Good morning internet fans, it’s Ryan Perry’s Simple Biz Support and it is Wednesday therefore it’s Social Media Wednesday. In fact it is Wednesday, March 11th, and as usual I have the beautiful and talented Sarah Giometti with Provaro Marketing on the other end. Good morning Sarah.

Sarah Giometti: Good morning Ryan, how are you?

RP: I’m doing fabulous. For some reason the traffic by the office today seems to be exceptionally loud, so if you hear a lot of background noise I apologize. Maybe if I close the mini-blinds a little bit more it’ll decrease the amount of volume traffic noise I got coming through.

SG: No worries, no worries, it’s not too terribly loud.

RP: All right, instead of traffic noise, we are… Well we are going to talk about traffic, however, it’s not going to be automobiles, it’s going to be relevant to Facebook and indirectly related to Facebook’s ad relevancy score. This is something that I wasn’t aware that even existed until I saw it on one of my ads that I was running and I was like, “Oh, what’s this cute little thing”, it looks like a Google pay-per-click score how they rate you and rank you and all that type of stuff. What is it and for us small business owners that are pushing ourselves out on Facebook using Boost or other paid advertising, why is it important to us?

SG: It… For a variety of reasons. The relevance score is one to ten, the higher it is the better your score, the better your ad will perform. So for a business owner who’s kind of getting their feet wet with Facebook advertising and trying it out and they’re not sure how successful they’re being, it’s a good indicator for them that if their score is on the lower side it might be time to change the message or change the creative, the pictures that you’re using. So on that side of it it’s a really helpful tool to kind of gauge how your ad’s performing. If you’re running an ad that has a really specific action or conversion action you want them to take like “buy now”, “sign up”, then the relevance score is extremely important and it will matter on how it performs.

SG: Facebook will look at your relevance score to determine how well your performance… Or how well your ad performs, and they’re gonna be looking at the conversion metrics too, and that will help your score. So there’s a lot of reasons why this is really beneficial for business owners. There’s also some reasons why it doesn’t really matter. So if you’re running an ad that is… You’re just trying to get impressions or you’re optimize for impressions verses optimized for an actual engagement then it’s less relevant. But it still helps with knowing if it’s time to refresh your creative or if maybe you’re targeting the wrong audience. The score is based on positive and negative feedback. So the positive feedback is they take the action you want, or they like, share, interact in some way. Whereas the negative feedback is… Sorry, my phone rang and it threw me for a second. The negative feedback is they hid your ad, they hid all ads from you, then that’ll drop your score. So looking… So knowing those numbers if you’ve got a lower score there’s something wrong with your ad that you’ll need to tweak, whether it be the message, the image, or your target audience.

RP: Okay. That is very good information. The other thing I thought of is that if you’re running an ad, A/B testing’s always very important so you could also just change one thing. Maybe change an image, or change your demographic, “Okay I wanna run this one ad” and just target just men, as an example, and then run the same exact ad but just target women as an example. If you have a ad score on both of them and there’s a significant difference, then you would be able to tell, “Okay, this ad is better suited for XYZ versus ABC”. And then the other thing… So I understand the score of zero, or one to ten. Obviously you wanna be as high as possible, you talked about some of the metrics that go into that, the more people interact the higher your score is, if people do not interact or if they actually say, “Hey, I don’t wanna see anymore ads from this person” it’s going to lower your score. Not everybody’s seeing the ads though, and why is that? Oh, I picked the perfect time ’cause she disappeared.

SG: Sorry, my phone’s a real… I forgot to put it on vibrate it’s ringing off the hook in the next room. So…

RP: No, and I was talking about… I was talking about why some people wouldn’t see your ad and that’s when you took off, and I’m like, “I can’t see you anymore”.

SG: Sorry. So people wouldn’t see your ad because it’s not relevant to them or they hid your stuff so…

RP: Actually let me rephrase the question, I don’t think I… I got thrown off by you leaving. It’s not that people don’t see your ad, it is the ad relevancy score. Not everybody as a business owner if I post an ad, I’m not always going to see it, why is that?

SG: That I’m not entirely sure. They… Because…

RP: But you mentioned the 500 before.

