Every now and then, Facebook improves its Ads Manager reporting tools to deliver more accurate information. Sometimes it’s in response to users’ behavioral changes, other times it’s because their AI found new ways to make reporting better.
By the end of April 2019, Facebook is dropping some major reporting overhauls that will help marketers and advertisers. This includes the improvement of a few well-known metrics and introduction of new ones.
As an advertiser, you may ask “Why is this important to me?” Well for starters, Facebook has a biased approach to choosing which ads to emphasise in the limited supply of placements. So they tend to lean toward ones they think have good scoring, giving those ads greater Reach at lower prices. As your ads get scored higher, your future ads will automatically get lower Cost per Acquisition and higher Reach.
Good-bye: Relevance Score
Relevance Score is a long time scoring system that Facebook used to measure the quality and engagement level of your ads[1]. Your Relevance Score is important because it determines both your Cost per Click on Facebook and how frequently Facebook shows your ad. It’s essentially their way of telling you if your ads is good or bad.
Historically, advertisers also use this scoring metric to know how well their audience is responding to it, or when the message has gotten stale and needs to be swapped out.
The problem with Relevance Score was that it didn’t really tell us much. This is because it merely tallied other numbers we could have already seen on the same table, such as Cost per Acquisition, Impression and Frequency.
Furthermore, old metrics like the Relevance Score only took into account our ads’ relationships with our audience. The new set of metrics, however, will include more important values as well: your competitors. This is Facebook accepting that the supply of advertisement placements are getting more limited in comparison to rising demands. Therefore the company is rolling out 3 new metrics to help give us better accuracy[2].
- Quality Ranking
An Ad’s perceived quality compared to other ads competing for the same audience.
2. Engagement Rate Ranking
An ad’s perceived Engagement Rate when compared to other ads targeted to the same audience.
3. Conversion Rate Ranking
An ad’s expected conversion rates when compared to ads with the same optimization goals and audience.
If your ads receive lower scoring in these metrics, it may mean that they are not as good as other advertisements reaching out to the same audience. So it could be a problem with your audience accuracy, message relevance, visual appeal, or even Call-to-Action in comparison to your competitors.
Exit: Offers Saved. Enter: Posts Saved[3]
Offers Saved gave credit to an advertisement containing offers that was saved for later. In the fast-moving environment within Facebook where the company tries to push you all kinds of new stuff every second, it’s almost impossible to go back to an advertisement you’ve seen before, so it make sense to save them for consumption at a later time. That is why Facebook gives extra cookies for ads with offers that were saved.
Now they are extending this metrics to all ads that were saved, regardless of their Call-to-Actions. Moving forward, we may start seeing marketers take advantage of this new feature by asking people to Save This Post, just so they can earn some ranking points.
Exit: Messaging Replies and Cost per Messaging Replies. Enter: Messaging Connections and Messaging Conversations Started.
Traditionally, Facebook credited marketers for having long and meaningful conversations with their audiences. So they gave good scoring for long conversations. But being sneaky as we all are, marketers began gaming the system by having long conversations with the same people who could sometimes be their friends.
For a change, Facebook is now going to focus on scoring for conversations that are new or have been left dormant for a while. Perhaps this will encourage us to give what our customers want faster, and reach out to more new customers.
Exit: Mobile App Purchase ROAS and Web Purchase ROAS. Enter: ROAS in General
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is Facebook’s equivalent to Return on Investment (ROI)[4]. It is to measure if your advertising spending is more or less than the revenue generated from it.
ROAS will soon be one all-encompassing metric rather than broken down into parts. Perhaps Facebook found that most apps these days are not sold upon downloads, rather via upgrades after the fact. This will help clean up the tables a little bit more
Whether you are a marketer who agrees with these changes or not, it will set to go live April 30th. We think it is nice to see Facebook allowing us to more accurately see the performance of our ads compared to competitors, and also make tweaks to improve resistance against abuse.
[1] “Facebook Relevance Score: 4 Key Facts to Know | WordStream.” 14 Sep. 2017, https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/09/14/facebook-relevance-score. Accessed 30 Mar. 2019.
[2] “RIP Relevance Score: Facebook Introduces 3 New Metrics | WordStream.” 13 Mar. 2019, https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2019/03/13/facebook-sunsets-relevance-score. Accessed 30 Mar. 2019.
[3] “Facebook to replace relevance score with 3 new metrics in April ….” 12 Mar. 2019, https://marketingland.com/facebook-to-replace-relevance-score-with-3-new-metrics-in-april-258355. Accessed 30 Mar. 2019.
[4] “How to Measure Your Facebook Return on Ad Spend : Social Media ….” 20 Dec. 2018, https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-measure-facebook-return-ad-spend/. Accessed 30 Mar. 2019.
