Ad quality is one of the three factors Meta uses to decide which ad wins each auction for a place in someone’s Facebook or Instagram feed, Stories or Reels. It is Meta’s judgement of how worthwhile your ad is likely to be for the person seeing it, built from viewers’ feedback and from checks for low-quality traits such as clickbait or withheld information.
How ad quality works in Meta’s auction
Every time an ad slot opens, Meta compares the ads eligible to fill it and gives each a total value made of three parts: your bid (or the bid Meta places for you under your bid strategy), the estimated action rate, meaning how likely this particular person is to take the action you are optimising for, and ad quality. The highest total value wins. That is why an ad with a lower bid can beat a better-funded competitor, and why a poor ad can lose even with a generous budget behind it.
Meta draws its view of quality from two sources. The first is how people react: hiding the ad, reporting it, or saying they do not want to see ads like it. The second is an assessment of the ad itself and the page it leads to. Meta’s published list of low-quality traits includes engagement bait such as “tag a friend who needs this”, withholding the information needed to understand the offer, sensational or exaggerated language, and landing pages that are thin, misleading or buried under pop-ups.
You never see the score itself. The nearest view is the quality ranking column in Ads Manager, one of three relevance diagnostics, which compares your ad’s perceived quality with other ads competing for the same audience. It only appears once an ad has had enough impressions, and it is a diagnostic for you, not a number fed directly into the auction.
Why it matters
Low ad quality costs money in two ways. Your ad must bid higher to win the same impressions, so CPM and cost per result rise, and it may be shown less often to the people most likely to respond. A small UK business spending £20 a day feels this quickly, because the same money buys fewer of the right impressions.
It also overlaps with UK advertising rules. Ads that hide the price, overstate claims or bait clicks often fall foul of the ASA and the CAP Code as well as Meta’s quality checks. Fixing one usually helps with the other.
Common mistakes
- Writing “Comment YES below” or “Share with someone who needs this” to inflate engagement, which Meta treats as bait and demotes.
- Teasing without saying what is on offer (“You won’t believe what we charge”), which reads as withholding information.
- Sending clicks to a slow page where a large pop-up covers the product before the visitor sees anything useful.
- Panicking over a below-average quality ranking on an ad with very few impressions, or ignoring one on an ad that has had tens of thousands.
- Running the same ad to the same small audience for months until hides and negative comments pile up.
How to act on it
In Ads Manager, add the three relevance diagnostics columns: quality ranking, engagement rate ranking and conversion rate ranking. Look at ads with a substantial number of impressions. Where quality is below average, read the ad as a stranger would. Is the offer clear? Is the language plain? Does the landing page show what the ad promised without scrolling or closing anything?
Rewrite headlines that rely on curiosity alone, remove requests for likes, shares or tags, and fix the landing page before you raise any bid. Replace tired ads before creative fatigue sets in, and keep an eye on negative comments. These diagnostics are part of every monthly review in my Facebook and Instagram ads management service, checked alongside the cost per result.