SG: Well no, no, no… So the 500… Why you wouldn’t see an ad relevancy score, you need to have an average 500 daily views. So, sorry that I misunderstood your question. So, you won’t get a score if you do a really short ad or you don’t reach 500, because Facebook is trying to predict the future based on past action. So, if on day one, your ad is shown to… You get 500 impressions or more, then you start getting ad relevance score. But if on day one you only hit 300 people, and day two you only hit 300 people, there’s not enough data for Facebook to give you a relevance score. So, that definitely matters and your budget is part of that. There’s still the relevance score in the backside that Facebook does have it and that’s determining why even when you set up your ad if it says, “You could possibly reach between 300 and 1000 people,” they’re still seeing that if people are not interacting with it or engaging with it, it’s not gonna show to more people. Therefore, you’re only gonna hit at three or 400 people and not see the public relevance score that you would be able to use.

SG: And that’s also an indicator that if you’re not getting a score and when you set up your ad, it said your possible reach what could have been above 500, you might wanna tweak your ad again. Definitely do the A/B testing. I’ve done ads before where I drilled down, and I’ve had men in this age range and then men in the next age range, and then I did it again for women. So, you could run six different ads and have it all under one budget and test and see what works and what doesn’t.

RP: Okay, and that’s good information to know. The other thing to note that we thought was kind of interesting was we were gonna actually do a screen share and go “Hey, here’s an ad. Here’s the relevancy.” You had one that had a score that was with it. The ad has since expired, and the score disappeared. So, the other thing that I think is kind of interesting about this is that it is dynamic.

SG: It is. It’s real-time, so what you see right now if you were running an ad and you went and looked, the number you see right now can be completely different than what you’ll see 12 hours from now. I was running an ad. When this first started rolling out about a week or so ago, I had promoted a post and it got really, really great interaction, and then my score was something like eight out of 10. And so I did actually see it, and I went looking for it today, and I know exactly what post it was. And the score says “not available.” So, I’m not sure if that’s a glitch on Facebook’s side, or if it does disappear once your ad’s done. So, you really need to remember which one worked well, and which one didn’t.

RP: Yeah. Which is really interesting, and my typical ad budget isn’t that big and I’m actually seeing some of these, the relevancy score pop up in some of these. So, for a business owner if you’re curious to know what your relevance score is, how do you do it and you’re not seeing it? By maybe adding $20 to your budget, in most case it should easily give you enough. And the other thing is if Facebook is looking for 500 interactions a day, is that if you’re taking a very small budget and stretching it out over a 30 days or something, that’s also gonna limit the number of people that are gonna see your ad each day. So, typically, you’d be better off just go ahead and spend a small amount of money over a small period of time, get as much visibility and soak as you can at once, and then take that data and then flip it into another ad. Do some A/B testing and see if you can get that relevancy score up.

SG: And to be clear, it’s not 500 interactions per day, it’s 500 impressions. Just to clear that one up to make sure. You don’t need to have 500 people do something with your add. It’s the 500 people have to see it. So, it’s not as daunting as you might have just scared some business owners.

RP: Okay. I wasn’t trying to confuse everybody. I’m sorry. But yeah, that’s a good point. And if it’s strictly only gonna show in real-time, then you need to make sure that you go in and check it. I’d be curious to know if any other viewers could leave a comment and let us know if they’ve seen the ad relevant, what their ad scores are if they’re willing to share it, and did they kind of share the same issues that you had where it was there and then all of a sudden it disappeared after the ad expired.

SG: Yeah. This is really new, so we would love to have some feedback from you guys. What you guys are seeing, how are your A/B testing is working out. If tweaking the content or a picture, tweaking your target audience a little bit has upped your score for you. We would love to get some feedback ’cause it is relatively new, and so the information out there we kind of know the positives and negatives of it. But it’s still about a week and a half, two weeks old that’s been rolled out globally.

RP: All right. Perfect. Any other things that we should know about ad relevancy at this time?

SG: I don’t think so. Well, the big thing is making sure… It is a useful tool, but you still really need to focus on what the end goal of your ad was in the first place. If you’re running an ad to gain likes and you gained 50 likes for $50, that’s a good result. So, we don’t want you to get too dialed into this and too focused on the ad relevance score. You still want to focus on what your goal was. Were you looking for people to sign up for something? Or buy a product? Or just like your page so you can get in front of more people? So, make sure that yes, use it as a piece of the metrics in deciding what you would do with your advertising. Whether you change it or leave it as is? But still focus the primary… At the end of the day, it’s all about what you actually wanted to accomplish. Did the ad accomplish that for you?

RP: I just hit the…

Unfortunately, I accidently hit the “Stop Recording” button which terminated the Hangout, thus ending this blog post. Until next week!