Want to Improve Your Facebook Ad Relevance Score? Try This.

Your Facebook Ad Relevance Score is not a vanity metric. You should pay close attention to it, because improving it saves you real money.

Here’s how it works . . .

The Facebook Ad algorithm assigns a good relevance score to posts that have a higher engagement rate, and then rewards those posts with more exposure at a lower cost. (Engagement is calculated according to how often anyone takes an action on the post, including likes, comments, shares, offer claims, link clicks, photo views, video views, etc.)

So, for instance, if your sponsored post garners only around 1% engagement, the cost per click you will be charged as you continue to show the ad could be upwards of $3 per click. But on the other hand, if your engagement rate is around 10%, your cost per click may drop to around 25 cents.

You can see how it’s definitely in your best interest to improve your engagement rate. But how do you do that? What will get your engagement rate up and improve your ad relevance score?

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Conventional Wisdom: Refining Your Ad Targeting Strategy

The first and most obvious thing you can do is to narrow your ad targeting. The theory is that if you show your post to a more tightly targeted audience, it will perform much better. Even the most average content has a chance to draw in raving fans of the topic.

The usual way to narrow down an audience is to use qualifying rules to find subsets. For example, if you’re selling parental control software, you might promote your offer to:

• Parents (broad audience)
• Of grade school children (narrower audience)
• Who have shown an interest in child safety (tighter subset)

Of course, there are no guarantees with this tactic. You might create a very narrowly and accurately targeted ad set, but if that audience has a lot of content to choose from, they may not be induced to pay attention to yours.

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An Alternative Strategy

What if, instead of only targeting correlated interests, we targeted completely different interests, but concentrate our advertising on an interesting overlap?

Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey and Founder of Wordstream, recently used this tactic with exceptional results. He wrote a story about an experiment he conducted on how easy it was to spread a fake news story using Facebook ads (as Russia had been reported doing during the presidential election).

With only a $400 budget to promote this story using Facebook ads, Kim achieved the following engagement:

• Almost 120,000 views
• 1,300+ likes
• 235 shares
• 68 comments

Subsequently, the story was picked up by both Business Insider and Forbes, and led to Kim being interviewed on a major television network.

Kim’s story also attracted attention at Facebook, and might even have been a contributing factor in the social media giant updating their ad reviewing policy.

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How It Works: Step-by-Step

Here’s how Larry Kim’s campaign worked. He selected a demographic that he knew the story would appeal to most. Liberals.

Now, that’s a massive audience of 26 million. With a budget of only $400, Kim set out to identify a subset to target.

Instead of trying to come up with a complimentary qualifier that would narrow down his audience, he chose another large audience that had no obvious correlation. His target would be the overlapping segment of these two audiences.

Kim required that people in my target audience be both liberal and Star Trek Fans. This cut the audience down from 26 million to just 1.1 million.

What does being a Star Trek fan have to do with being a political liberal? Nothing. But Kim brilliantly focused on the overlap between the two groups by targeting liberals who might understand an obscure Star Trek reference.

Kim made the title image for the post a meme based on the obscure reference.

It worked. Star-Trek fans who were also liberals jumped all over the post, creating strong engagement metrics that gave the ad a Facebook Relevance Score of 7/10.

You see the power of this strategy? It makes ads more engaging by appealing to more than one of a user’s diverse interests.

If you just brainstorm this for a while, you can probably come up with dozens of campaign possibilities. What about CRM software users who are also Seinfeld fans? Or financial investors who love the Lord of the Rings trilogy? Or educators who will recognize Harry Potter references.

The possibilities are endless . . .

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Over to You

Do you need to improve your Facebook Ads click through rate? Do you want to raise that all-important relevance score so you can get more ad exposure at a lower cost?

Let this unconventional tactic inspire your creativity and see what ideas you can come up with.