Ad Relevance Diagnostics
What are they and why do they matter?
Happy Monday,
I wanted to get together a quick newsletter to chat about Ad Relevance Diagnostics on Facebook.
These diagnostics are a few of the last “on-platform metrics” that we look at right now. Why? They directly impact performance AND they are not impacted by data loss, as they are on the platform.
Here they are:
You can set this in your column settings and they will be visible at the AD LEVEL.
So, wtf is ad relevance and why should you care?
I love these metrics because they are compared to ads competing for the same audience or compared to ads with the same optimization goal competing for the same audience.
People prefer to see ads that are relevant to them.
That's why Facebook considers how relevant each ad is to a person before delivering an ad to them.
Ads that are more relevant cost less and see more results. This leads to better experiences for people and businesses alike. Evergreen ftw.
Ad relevance diagnostics can help you diagnose whether the ads you ran were relevant to the audience you reached.
If your ads aren't meeting your advertising objectives, you can use ad relevance diagnostics to understand whether adjustments to your creative assets, post-click experience, or audience targeting could improve performance.
The diagnostics are:
Quality Ranking: How your ad's perceived quality compared to ads competing for the same audience.
Engagement Rate Ranking: How your ad's expected engagement rate compared to ads competing for the same audience.
Conversion Rate Ranking: How your ad's expected conversion rate compared to ads with the same optimization goal competing for the same audience.
High relevance is correlated with high performance, but it's not always the reason for high performance.
As such, we use ad relevance diagnostics to diagnose underperforming ads – not to optimize ads that are already meeting your advertising objectives.
Achieving high ad relevance diagnostics rankings should not be your primary goal, and doesn’t guarantee an increase in results. BUT it’s a great on-platform way to look at creative right now.
Facebook even provides a chart for this that we use internally in creative reporting meetings (see below).
Now, most people just crank out creative with the idea that it needs to be refreshed every 7-14 days. When the reality is, it doesn’t.
The right creative, served to the right audience should be lasting well beyond 7-14 days. Period. I’ll die on that hill.
The notion that you need a new asset in there so rapidly and consistently to scale has, and always will be, pretty absurd to me.
Think about it. If you are cycling in new creative every 14 days, you are allowing ZERO time for an ad to soak, optimize, hit the right audience pocket, and build/leverage engagement. If it’s killed within 14 days just based on soft metrics, you will continue to contribute to a vicious cycle.
Creative is so, so important. We all know this by now.
But what’s more important is how that creative is created in the first place.
It should be there to serve a purpose. A purpose that has life to it. A purpose that can tell a story and get people engaged.
You’re never going to win at FB Ads if you do not have strong evergreen and the ability to create/scale off Post IDs. That’s my opinion, and I strongly believe in it.
For context, we have some accounts that run a single asset TOF and a single asset MOF for 60+ days then refresh a new one, soak, rinse and repeat. These are soaked to the bone in engagement, shares, etc. Full-blown evergreen and we just optimize off variations of it based on relevance diagnostics.
Here’s that chart from FB by the way, that we still refer to:
This is a shorty dispatch but I just wanted to share this in case others have never laid eyes on it.
A final parting note:
Every single brand that is running paid media should be focused on CPAs for New/Returning Customers and MER as a North Star. You can still be REALLY dangerous with FB and Google (the best auction-based channels) if you know what these targets are.
Couple that with LTV data, and you’ll always have a strong base for acquisition/scale.
You NEED to know these numbers and so do the businesses that you serve.
I wouldn’t branch out into testing other channels until these numbers are solidified into a game plan for the rest of the year.
Speaking of other channels…?
Nothing beats Google + Facebook right now. Period.
Even with the monster that is iOS, nothing beats them.
Snapchat: Nice to have, can’t scale and data is trash.
TikTok: Moving fast, great to have, still very TOF biased, 2-3 years from being a viable channel. You have a better chance of an organic video going viral than you do getting TikTok to scale. Spark Ads are amazing but they are short-lived and of course, can’t really scale.
Pinterest: Nice to have, can’t scale.
You simply cannot find the consistent scale of Google + Facebook elsewhere.
So, hunker down, stop chasing ROAS and get more in-line with creating a paid funnel that tells a story and builds an experience for the person on the other end. No shortcuts, no hacks. Do the little things correct and scale them.
If you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment or send me a note on Twitter. I’ve been heads down planning EoY and truthfully, just doing everything we can to stay as far ahead of changes as possible.
With the right gameplan, product, and understanding of platforms, there’s still a TON of success to be had on the channels we know and love.
As always, I appreciate every single one of you and I do not take this space in your inbox for granted.
Have an amazing week and until next time…
Cheers,
Jake the Ad Nerd ✌️