Facebook rolled out a slew of new updates in how it reports its metrics on Tuesday, which are intended to help marketers make better decisions in how they spend their ad dollars.
Moving forward, relevance scores will now be broken off into three separate categories:
• Quality ranking will inform marketers how their ad’s perceived quality compares to ads competing for the same audience
• Engagement rate ranking will provide an ad’s expected engagement rate compared with ads competing for the same audience
• Conversion rate ranking aims to surface insights into what an ad’s expected conversion rate will be when compared with other ads that had the same goal and competed for the same audience, Facebook says.
Relevance scores had been similar to Google’s Quality Score in search, which many agencies use to improve search campaigns. The issue Facebook may be trying to address with this overhaul is that individuals engage very differently through video, images and chats.
Facebook did not return requests for a comment at press time.
‘Distrust’ among advertisers
The social media powerhouse also says “Potential Reach,” which provides businesses with a sense of how many people can potentially be reached by an ad campaign, will now only include people who were shown an ad on Facebook within the last 30 days. Previously, this metric was calculated on the number of total monthly active users on Facebook, the company says.
“Users may just be spending less time scrolling through their newsfeed and more time in deliberate sections of the platform, like interacting with groups on Facebook or looking for content in the explore section of Instagram,” Boyd says. “Within the Facebook advertising community, we definitely witnessed distrust with the potential reach resource.”
She adds that the previous method Facebook used to estimate potential reach was disappointing, as the number of users Facebook said it could reach seldom matched up to how many ads were actually delivered. “Adding accuracy to this metric will make campaign planning easier and more effective for our clients,” Boyd says.
Facebook says the new changes will begin rolling out April 30.