Tim Peterson | AdAge | February 11th 2015
Facebook is giving advertisers a new tool to better compete for the social network’s expensive and scarce ad slots.
Starting this week, Facebook will tell advertisers how relevant the social network has judged their ads to be. Advertisers will be able to monitor their scores and tweak less relevant ads to become more relevant, potentially boosting the ad’s performance and lowering its price.
Facebook will score an ad’s relevance on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 meaning the ad is highly relevant to its target audience.
Facebook determines an ad’s relevance by measuring how positively or negatively its target audience may respond to it. Positive measurements include video views, shares and clicks, and negative measurements include the number of times people click to hide an ad or report it as spam. Facebook will start scoring an ad’s relevance after it has been served 500 times and will update the relevance score as more people come across it.
This move appears to be the latest way Facebook is trying to get a grip on the firehose of content flooding people’s news feeds. Last year the company moved closer to a pay-to-play model for brands to communicate with people on Facebook, which made room in people’s feeds for posts from friends and family. But heated as the competition may be to freely take up space in people’s feeds, things are also heating up on the paid side.
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