Meta is rolling out Opportunity Score, which represents how optimized your campaignsThe campaign is the foundation of your Facebook ad. This is where you'll set an advertising objective, which defines what you want your ad to achieve. More, ad setsAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More, and ads are.
Where can you find your Opportunity Score? What the heck is it? How is it calculated? And does it mean anything?
Let’s investigate…
Where to Find It
I first realized I had access to Opportunity Score when I noticed it at the top of the Ads Manager table view next to the ad account selection drop-down menu.
It’s a bit random there, if we’re to be honest. Hover over it and you’ll get a breakdown…
You may also find it on your Account Overview page.
You’ll get recommendations that can improve your Opportunity Score if implemented.
What Is It?
Opportunity Score is graded on a 0 to 100 scale and represents how optimized your campaigns, ad sets, and ads are collectively. This score is reflective of all advertising that is active on an ad account and is not specific to a single campaign, ad set, or ad.
Great. So, how does Meta determine whether your account is properly optimized? It’s based entirely on how many delivery recommendations you adopt.
You’ve seen the recommendations. You may have ignored them. They could recommend combining ad sets because Audience Fragmentation or Auction Overlap has become an issue. Or turn on Advantage+ PlacementsFormerly known as Automatic Placements. When you utilize Advantage+ Placements, Meta will automatically optimize which placements are used and when to get you the most results for your budget. More to help with costs. Or apply standard enhancements to improve ad performance.
I’m making some assumptions here. Meta’s details about this are limited. I haven’t seen any documentation that lists out all of the possible recommendations that contribute to this score.
How Is It Calculated?
And now it’s going to get more convoluted. Not every recommendation is weighted equally, and values will be different based on the ad account, objectiveWhen you create a campaign, one of the first things you'll do is select an objective. The campaign objective is your ultimate goal. Your selection will impact options, including optimization and delivery. Options include Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, and Sales. More, aggregated industry insights, and more.
Scores, and factors that contribute to them, update and calculate in real-time. Here’s how Meta explains it:
Certain recommendations impact your score more than others based on how valuable we estimate they may be for your account. This estimated point value varies depending on things like your ad objective, aggregated industry insights and more. Your score updates in near real time, so the actual point change might be higher if you’re no longer eligible for other recommendations or lower if you become eligible for new recommendations.
Meta provides few details and examples, but this is the closest I found when explaining how applying recommendations impacts your Opportunity Score:
For example, you might have a score of 60 that could be improved by fixing audience fragmentationAudience Fragmentation is the potential result of running multiple ad sets that target different groups of people but are optimized in the same way to promote similar ad creative. When it becomes problematic, you should combine ad sets. More and using Advantage+ placements. When looking at the recommended actions, you might see that fixing audienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More fragmentation issues may improve your score by 35 points and enabling Advantage+ placements may improve your score by 5 points. In this situation, applying both recommendations could result in a score of 100. If you want to prioritize certain recommendations, you may want to focus on fragmented ad sets because it will likely increase your score more.
It would be nice to have a true list of all of the precise recommendations that contribute to this score, but we don’t have that.
The bottom line is rather simple: If you apply every recommendation that Meta gives you, your Opportunity Score should be 100.
Does It Reflect Performance?
Not necessarily.
Your Opportunity Score literally reflects your ability to adopt delivery recommendations. A high score doesn’t mean that your campaign is performing optimally and a low score doesn’t mean it’s performing poorly. Adopting recommendations to increase your score also doesn’t guarantee you’ll get better results.
That said, the recommendations and values assigned are based on Meta’s models that help highlight what will improve performance.
This is Nonsense… Or Is It?
My initial impressionsImpressions are the number of times your ads were displayed to your target audience. Impressions aren't counted if it is detected they came from bots. More of the Opportunity Score were that it’s complete nonsense. All it reflects is your willingness to accept delivery recommendations. And there are absolutely times when you should ignore them.
But, let’s look at this from a different angle. If you have a low Opportunity Score and your ads aren’t performing, this gives you some potential reasons why. You have lots of opportunities to make changes that could positively impact your performance.
In particular, I think about how best practices have changed over the years. So many advertisers resist Advantage+ Audience, audience expansion (when it’s an option), and even Advantage+ Placements. They continue to segment targeting into multiple ad sets per campaign like it’s 2018.
I would expect that those who resist these newer best practices will end up with very low Opportunity Scores. Again, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re getting terrible results, but this could help highlight the specific ways a badly performing account could be improved.
More than anything, this gamifies applying recommendations. It could actually work.
How to Approach Opportunity Score
Remember that your Opportunity Score doesn’t reflect performance. Being “most optimized” or even poorly optimized in the eyes of Meta doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
Its meaning may be more about probability. Meta has a ton of data about what works and what doesn’t. My guess is that a high Opportunity Score is more likely than a low score to perform well. It just doesn’t guarantee it.
I’d also suggest that you don’t completely ignore any recommendation that Meta makes. Try to understand where that recommendation is coming from. Do you resist it? Why? Is it reasonable?
Also, use these recommendations as opportunities to experiment if you aren’t getting great results. You may have resisted them in the past, but what do you have to lose? Maybe you’re just being stubborn and this will help results improve.
I’m not trying to shame you. I know it took me some time to embrace some of Meta’s changes over the years, and I’m still skeptical of some of them. But there comes a point for every advertiser when you need to eventually face the possibility that you’ve been wrong. Consistently bad performance is the blinking red light that should inspire change.
You could laugh off the Opportunity Score as mostly nonsense. I’m not saying that you should obsess over it. But it should be one of the first places you look when you’re struggling to improve results.
Begging for Transparency
This may sound crazy, but I think it’s a reasonable request…
I don’t see any reason why these formulas need to be protected. It’s not that I want to see the specific mathematical equation that led to my score. But a log of every recommendation, whether it was adopted, and the real-time value assigned to it would be helpful.
As we know, these values are dynamic, and they’ll be different by ad account, industry, and situation. Those values will even change from day-to-day. But, seeing them could be extremely helpful.
It could highlight what is often most important. It could also help me understand which changes (whether I’ve implemented them or not) Meta believes are most impactful.
I have a 97 right now. What are all of the things that I did right to get that 97? I’d love to see it.
Your Turn
Do you have Opportunity Score yet? Do you think it will be useful?
Let me know in the comments below!
