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Facebook’s New Quality, Conversion, and Engagement Rankings | What You Need To Know

Facebook’s New Quality, Conversion, and Engagement Rankings | What You Need To Know

If you’re an advertiser on Facebook, you likely live and die by the platform performance data you receive. Analytics like click-through rates, cost per click, and conversions give you a vital picture of how your campaigns are performing. For those that went a step further (and you should have), you may have noticed a column at the ad creative level called “Relevance Score”. In 2015, Facebook launched this metric to advertisers in hopes of providing bigger insight into ad and targeting performance.

If you’re an advertiser on Facebook, you likely live and die by the platform performance data you receive. Analytics like click-through rates, cost per click, and conversions give you a vital picture of how your campaigns are performing. For those that went a step further (and you should have), you may have noticed a column at the ad creative level called “Relevance Score”. In 2015, Facebook launched this metric to advertisers in hopes of providing bigger insight into ad and targeting performance.

More specifically, this metric judged how well your ad copy, imagery, and targeting performed or was likely to perform. The scoring system was based on a simple ten point scale and was determined by positive and negative user feedback. If you saw a score of ten, you had a solid setup.

Get closer to a one and you would be led to assume your cash is going to a burning trash can. Earlier this year, Facebook announced that this metric will cease to exist starting May 2019 and that it would be replaced by three more detailed metrics that had a totally different operational function. Well, they have arrived.

The Three New Amigos

In hopes of providing more actionable insight, Facebook has released many new metrics to its ads platform. The three that advertisers should most be aware of are Quality Ranking, Engagement Rate Ranking, and Conversion Rate Ranking.

Below is a screenshot of what these new metrics look like in ad manager. You can see them when viewing in the dashboard at ad level. You can see that we've managed to get our client a significant amount of leads in this 10-Day time period. These new stats tell us that in our top two creatives, we are doing above average in comparison to their competition.

Facebook Quality Ranking

The new quality ranking will measure your ad’s quality by the number of people viewing or hiding the ad in relation to assessments of clickbait and other “baits” that Facebook deems as a poor user experience. Unlike the previous Relevance score numerical ranking system, your ranking will be displayed in Ad Manager with one of five values. Possible values for quality ranking are (where average represents the 35th to 55th percentile):
  • Above Average
  • Average
  • Below Average (Bottom 35% of ads)
  • Below Average (Bottom 20% of ads)
  • Below Average (Bottom 10% of ads)

For example, a quality ranking of Below Average (Bottom 20% of ads) means that your ad's perceived quality was among the lowest 20% of ads competing for the same audience. At least 80% of ads competing for the same audience were perceived as higher quality.

Facebook Conversion Rate Ranking

The new Conversion Rate ranking will measure your ad’s expected conversion rate compared to your competition that is using the same optimization objective aimed at the same audience. This calculated rate will give you insight into the likelihood that a person that viewed your ad will complete your optimization goal. The ranking system and values are the same as Quality Ranking. We should note that some products will naturally exhibit lower conversion rates. As Facebook mentions, “high-price or high-consideration products like jewelry should expect lower conversion rate rankings than lower-price or lower-consideration products like t-shirts.”

Facebook Engagement Rate Ranking

The new Engagement Rate ranking will measure your ad’s expected engagement rate compared to your competition that is using the same optimization objective aimed at the same audience. This calculated rate will give you insight into the likelihood that a person will click, react to, comment on, or share your ad. The ranking system and values are also the same as Quality Ranking and Conversion Rate Ranking

Competition Is King

There’s a common theme in regards to Facebook’s new ad metrics: They are all based on good ole’ fashioned competition. This is the first time a competition-based metric has been available in a self-service ad platform and it makes perfect sense. When you run ads on Facebook, you are entering an auction. You’re putting your ad dollars and ad creative against every other advertiser bidding to be displayed to the same target. The more valuable the target, the more you can expect to pay to acquire that customer. If you want to learn why I think this is a move in the right direction, please see my opinion piece that was recently featured on Marketing Dive and Social Media Today.