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Facebook ads poor relevance when direct linking (4)

05-14-2015 08:17 AM #1 stevedc (Member)
Facebook ads poor relevance when direct linking

I have just been testing a few campaigns in the gaming vertical with Facebook ads and I have come to a few conclusions based on my testing. I would appreciate some feedback from everyone if you agree or disagree with it.

Basically, I have created 5 campaigns for different games , a few of them I have created landers for and the rest just direct linked to the offer page. One of the games I built landers for is Nova Genesis [UK] and I direct linked to Smite [US]. I have been using CPC bids at around 0.60 per click for both.

The Nova Genesis lander campaign generally has very low CTR (0.2% on average) but a high relevance score so any clicks were relatively cheap. The Smite campaign has very high CPC and a slightly better CTR (0.9% on average) but not great.

When I initially started the Smite campaign it was rolling along ok with a CPC of around 0.45 pence per click and I even had a conversion. which was great but then all the impressions to that campaign suddenly stopped for several hours. When I looked at it a bit deeper, I noticed the relevance score for the ads was just 3 which is very low. The ad copy is very relevant to smite and so is the image used in the ad but according to Facebook it has very low relevance to the target audience, which in this case are people interested in League of legends.

I then switched to oCPM for the ad which generated the conversion and slowly started getting impressions again on that ad. A few hours later I noticed that I had just one click to the website at a cost of £2.45. This obviously isnt going to work so I went back to the CPC bidding model.

The conclusions I have drawn from this and I realize it probably needs a lot more data to be sure are the following..

  1. When direct linking to an offer there is a higher chance of getting a poor visitor experience because essentially they have seen ads like this going to this webpage a thousand times already, hence the low relevance score and high CPC from Facebook.
  2. When using your own landers, it offers something new to the vsitor and (so long as it is actually a good lander) offers a better and more unique expereience and hence a higher relevance score and lower CPC.
  3. Direct linking to new offers might give a better chance of getting good relevance scores because the visitor hasnt seen it a thousand times before already.
  4. Ensuring a high relevance score from Facebook is essential if we are to get low CPC and a positive ROI on campaigns.


What I have also noticed on my landers is that I am not getting many clicks through to the offer from them, so obviously they are sucking as landing pages and/or I am not targeting the right audience. Either way, this is where I need to put in some effort obviously as they are key to high relevance and low CPC.

What do you all think of this?

05-19-2015 08:59 AM #2 zeno (Administrator)

I think you're going far down the wrong track, except for this comment:

What I have also noticed on my landers is that I am not getting many clicks through to the offer from them, so obviously they are sucking as landing pages and/or I am not targeting the right audience. Either way, this is where I need to put in some effort obviously as they are key to high relevance and low CPC.
Basically, your ads suck.

Whether it be the images, the ad copy, the target audience, or all of these.

This is why your ads are getting low delivery, high CPCs, and low back-end performance.

Ad relevancy score doesn't directly effect your ad prices (at least, I'm 99% sure it doesn't work like this). The ad relevancy score was brought in to give you, the advertiser, some vanity metric to gauge your ads against everyone else.

What does matter is your CTR, rate of engagement, conversion rate, etc. and these are taken into account in calculating the relevance score. (I'm pretty sure Facebook didn't alter their ad delivery algorithms overnight to take into account a 1-10 score that they produced from values they already knew :P).

So, to summarise my thoughts:


  1. When direct linking to an offer there is a higher chance of getting a poor visitor experience because essentially they have seen ads like this going to this webpage a thousand times already, hence the low relevance score and high CPC from Facebook.
  2. When using your own landers, it offers something new to the vsitor and (so long as it is actually a good lander) offers a better and more unique expereience and hence a higher relevance score and lower CPC.
  3. Direct linking to new offers might give a better chance of getting good relevance scores because the visitor hasnt seen it a thousand times before already.
  4. Ensuring a high relevance score from Facebook is essential if we are to get low CPC and a positive ROI on campaigns.


1. No, definitely wrong. The back-end path has nothing to do with your relevancy score or ad delivery. The only way it will effect things is through oCPM conversion data that comes from back-end events.

2. Sure, a more unique experience for sure - this is one of the reasons we use landers regardless of traffic source, but again this has nothing to do with relevance score. Remember, you are serving 1000's of independent users. One of them thinking 'uhhh, that was new' wont change how some completely random person feels about your ad 5 minutes later.

3. Yes, but this is purely due to the ad content being new, and has nothing to do with if you are direct linking or if the offer itself is new. It's just something 'fresh'.

4. I wouldn't say essential, but yes, to get a low CPC you want an engaging ad (which infers a high relevancy score). Positive ROI is not at all inferred from that - you can have 1000 ads with 10/10 relevancy scores and have them burn money 24/7 if users don't provide some value (e.g. a conversion) on the back-end.

Hope these points help!

05-20-2015 10:04 AM #3 stevedc (Member)

Thanks for your comments Zeno.. Always appreciated and taken on board.

Can you think of any reason why Facebook would suddenly stop serving my ads for the smite campaign which was direct link to the offer? My CPC bid was pretty high but after 1 conversion suddenly the impressions stopped. This is what lead me to think that the low relevancy score had something to do with it.

I understand your points about the relevancy score just being a vanity thing, but what I dont understand is why my Smite ads had low relevancy in the first place when it was very tightly targeted to people interested in the League of Legends game. To compound my paranoia why also did they throttle my impressions for the ads? Is it just pure coincidence that they throttled impressions with the low relevancy score for a tightly targeted ad?

I really do appreciate your insights Zeno..

05-28-2015 12:32 PM #4 zeno (Administrator)

Quote Originally Posted by stevedc View Post
Thanks for your comments Zeno.. Always appreciated and taken on board.

Can you think of any reason why Facebook would suddenly stop serving my ads for the smite campaign which was direct link to the offer? My CPC bid was pretty high but after 1 conversion suddenly the impressions stopped. This is what lead me to think that the low relevancy score had something to do with it.

I understand your points about the relevancy score just being a vanity thing, but what I dont understand is why my Smite ads had low relevancy in the first place when it was very tightly targeted to people interested in the League of Legends game. To compound my paranoia why also did they throttle my impressions for the ads? Is it just pure coincidence that they throttled impressions with the low relevancy score for a tightly targeted ad?

I really do appreciate your insights Zeno..
The low relevancy will basically reflect low performance, so FB may have stopped serving the ads due to the poor performance.

Remember, traffic sources are all trying to make as much money possible per impression. If you are bidding CPC then they only charge you per click. So, if your ad gets very few clicks from your impressions, then it is negatively effecting the source's revenue. This is why your CTR and your bid are important. If your CTR is abnormally low then you will need to pay more per click for the traffic source to run your ads cost effectively.

The other thing is account scrutiny - if you did anything to flag yourself then FB might throttle your traffic or sandbox accounts, though this is not likely here.

Anyway, you mention 'tightly targeted'. Facebook doesn't care. If you target husky T-shirt ads at 10,000 people who love the hell out of huskies, then it's tightly targeted. If no one clicks your ads, then to FB, they suck and lose the platform money if they run them. Thus, the ads stop getting delivered as much.

The same thing probably happened with your Smite ads. It's nothing personal, it's purely programmatic. 0.2-0.9% CTR in the News Feed is likely well below the average for the audiences you are targeting.

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