As a marketer, you probably already know that running relevant ads to your audience is extremely important. If you’re not relevant, people aren’t paying attention to you and your efforts are being wasted. Everyone wants to on-trend and relevant to their audience, but how can you know for sure if you’re succeeding at this? One way, is by using the Facebook relevance score.

What is a Relevance Score?

Your relevance score is calculated after your ad has reached 500 impressions, and then Facebook will rate your ad on a scale of 1 – 10 based on feedback and the ad objective. The higher the score, the better. A low number would indicate your ad was not relevant to the audience you’ve targeted. Facebook is relying heavily on user feedback to determine how often your ads are shown in the newsfeed. Don’t panic – this is NOT exclusive to your relevance score. The MOST important factor is your bid price, however, your relevance score still contributes to newsfeed visibility, so it is important to keep an eye on this.

Relevance Score = Who You’re Targeting

The quickest way to a low relevance score is to, for example, advertise an eBook full of paleo recipes to an audience that lives a vegan lifestyle. This would likely result in your post being hidden and/or blocked by the vegan audience, which would contribute to a low relevance score. In order to increase your relevance score, you must target your audience in specific ways. For example, if your target audience is aged between 18-25, 70% female, vegan, interested in working out, and likes to read Health Magazine, then make sure you set those distinctions in your ad settings. By targeting the right audience, your ad should be received with open arms, which would result in a higher relevance score.

What You Need to Know

We recommend you keep an eye on your relevance score so that you can get a good feel for how your ads are performing, based on the audiences you’re currently targeting. Essentially, Facebook is giving advertisers a guide so that we can know if we’ve “hit the mark” or severely missed it. This is good for us, because Facebook rewards a high relevance score with an extremely low CPC. This is also good for Facebook users, as a high relevance score means they’re seeing content in their newsfeed that matters to them, improving the overall user experience (which Facebook cares so much about).