As an advertiser yourself, what can you do to keep your ads competitive, relevant and successful? Here are some tips.

1. Improve your Relevance Score

Facebook scores ads on their relevance to their target audience.

Relevance score aggregates various ad quality and relevance factors to give you an idea of how relevant your ads are to the people in your target audience compared to other ads targeting that same audience. These factors include positive feedback (ex: clicks, app installs, video views) and negative feedback (ex: someone clicks “I don’t want to see this” on your ad). It uses a 1-10 scale in which 1 means your ad is much less relevant than other ads targeting the same audience, and 10 means your ad is much more relevant. You’ll be able to see this score once your ad has had about 500 impressions.

There are two main factors that impact relevance:

• Targeting: you may want to throw a big, broad net here, but Facebook recommends that you don’t. Narrow down your target audience by specific location, a small age range, or use Custom Audiences, which uses specific rules applied to each custom audience that will include/exclude certain visitors or actions, depending on what is important to you for targeting. We wrote a detailed post about reaching the right audience on Facebook a few months ago that is worth the read.
• Ad Creative: You might need to do some testing here, but what ad format works best for your audience? Text, image or video? If you do include image or video, make sure that is the main focus to your ad and is well-designed, and that the text is easy to consume next to it. Another suggestion is to constantly refresh your inventory: a design that works well now may not work well in another year from now.

2. Collection Ads

Facebook knows how much time we spend on our mobile phones. With Facebook Collection Ads, people who tap on your ad can browse multiple products or learn more about the features of a specific product, all within a quick-loading experience. This new ad format “makes it easier for people to discover, browse and purchase products and offerings in a visual and immersive way”.

Here’s a look at some of the formats:

Get New Customers and drive conversions with mobile landing pages that encourage user action

Sell products: Lifestyle layout this layout has a more full-screen effect and will allow users to browse your items one at a time in featured photos.

Showcase your business is a unique ad format that allows your users to engage with your brand via video and carousel images.

Tommy Hilfiger reported an ROI increase of over 200% after implementing the use of Collection Ads, integrating video and ecommerce.

3. A/B Test

Connectio.io put together a great resource on 30 simple ways to change up your Facebook ads to increase your click-through rate. There are many of these that you could easily implement between your A/B testing that could help you understand layouts, formats or designs that work best. One of the tricks of paid advertising is really not a trick at all: you have you kiss a few frogs before you find your prince ie: publish a few ads before you find the design and format that work best for your target audience.

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One of the most important metrics in any paid advertising strategy is your click-through rate (CTR): the higher your CTR, the better your ad is performing, and more your ROI will be positively impacted. The above tips will hopefully help you with both metrics and ultimately improving the success of your Facebook paid advertising campaigns.