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.

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