Facebook platform and their audience: Facebook can show ads that make it more profitable (higher bids), and users get ads that are useful and relevant to them.

Facebook defines the relevance score as:

“The relevance score represents the degree to which the ad resonates with the people it reaches. The higher the relevance score of an ad, the better the ad performs.”

How does Facebook determine the ad relevance score?

To improve your Facebook ad’s relevance score, you need to know what factors Facebook uses to calculate the score.

Facebook's ad scoring is not done manually; the relevance score is automatically generated by the system. Facebook did not release the exact algorithm they used to determine the score, but Facebook did release some of the factors used to calculate the score.

Like Google’s Quality Score, Facebook’s Relevance Score uses a number of different factors to determine your ad’s quality and relevance to your target audience:

Advertising effectiveness. Did the customer click on the ad? Are they watching videos? Do they have the app installed? Do they scroll past the ad without viewing it? Facebook relies heavily on hard metrics when evaluating ad relevance. Ads that people interact with are usually more relevant to their interests.

Advertising content. What keywords are included in the ad? Do these keywords align with your targeting options? For example, showing an ad for baseball gloves to someone who likes cooking is clearly irrelevant to the user's interests.

User feedback. Facebook also asks users to leave feedback on the ads they interact with. They can leave both positive and negative feedback. There are several ways to leave feedback on ads. In the image below, you can see the “Leave Feedback” menu, and Facebook also offers an “I don’t want to see this content” option next to the ad. If you receive too many negative reviews, your ad's relevance score will drop.

How to improve your Facebook ad relevance score

A high Facebook ad relevance score provides the following benefits:

Get more impressions and reach a wider audience;

Lower bids for the same number of impressions;

Ability to A/B test on a larger audience;

Improve your campaigns by using relevance scores to find your target audience.

Here are some ways to improve the relevance of your Facebook ads:

1. Know your audience

Understanding your audience is an important step in creating relevant ads for them.

Facebook allows you to do in-depth targeting using personas, usage data, saved audiences, custom audiences, and more. There are many targeting options to ensure you are targeting the right people.

You can use buyer personas to create engaging ads that address your audience’s concerns and pain points and satisfy their needs. You can use ad copy to ask questions, solve problems, and call to action in a way that appeals to your audience.

When you’re able to communicate in a way that resonates with your audience, your ads will naturally become more relevant to them.

2. Be more specific in your positioning

You need to be more specific with your ad targeting, making sure each ad is targeted to only a small group of people. Here’s how to improve ad relevance:

Facebook's ad targeting options are very important. You can select the audience for each ad by limiting geographic location, targeting specific interests, targeting people who like a specific page, or using retargeting options to speak to an audience that already knows about your business.

Each ad should be targeted to a very specific group of people, so that you can accurately target your audience and it will be easier to create ads that your audience will be interested in.

Additionally, you can use value-added lookalike audiences to target your ads and improve relevance:

Similar-value audiences are users who are similar to your current customers and, in theory, will convert to orders at a higher rate than those targeted through traditional options.

3. Segment your audience

Segmenting your audience is an effective way to improve your relevance score. With Facebook’s audience targeting options, you can segment your audience and show your ads to specific groups.

For example, you can selectively show ads to users who have previously interacted with similar content on the platform, rather than showing your ads to an audience that is less interested in your product.

You can do this by creating a Facebook custom audience and using other targeting options. You can create multiple segments within a larger custom audience and show ads to each segment individually, resulting in a higher relevance score for each ad.

4. Show ads to people who have interacted with your brand

Since engagement is crucial to your ad’s relevance score, targeting people who have already interacted with your brand in some way is an effective way to improve your relevance score.

You can target Facebook users who:

Visited your Facebook page;

I have read the content on your blog;

Liked your social media posts;

Clicked on an ad before;

Visited your website.

These users already know your brand and have built some initial trust in it that someone who has never heard of it would not have.

Additionally, you know that audience is willing to engage. Interaction with your ad has a big impact on relevance score, so targeting users who have interacted with your brand in the past can give you an advantage.

5. Exclude users who have converted before

Keeping users who have already converted in your audience will only lower your relevance score. Even worse, they may not only choose to avoid your ad, but they may also choose to “hide ad” after seeing the same ad, thus sending negative feedback to Facebook and further lowering your score:

When setting up custom audience targeting for your ad, you can exclude people who have previously converted by clicking “Exclude”:

6. Test and optimize relevance scores

Most of the time, A/B testing ads is testing the number of conversions your ad gets. This is useful because you want to optimize your target ROAS for each ad you run. However, if you split test and optimize for less relevant ads with a low likelihood of conversion, it could backfire.

Before you dive into conversion optimization, you need to try testing and optimizing your ad relevance score because it only makes sense to optimize for conversion rate once you have a stable Facebook ad relevance score.

7. Write attractive headlines to increase engagement

Writing relevant and appealing headlines is probably the skill that all forms of marketing require.

The success of any advertisement or marketing content depends largely on the headline. Let’s say you run an ad, but if your headline doesn’t grab people’s attention, then no one will read your ad because it won’t be compelling enough for them to read the rest of the ad. If your ad has low engagement, there’s a good chance that your headline is the problem.

8. Ads must include a clear call to action

Engagement has a huge impact on the relevance score of any ad, and how actively your audience clicks on your ads is an important factor when Facebook evaluates engagement.

If you want to encourage users to click on your ad, then you need to get your audience to take action, tell them to click on the ad, and tell them why they should click.

For example, you can tie your call to action directly to your unique value proposition and make sure the next steps are clear: “If you click on the ad, this will lead to a certain outcome.”

9. Create a sense of urgency

You want your audience to take action immediately when they see your ad, not a week later when they may have forgotten about your campaign. Data shows that the excitement that leads to an impulse buy usually wears off after about 20 minutes.

You need to get users to take action while their excitement is still there. To achieve this, you need to create tension, and there are several ways to do this:

Set a time limit on your event, “only today”, “24 hours left”;

Limit the number of offers, “Only 5 left!”;

Time limit, "Order today and enjoy 50% off";

Create more tension through headlines and images.

The more you can convince your audience to take immediate action, the more engagement your ad will attract.

10. Use colorful images to increase visibility

Images have a huge impact on whether your ad grabs your audience’s attention.

Attractive images can make people stop scrolling and pay attention to the picture when they see it. Brightly colored images will appear more prominent on the page and are more likely to grab your audience's attention.

For example, this ad from FreshBooks:

The bright blue contrasts with the pale blue in Facebook’s UI and can easily grab the user’s attention.

11. Include ad copy in images

Typically, users will glance at the image first and then read the rest of the ad copy, but the ad copy doesn’t always play a prominent role.

You should try to place the main headline and other copy directly within the image, like this ad from AdEspresso:

Their image not only includes the main headline, but also subheadlines and calls to action. Users can intuitively get everything they need to know without having to read the rest of the ad.

Author: Traffic FB

Source: Traffic FB