How to Improve Facebook Ad Relevance Score

Chances are you've heard about the Facebook Ad Relevance Score, a metric that once graded your ads on a scale from 1 to 10. While that specific score is gone, the underlying principle is more important than ever. This guide will walk you through its modern replacement - the Ad Relevance Diagnostics - and give you actionable strategies to improve your ad performance, lower your costs, and drive better results.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Goodbye Relevance Score, Hello Ad Relevance Diagnostics

In 2019, Facebook replaced the single 1-to-10 Relevance Score with three more specific and helpful metrics. Instead of wondering why your score was a 4, you now get clearer feedback on where your ad is struggling. This change empowers you to diagnose problems with greater accuracy. Think of it as upgrading from a general warning light in a car to specific diagnostic codes for the engine, brakes, and transmission.

These three new metrics are:

• Quality Ranking: This reflects the perceived quality of your ad and landing page compared to other ads competing for the same audience. It’s the closest direct replacement for the old ad relevance score and a primary indicator of your ad’s overall health.
• Engagement Rate Ranking: This measures how likely people are to interact with your ad (click, like, comment, share) compared to others targeting the same audience. It’s all about whether your creative is stopping the scroll.
• Conversion Rate Ranking: This assesses how well your ad is driving your desired action (e.g., purchases, lead sign-ups) compared to competing ads with the same optimization goal.

For each of these diagnostics, Facebook will give your ad a rating:

• Above Average
• Average
• Below Average (shows the bottom 35%, 20%, or 10% of ads)

Your goal is to get all three metrics to "Average" or "Above Average." A "Below Average" ranking is a clear signal that something needs to be fixed. You can find these new metrics in your Ads Manager by navigating to the "Columns" dropdown and selecting "Customize Columns," then searching for "Quality Ranking," "Engagement Rate Ranking," and "Conversion Rate Ranking."

7 Actionable Ways to Improve Your Ad Relevance Rankings

Improving your rankings isn't about gaming the system, it's about delivering a better experience to your audience. When you provide a highly relevant ad that leads to a positive user experience, Facebook's algorithm rewards you with a wider reach and lower costs per click. Here’s how to do it.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

1. Get Hyper-Specific with Your Audience Targeting

Showing your ad to the right people is the foundation of ad relevance. If your ad feels like it was made just for them, they are far more likely to engage. Vague, broad targeting is a recipe for low relevance.

Drill Down with Detailed Targeting

Don’t just target a broad interest like "Fitness." Layer interests to find your ideal customer. For a high-end yoga brand, you might target people interested in "Lululemon" AND "Yoga Journal" AND who have behaviors like "Engaged Shoppers." This narrows the field from millions of loosely interested people to a smaller group of highly motivated potential buyers.

Leverage Custom and Lookalike Audiences

Your warmest audiences are people who already know you. Upload your customer list or create a Custom Audience from website visitors. These groups produce some of the highest relevance scores because you’re speaking to people already familiar with your brand.

Then, take it a step further by creating Lookalike Audiences from your best sources, like your top-spending customer list. Facebook's algorithm will find new users who share characteristics with your best customers, giving you a powerful, pre-qualified group to target.

2. Craft Compelling Ad Creative That Stops the Scroll

Your ad creative - the image, video, and text - is your first and only chance to grab attention. This is where you directly impact your Engagement Rate and Quality Rankings.

Write a Powerful Hook

Whether it’s the first three seconds of a video or the first sentence of your ad copy, you need a strong hook. Ask a question that speaks directly to your audience's pain points ("Still struggling with boring meal prep?") or make a bold statement ("This is the last pair of running shoes you'll ever need."). You have a fraction of a second to convince someone to stop scrolling, so make it count.

Use High-Quality, Relevant Visuals

Blurry photos or generic stock images scream "advertisement" and cause people to tune out. Use vibrant, high-resolution visuals that align with your brand. User-generated content (UGC) is incredibly powerful here, as it feels more authentic and trustworthy than overly polished studio shots. Showcasing real customers using your product builds social proof and boosts engagement.

