Facebook's Changes to Ad Metrics

Have you ever wondered which is the best way to find out how well your social media strategy is performing? How do you know what you might need to change or improve on in order to get the best results? The answer is simple: check your metrics, more importantly, check your Facebook metrics.

As a platform, Facebook is constantly evolving, and with that metrics must change too. Facebook recently announced that the single ad relevance score will be replaced by three actionable ad relevance diagnostic metrics which are intended to help marketers make more informed decisions when making ad purchases.

Goodbye Relevance Score

The ad relevance score originally introduced by Facebook back in 2015 initially was designed to provide advertisers with more insight into how their ads were performing. The relevance score is a 1-10 rating of how well an ad is resonating with your intended audience. Facebook calculates this rating based on the positive and negative feedback an ad is expected to receive.

“The higher an ad’s relevance score is, the less it will cost to be delivered.” - Facebook

However, Facebook has now claimed the single metric alone doesn’t provide advertisers with much actionable insight, hence the introduction of more detailed measurements. This new change could help advertisers to understand how each element of an ad from creative, audience targeting or the post-click experience could have an impact on campaign performance.

The new metrics which will be provided are as follows:

Quality ranking: How your ad's perceived quality compared with ads competing for the same audience.

Engagement rate ranking: How your ad's expected engagement rate compared with ads competing for the same audience.

Conversion rate ranking: How your ad's expected conversion rate compared with ads that had the same optimisation goal and competed for the same audience.

Similarly to the previous relevance score, these metrics are not factored into the ad’s performance during an auction. Facebook says that this level of granularity will allow reporting processes to be more functional for businesses.

Recalculating Potential Reach

In addition to this, six other metrics are being removed and replaced with more actionable measures along with further updates to how potential reach is calculated.

Potential reach will now only include people who have been shown an ad on Facebook in the last 30 days, as opposed to being reported based on the number of total monthly active users. This should not be confused with campaign reach however, as potential reach is used to provide businesses with an idea of how many people can actually be reached by an ad campaign. These new metrics will give advertisers more nuanced insights into how their ads are performing and could drive ad spending up.

Facebook announced the new changes will begin rolling out from April 30th, 2019. A full list of the metrics that will be replaced can be found here.