Facebook's New Competition-Based Ad Metrics Are What We've Always Needed

It's always made sense. The thought of being able to directly see how your ad creative is performing against your competition seems like it would be the most important metric given the structure of self-service ad platforms.With ad platforms like Facebook, advertisers are bidding on impressions against competitors for the same targeted audience. The more valuable the audience and the desired action are, the more an advertiser can expect to pay to display their ad.
Enter your competitor's better ad creative, website and product and you're paying more while getting worse results.So if what advertisers pay for their ads to be displayed is directly tied to their competition, why are we only seeing internal-based metrics like clicks and impressions?
We're only seeing half the picture, leading to unnecessary guesswork when it comes to ad campaigns.Facebook's not-so-relevant relevance scoreIn 2015, Facebook launched its ad relevance score metric to provide better insight into ad creative and targeting performance potential.Based on positive ad interactions on early impressions, Facebook would give your ad a score between one and 10. Receive a 10 and you could be confident your ad is on target. Get closer to a one and you'd better rethink everything.While the metric provided some insight into ad performance that wasn't previously available, it still didn't give enough detail, as admitted by Facebook earlier this year.This has led to Facebook's April 30 replacement of the ad relevance scorewith three new metrics: quality ranking, engagement rate ranking and conversion rate ranking.