Write Benefit-Driven Copy

People don’t buy features, they buy a solution to their problem. Don’t just list what your product does, explain how it will improve their lives. Instead of saying "Our moisturizer has hyaluronic acid," say "Get visibly smoother, hydrated skin that glows." Focus on the transformation, and make your call-to-action (CTA) clear and direct ("Shop Now and Transform Your Skin").

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

3. Optimize Your Post-Click Landing Page Experience

Facebook looks beyond the ad itself. A low Conversion Rate Ranking often points to a problem with your landing page. The user journey must be seamless from the initial click to the final conversion.

Ensure Message Match

Your landing page must be a direct continuation of your ad. If your ad promises "50% off black leather boots," the landing page must immediately feature black leather boots at a 50% discount. A mismatch between the ad's promise and the landing page experience is a leading cause of high bounce rates and poor conversions, torpedoing your ranking.

Prioritize Page Load Speed and Mobile Friendliness

Most Facebook users are on mobile. A slow-loading, poorly formatted mobile landing page will crush your conversion rates. Test your page on Google's PageSpeed Insights. Compress images, streamline code, and ensure every element is easy to click and read on a small screen. Even a one-second delay in page load time can cause a significant drop in conversions.

4. A/B Test Your Ads Relentlessly

You can't improve what you don't measure. Guessing what works is a losing game, methodical testing is the key to consistent improvement.

Create variations of your ads to test different elements:

• Creative: Test a video against an image. Try a shot of the product in use vs. a lifestyle-focused image.
• Headlines: Test a question-based headline against a benefit-driven statement.
• Primary Text: Try long-form, story-based copy against short, punchy copy.
• Audiences: Pit a Lookalike Audience against an interest-based one.

Facebook's Dynamic Creative feature can automate much of this for you by mixing and matching your assets to find the winning combinations for different segments of your audience.

5. Monitor and Manage Ad Comments and Feedback

The social proof on your ad is a powerful signal to both users and Facebook's algorithm. Positive comments and shares boost your perceived quality, while negative feedback can send it into a nosedive.

Stay on top of your ad comments. Respond to legitimate questions, thank people for positive feedback, and hide or delete spammy or excessively negative comments. Besides visible comments, users can also provide negative feedback by choosing to hide your ad. If you see high rates of negative feedback, it’s a glaring sign that your targeting is off or your creative is annoying your audience.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

6. Prevent Ad Fatigue with Creative Refreshes

Ad fatigue happens when the same audience sees your ad so many times that they start ignoring it or, worse, become annoyed by it. This leads to a decline in engagement and an increase in costs.

Keep an eye on the "Frequency" metric in an ad set. If the frequency starts to climb above 3 or 4 and you notice your performance declining, it's time to refresh your creative. Swap in new images, update your copy, or try a completely different ad angle. Keeping your creative fresh ensures your message stays effective and prevents your audience from tuning out.

7. Align Your Ad Goal with Your Business Goal

The optimization goal you pick for your campaign tells Facebook who to show your ad to. If your goal is to get purchases, but you choose the "Traffic" objective, Facebook will find people most likely to click - not necessarily people most likely to buy. This misalignment leads to a poor Conversion Rate Ranking.

Ensure your campaign objective reflects your true business goal. If you want leads, use the "Leads" objective. If you want sales, use the "Sales" objective with the "Conversions" optimization. This alignment gives the algorithm the correct instructions to find users who will help you hit your goals and improve your relevance.

Final Thoughts

Improving your Facebook Ad Relevance Diagnostics comes down to a simple, user-focused mindset: serve the right ad to the right person at the right time. By treating these metrics not as hurdles but as helpful feedback, you can systematically diagnose issues, deliver more value to your audience, and get much better results from your ad spend.

We know that managing all these metrics and optimizing campaigns can feel like a full-time job, especially when you're trying to connect performance dots between Facebook Ads, your website analytics, and your sales data. To save you from drowning in spreadsheets, we built Graphed instead. Instead of spending hours manually pulling reports, you can now simply ask for a real-time dashboard comparing Facebook spend to Shopify revenue, and get it in seconds. We help you skip the data wrangling and get straight to the insights that will move the needle for your business.