What Happened To Facebook Ads Affinity Score? Plus What You Can Do About it

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Today I want to talk about Facebook's affinity score.

Many of you may have noticed that when you log in to your Facebook Ads account, the affinity score isn’t there anymore. A lot of you, including people in the Emoji Arbitrage Course, have gotten used to this idea of having an affinity score, using it to pick your audiences. And now that there’s no affinity score, you may feel like you don’t know what to do.

Now, I'll show you what’s going on and explain why this is all happening, so that you can change your strategy a little bit, to make your strategy much more effective.

The downside of removing the affinity score is that there’s a little bit more work involved. But the upside is you’re going to get much better results over the next couple of weeks, months, years for everything.

What's an affinity score?

On your Facebook ads account, you see the Facebook audience insights area, where you go to research people on Facebook.

Let’s say you just created an emoji app or you’re thinking of doing some Facebook Ads. For example, you did an emoji app on pizza. When you go to Interest and type in “pizza,” this generic term has 40 to 45 million people a month, interested people in the United States. Now, that’s pretty broad, and typically, you want something under a million to be specific enough for an app, especially emoji app.

What we teach is that you go to Demographics and then go over to Page Likes. The Top Categories section talks about people who like pizza tend to like these specific pages within these categories.

Down in the Page Likes section, this relevance column used to be over on the right and it used to be called the affinity score.

The affinity score will give you a list of pages and tell you how likely people who like pizza were to like that specific page. And this was a big part of research and of buying Facebook Ads and everything else.

Facebook now replaced this with Relevance and, here’s what they say: “The pages that are mostly likely to be relevant to your audience based on page size and the number of people in your audience who already like that page.”

Now you need to get specific. So instead of “pizza”, type “golden retriever.”

Seeing the results, there’s some difference, but it’s not like a game-changing difference. So this isn’t that helpful. But, it doesn’t mean all hope is lost.

Why did the Facebook affinity score disappear?

This is from talking to a bunch of people, and this is also just my best guess. Facebook’s algorithm is better than anything we could ever do on targeting. We, as humans, probably think that we know what we’re doing. We think that there’s no way Facebook’s optimization or pixel could ever do the work we’re doing, that there’s no way they’re smarter.

The news is, actually, Facebook’s much better than we ever are or will be. And they’re trying to get people to do less manual work, and let Facebook do more of the ‘finding the best customers’. They want you to do less targeting yourself, and they want to take over that targeting for you.

The more that they can take that out of your control, the better that their pixels are going to get, and the better that they’re going to get at finding the customers you need.

What Facebook is telling you, and what you want to tell Facebook

What Facebook is trying to tell you is this: “Just tell us the people you need, tell us the people you want, and we will go get them for you”. Now, that’s different than “tell us what the people are interested in” or “tell us what pages they like.” Right?

What you want to tell Facebook is “tell us the exact people that you want us to go find more of”. Now, you’re not looking for people who are interested in pizza or golden retrievers. You’re looking for people who will install and download your app. And that is why, I think Facebook is removing this affinity score, and they are putting all the weight in custom audiences and lookalike audiences.

This custom audience is giving Facebook your own interest group. Realize that their technology is so smart, the more data that you can give them, the better targeting and research and everything that they will be able to get you.

What you can do about this

What you need to do is to start shifting your focus over to generating custom audiences, instead of spending time putting in interest and trying to find affinity scores and creating as many audiences through that.

It’s all about custom audiences

Facebook is so good and all it wants is for you to give it more data. And that’s what you need.

So, if you’re freaking out about your affinity scores not being there, you need to shift that energy to thinking about this instead: “How do I create new custom audiences for Facebook that are the kind of people that I want more of?”

That’s what’s happening on Facebook, that’s what you need to do, and that’s what going to get you cheaper installs, and eventually, make your marketing much more effective and profitable.

Want to learn more about Facebook Ads for app installs? Click here to check out our mini course.

See ya!

Carter

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