Are your Ads Relevant? Well Facebook can now tell you!

Facebook are changing the world of advertising forever by creating a new tool that will help advertisers compete for expensive and scarce ad slots. However, unlike before, the tool will be able to say how relevant an advertisers ads are to their target market – making sure that ad space is not being wasted. This will allow advertisers to monitor their scores over time and tweak less relevant ads when needed, potentially lowering an ads price and boosting it’s performance.

The tool will score an ads relevance between 1 and 10, with 10 being highly relevant. This is scored by how positively or negatively the target audience may respond which depends on different aspects. A positive response would depend on video views, shares and clicks on the advert, whereas, a negative response would depend on audience hiding the advert or reporting it as spam. Facebook will take all this into consideration, and when an ad has been served 500 times, the tool will score an ads relevance. This stops irrelevant content flooding peoples news feed and only shows what a user will find interesting.

Throughout the years, the average price for a Facebook ad has been on a steep incline, however, the number of ads Facebook served has dropped. For example, in the first quarter of 2014 the price per ad rose by 335%, unlike the number of ads served, which decreased by 65% – the competition for ads to be shown is fierce.

Facebook don’t just want the ad that has the most expensive bid to show any more as cost does not make an advert superior. Judging an ad on expense may not attract the right audience and will alienate users and eventually – like what happened to Myspace – they may move on to another social media platform. Facebook is going to become more clear with advertisers about important relevance score is and why is matters when serving ads.

Now with this new tool, Facebook will not just be looking at bids any more and will be taking in to consideration relevance score. However, it must be made clear that relevance score varies depending on the objective of each advertiser, such as an ad for an app download will prioritise the ‘Click to Install Button’ when calculating a relevance score. The tool will have the biggest impact on a brand who when seeing the adverts wants a user to take action such as clicking through to the site, however, brand advertisers just aiming for gaining attention will see a smaller impact on delivery and cost. Also, ads bought on a guaranteed basis (Facebook agreeing on a certain number of impressions) will not be affected.