Is Meta’s Opportunity Score Worth Your Attention?
Meta's opportunity score gives you a snapshot of how optimized your campaigns are based on Meta's own recommendations. It's a helpful reference point, but not a guarantee of results. Learn what the score means and if it’s helpful for your advertising strategy.
If you’ve recently seen Meta displaying a percentage score when you’re creating your ads and wondered what it means, you’re in the right place.
That percentage is your opportunity score.
In Meta's universe, it's a measure of how optimized your ads are, based on how many of Meta's recommendations you've implemented.
The question now is, should you pay attention to it, or is it just another vanity metric to ignore?
Let's find out.
Key takeaways
- The opportunity score is a real-time estimate of how well your campaigns align with Meta's best practices.
- A score below 100 does not mean your campaigns are failing; it means Meta has recommendations for you to consider.
- Not every recommendation will suit your campaign goals, so review them critically before applying any.
- Some recommendations, such as changing your targeting or ad creative, will push your campaigns back into the learning phase.
- The score is a useful reference point, but you are ultimately the strategist who knows what is right for your campaigns.
What exactly does the opportunity score mean, and where can you find it?
The opportunity score is a real-time, Meta-provided score between 1 and 100. The higher your score, the better optimized your campaigns are.
If your score falls below 100, Meta will generate recommendations for you to implement to bring it up. These recommendations can range from switching to an Advantage+ audience to scaling a particular campaign.
You could see upwards of 60 recommendations, but Meta filters these down to the ones most relevant to your business profile and campaign characteristics.
That said, Meta is upfront about what the score means for your results:
"Opportunity score (including a high score) itself does not reflect your actual or future performance. Should you choose to apply all or some of the recommendations, then the applied recommendations can help improve performance over time, but this isn't guaranteed. Actual performance depends on many factors, such as market dynamics."— Meta.
In short, the score is an estimate of how well your campaigns align with Meta's best practices. It does not guarantee better performance, but the recommendations provided do give you a starting point for identifying what to test or improve in your ads.
Examples of recommendation categories that Meta can suggest
| Category | Example recommendation |
|---|---|
| Automated campaigns | Try an Advantage+ shopping campaign. |
| Objective & goals | Use a different campaign objective or performance goal to maximize conversions and lower cost per result. |
| Audience | Using Advantage+ audience may improve performance. |
| Creative & placements | Add another image or video to re-engage your audience. |
| Signals | Set up the Conversions API to improve results. |
| Budget & bidding | Scale your high-performing campaign. |
| Other | Fix delivery errors and respond quickly to increase customer message value. |
Where can you find the opportunity score?
There are two places to find it in Meta Ads Manager. The first is the account overview tab.
The second is the campaigns tab, just above your campaigns overview table.
If you’re not seeing your opportunity score, you most likely have an account error that you must resolve first.
Must you implement the recommendations Meta provides?
Not necessarily. Some recommendations may not align with your campaign goals at all.
However, Meta claims that advertisers who adopted opportunity score recommendations saw a median decrease of over 5% in cost per result on average, so there is some merit to at least reviewing them.
When you do decide to act on Meta’s suggestions, start with the recommendation that gives you the highest points first.
If you don't want to implement a recommendation, you can dismiss it. However, dismissals only apply at the campaign level, so the same recommendation may still show up for your other campaigns.
Also worth knowing before you make any changes is that some recommendations will push your campaigns back into the learning phase. According to Meta, these include:
- Any change to targeting
- Any change to the ad creative
- Any change to the optimization event
- Adding a new ad to your ad sets
- Pausing your ad set for 7 days or longer (it re-enters the learning phase once you unpause)
- Significant Facebook budget changes
The opportunity score is not the true north of whether you're doing FB advertising right. In fact, you should not even be chasing a 100% score, according to Meta's Product Marketing Manager, Sarah Redding.
I definitely would encourage businesses to not get discouraged by a score below 100 or even a score that is at 100 and then drops. It's really just a chance to try out more of our best practices because the opportunity score does change in real time with the recommendations that it offers. As things in a campaign change like auction dynamics or creative fatigue, your score may drop, but that just means that we're showing you another opportunity to potentially improve performance.
Product Marketing Manager at Meta
Final thoughts on Meta’s opportunity score
Meta's opportunity score is more of an estimate than a guarantee, a game of probabilities if you will.
After all, implementing the recommendations may or may not improve your performance.
Yes, keep an eye on the score, act on the recommendations when they make sense for your campaigns, but remember, you are ultimately the strategist who knows your campaigns best.
A surer way to improve campaign performance would be to use great creatives, and that only comes through testing.
If you want to create multiple creatives for your A/B tests, check out Cropink. With Cropink, you can create hundreds of on-brand, optimized creatives that your audience will find relevant and convincing.
Try out the free plan to see Cropink in action.
FAQs
The opportunity score is a real-time score between 1 and 100 that measures how well your campaigns align with Meta's best practices. It updates based on how many of Meta's recommendations you've implemented.
To bring your score up, review the recommendations Meta suggests in Ads Manager and implement the ones that make sense for your campaigns. Start with the recommendation that gives you the highest points first.
You can find the opportunity score in two places inside Meta Ads Manager. One, in the account overview tab, and two, on the campaigns tab, just above your campaigns overview table. If you're not seeing it, check for any account errors that need to be resolved first.
Damaris is a Digital Marketing Specialist who writes about digital marketing and performance marketing. At Cropink, she creates data-driven content to help businesses run better ad campaigns for better performance and ROI.
Leszek is the Digital Growth Manager at Feedink & Cropink, specializing in organic growth for eCommerce and SaaS companies. His background includes roles at Poland's largest accommodation portal and FT1000 companies, with his work featured in Forbes, Inc., Business Insider, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, BBC, and TechRepublic.
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