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Everybody can launch a Facebook Ad. From start to finish, the process requires very little skill or attention. However, there’s a difference between running a Facebook ad and an engaging campaign that actually contributes towards your marketing goals. In fact, many marketers and businesses still struggle to use Facebook Ads in a way that helps the business.
With this in mind, we want to delve into the mysterious ad quality rankings process. What does it involve? How do you ensure a strong ad quality ranking for your business? Let’s find out!
Rather than having poor ads steal the show, the platform wants consumers to enjoy the very best ads at all times. Therefore, it developed the ad quality ranking system. Essentially, the system compares ads of one business to the ads of another. In 2019, the old relevance score system was replaced by this newer version.
When pushing to appear in front of an audience, you won’t enjoy much success if your ad quality ranking is lower than that of the competition. If you want to see your current score, head into the Ads Manager and click on the Ads section. Look for the Quality Ranking column and you’ll see the current rating of your campaigns.
Today, we’re focusing on improving the ad quality ranking. Firstly, it’s important to note that ad quality rankings are made up of three components:
If people aren’t engaging with your ads, you won’t have a high ad quality ranking. Likewise, your ad quality ranking suffers if conversion is low. Why? Because both of these things suggest to Facebook that your ad doesn’t offer the audience much value. Due to this, it’ll prioritize the ads of competitors where engagement and conversions are both higher.
With poor engagement and conversions, your ad will have a low quality score. Quality is also determined by feedback, the number of users hiding your ad, engagement bait, grammatical errors, and whether or not you withhold information in the ads.
If you want to boost your Facebook ad quality rankings, you need to improve engagement, conversion, and/or quality. Now, you’re ready to learn the top tips for this process!
You’ve just seen that engagement is important for the ad quality ranking, so it makes sense to gather as many likes and shares as possible. However, there’s a small trick that businesses often overlook. When creating a campaign, Facebook assumes you want to create a new ad. If you look towards the top of the page, you’ll see another tab labeled ‘Use Existing Post’.
Most people don’t even see the option, but it means that you’ll collect all likes and shares under one single ad rather than spreading them across many. Ever wonder how an advertiser has thousands of likes and shares? They simply use the same ad time and time again rather than creating a new one.
After publishing promotional content on your Page, choose this post for every new campaign and all the engagement gathers on this one post. Facebook sees this engagement and your ad quality ranking increases (hooray!).
Though the first suggestion is a great tip, it doesn’t help if you struggle to gather engagement in the first place. For this, we recommend plenty of A/B testing. Thankfully, you’ll now find high-quality automation tools that perform A/B testing on your behalf. Whether you utilize these tools or do it manually, testing is one of the best ways to learn what works and what doesn’t in terms of ad engagement.
Play around with the different ad formats, test different creatives, and check for the best-performing CTAs. Over time, you’ll drop what doesn’t work and keep what does. As long as you give each variation time to perform, you’ll continually improve your ads and, in turn, your ad quality ranking.
By default, most campaigns run constantly, and this means that your ads can appear at any time of the day. As long as the user is in your target audience, they’ll see the ad (even at 3am!). Another way to improve your ad quality ranking is to actually determine the best times of the day and then run your ads on a schedule rather than constantly.
Head into the analytics and learn at which time your audience engages, converts, and otherwise enjoys your ads. Are there certain hours in the day that outperform others? After learning this information, go into the ad scheduling settings and highlight these specific periods.
Now, your ads are only active during the period where conversions are most likely. As conversion increases across the whole campaign, your ad quality score does the same.
Next, it’s a common fact that people grow tired of seeing the same ads over and over again. If you aren’t rotating your ads, people will come to resent them, and clicking will be the last thing on their minds. If possible, keep your ads on a constant rotation to catch the eye of those starting to switch off.
How do you fight ad fatigue? Use everything you’ve learned from A/B testing to create variations of your ad - this means using different images, copy, CTAs, and other features. With Facebook, it’s now possible to schedule a different ad set for each day of the week. With each ad only repeating once a week, people won’t grow tired of your brand.
If done correctly, this could hit the holy grail of improving conversions, engagement, and quality.
Engagement is one of the three components of ad quality ranking, so it makes sense to encourage likes, comments, and shares wherever possible. While some brands respond to all comments and filter negative comments, others simply ask people to comment in the ad itself. It seems obvious, but it gets people talking and Facebook notices the interaction taking place on the ad.
Let’s be honest, consumers are tired of the sneaky tactics used by businesses to generate interest these days. We recommend breathing some fresh air into the world and taking an honest and open approach. Don’t use clickbait language, don’t over-promise in the ad and then fail to deliver, and don’t withhold information in the ads that will likely disappoint later.
There are two reasons why an honest approach is best:
As a business, everybody is telling you to make videos, and the same is true for ads. If you’ve been looking for a reason to dip your toe into the water, know that it helps your ad quality ranking. While most people tend to scroll past a static ad quite quickly, it’s thought that consumers spend five times longer lingering over video ads. Even if they don’t convert, you have a better shot at capturing their attention with a video.
Fortunately, clicks and conversions also increase for most businesses with video ads. Instead of shouting about your product, show why your products are the best and explain how you can help their pain points. There’s an old saying in storytelling - show, don’t tell - and the same is true for advertising.
Once you enter the world of video, you’ll realize that the opportunities are endless. You could even partner with an influencer that has a ready-made audience in your field.
With many of the tips above, their effectiveness is limited if you go wrong at the very first step - choosing a campaign objective. You might think that this objective is just for you, but it actually communicates your goals to Facebook. Then, the clever algorithms know how to optimize the delivery process to achieve these very goals.
After choosing the wrong campaign objective, Facebook optimizes incorrectly, and your campaign suffers unnecessarily. If you’re seeking brand awareness, make sure the Local Awareness objective is chosen. On the other hand, the Conversions objective is designed for those wanting newsletter signups and sales.
Here are some bonus tips to improve your ad quality ranking on Facebook:
As you boost your ad quality ranking, you should see a marked difference in campaign performance (while also outperforming the competition!).
