You've already removed the text from your image. Now it's time to turn to ad copy and something we call "Vanity Metrics" - two of the top three reasons ad campaigns fail.
2. My Copy Should Speak Directly to My Audience
Every piece of advice you get about writing copy and headlines is going to come back to speaking to your audience – and that isn’t a bad thing. Speaking directly to your audience’s concerns and fears, then explaining how your product or service overcomes those fears is the cornerstone of modern copywriting and advertising.
However, something you should keep in mind about advertising on Facebook is hidden inside their Ads Policy documents.
Facebook restricts any copy or images that make assumptions about the people viewing them – Instead of asking the question: “Are you X?” Facebook would much rather you make the statement: “For people who X.”
It’s a thin tightrope to walk, but the ads policy page does a pretty good job of making the lines clear.
3. Any Engagement is Good Engagement
Facebook has recently reinforced its commitment to showing people the content they want to see – which means they’ve doubled down on their content moderation policies.
In the last few months, you may have started to see a new trio of columns showing up inside of the Facebook Ads Manager, which the platform is calling “Ad Relevance Diagnostics.”
- These three metrics are
“Quality Rank”
“Engagement Rate Rank”
“Conversion Rate Rank”
This may seem like a change out of the blue, but it’s grounded in a much older metric called the “Relevance Score,” and these three new Quality Rankings are just providing advertisers with greater transparency into the way the algorithm works.
I just threw a lot of words at you, so let’s break down how these mechanisms affect you:
When you publish an ad, it becomes visible to anyone within the selected target audiences, some of whom will engage, and some of whom may not want to see the content of your ad. Facebook picks up on both of these groups through signals including:
- Click-through rates (CTR)
- Time spent on screen
- Number of Likes/Reactions/Shares – which we call Engagement Metrics
Higher CTRs, Longer Time spent on screen, and more likes, reactions, and shares reflect as “positive” signals
Conversely, lower CTRs, shorter time spent on screen, and fewer likes, reactions, and shares reflect as “negative” signals.
Following this logic, it’s pretty easy to see how Facebook is evaluating these signals and combining them into the overall metric of Relevance Score.
So why does this fall under the heading of a half-truth?
Signal number 4: Ratio of Positive to Negative Comments
Facebook looks at the type of language being used in your ad, on your landing page, and on the comments that have been left. If most comments are single words, low effort responses that just say “yes!” or something similar, or if they contain certain keywords that Facebook considers negative, then the platform will reflect this as a highly detrimental factor when calculating your Relevance Score.
Relevance Score operates on a scale of 1-10, where 10 is the absolute most relevant content you can deliver and 1 is the kind of content people scroll past or actively report to Facebook.
Relevance Scores themselves don’t mean much, but they reflect general sentiment about your content, and are a great way to get an at-a-glance understanding of the health of your ads.
It’s also important to note that Relevance Score is a living thing – As your ads run, their scores can increase or decrease depending on the way those signals we talked about earlier change.
A fluctuation of even two points can result in changes of 100-200% in your ad costs, and sudden changes of four or more points typically indicate that something has gone horribly wrong and it’s time to rethink your ad strategy.
