If you’ve ever run a Facebook Ad, you’ll be familiar with the, often, dreaded relevance score. Seemingly by a stroke of luck, you may get a 7 or 8 but you’re never really sure why or how.
The only thing you know for sure is that you frequently see ads with no score, or a 2-3, and you’ve heard it’s bad.
So, before we begin. Just in case, what is your relevance score? Essentially, it’s how ‘relevant’ your ad is to the people seeing it.
You’ll only see your relevance score when your ad has been seen by 500 people, so that’s the first thing to check if you have a non-existent score.
If your ad has been seen by more than 500 people, and you’re getting a really low number, that’s when you know that your ad needs work.
The best thing you can do to improve this score is to ensure that your ad copy and graphics perfectly match and speaks to the audience you are targeting.
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Generally speaking, a low relevance score is caused by a poorly defined audience (not sure how to define your audience? Check the targeting post here). What businesses commonly do is lump all of their targeting options into one in what is called targeting layering (you’re layering multiple targeting options in the hope of growing your audience), the major flaw with this technique is that it becomes very difficult to speak directly to those who are seeing your ad or know who is responding to your ad.
Facebook is the incredibly powerful marketing tool it is, because it allows you to reach very specific groups of people – so why waste that power by lumping all of your potential customers into one. Especially when they might not all respond to the same thing.
Put it this way, say you are a hairdresser (now I know most of you reading this won’t be – but you’ll understand the examples) if you received a phone call from a long standing male client who likes to come in and get his beard trimmed, get a stylish hair cut and brings his son in to get a matching haircut, how would you talk to him? What language would you use? What promotions would you tell him about?
Now compare this to the busy business woman who wants to come in weekly, gets a couple of extras like an eyebrow tint and blow dry while she is there. How would you talk to her? What promotions would you be sharing? What photos of your studio would you use to highlight your skills?
The way you talked to these two customers would obviously be very different, not in terms of service, but simply because they have very different needs, problems and end goals and it would take a different offer to get them in the door.
With Facebook ads you have the ability to speak directly to each group of people directly, which means they are much more likely to respond and engage with your ad.
And this is why your relevance score, and getting a high score is important. The higher the score, the more your potential customers are going to respond to you.
This is not to say that you can’t get results on a campaign with poor relevance score, or that you can’t have a terrible campaign if you have a high score – it is, however, a good indicator that you have your targeting and ad copy on the right track.
If you’re still stuck, a proven strategy is to upload your customer list to Facebook, and then create a lookalike audience of those people. So you’re essentially creating an audience of people who look just like your current customers, and they are likely to find your ad highly relevant.
Still not getting a great relevance score, or sick of wasting money on Facebook ads? Book in a complimentary Facebook review here and we can see what’s going on!
A now current client of mine booked her free session, and in just two weeks took her relevance score from a 2 to a 10! She’s now a very happy client as we work on other aspects of her business, but she got great results just from the free session!
