Facebook (and its partner platform Instagram) remains one of the most engaging social media platforms, with 1.56 billion daily users, and twice as many who are on at least monthly. People turn to Facebook to engage with their friends, but also to connect with businesses and organizations, make purchases, and seek out recommendations.

To make the platform as helpful and user friendly as possible, Facebook is constantly updating their policies and algorithms. While many of the changes are small, some can have a big impact for businesses like us who advertise on behalf of our clients on Facebook. Here are three changes you can expect to see in the near future:

Division of Relevance Score

Facebook’s relevance score has been a top priority for advertisers for a long time. That single number can tell you a lot about your campaigns including the estimated quality and predicted success. It can also directly affect your cost-per-click and have a big impact on your overall ROI. 

Facebook just announced that they’re replacing their single ad relevance score with three new “granular ad relevance diagnostics metrics.” These three metrics will be:

Quality ranking - perceived quality of your ad compared with those that are trying to reach the same audience. This means that this metric isn’t totally in your control, and it’s a comparative metric.

Engagement rate ranking - expected engagement rate Facebook thinks your ad will get compared with ads targeting the same audience. 

Conversion rate ranking - expected conversion rate compared to ads that are targeting the same optimization goal and audience 

While the formula itself is not expected to change, advertisers now have more insight into what Facebook is tracking and how to better optimize campaigns. This will also be extremely helpful in troubleshooting campaigns, so an advertiser will never wonder how a seemingly high-engagement campaign ends up with a disproportionately low relevance score.

Welcome to Budget Optimization

This helpful tool was launched about a year ago to help advertisers control their budget at a campaign level. When activated, users can control the overall daily or lifetime budget for the campaign. If you have multiple ad sets within that campaign, Facebook then optimizes to distribute your budget to those ad sets.

Coming in November 2019, this will no longer be something users can opt into or out of – all Facebook advertisers will lose the ability to set an individual adset budget in favor of the optimization tool.

NOTE: After September 2019, users can still control spending at the ad set level by using ad set spend limits. If you set a minimum spend limit, Facebook will aim to spend that amount. If you set a maximum spend limit, Facebook will not exceed that amount.

Ad Manager Upgrades

The new-and-improved ad manager has been redesigned to incorporate 5 new features to improve efficiency and usability of the platform: 

• New navigational experience in Ads Manager - Campaign, Ad Set and Ad tabs that are nested horizontally in the current version of Ads Manager will move to the left of the table to a navigational sidebar.

• Use of a Navigational Sidebar – new navigation allows you to see your campaigns, ad sets and ads in a single table, which provides clear context without the need to switch between tabs. 

• View Nested Campaign, Ad Set and Ad Results - new side-by-side view lets you simultaneously interact with the main table and view charts or edit. This replaces the collapsible editing and reporting tray.

• Use Combined Search and Filter in Ads Manager - combined search and filter bar lets you use search terms or select filters to find ads, ad sets or campaigns. 

• Duplication Using Copy and Paste - previously if you wanted to duplicate an ad into multiple ad sets or an ad set into multiple campaigns, you'd have to duplicate into one ad set or campaign at a time. Now, you can perform this action in one step.

The biggest takeaway here is that Facebook DOES listen to the needs and requests of their advertisers, so if you see an opportunity, speak up! Our team at Group 8A let out a simultaneous cheer when we learned about the duplicate feature, as that was something we specifically campaigned to add.

In a market as competitive as Facebook advertising, being an early adapter to learn about and adjust to changes is the only way to stay on top. If you need help understanding and implementing changes based on the latest research, contact our social marketing expert today at roni@group8a.com.