What is Ad Quality Ranking?
Ad Quality Ranking is Meta’s internal comparative score showing how your ad’s perceived quality stacks up against all other ads competing for the same audience.
Notch - Content Team
Nov 20, 2025, 6:27 PM
Table of contents
Ad Quality Ranking
(Platform Mechanics Framework — Comprehensive Edition)
1. What is Ad Quality Ranking?
Ad Quality Ranking is Meta’s internal comparative score showing how your ad’s perceived quality stacks up against all other ads competing for the same audience.
It is one of Meta’s three major comparative diagnostics:
Quality Ranking — perceived overall quality
Engagement Rate Ranking — expected engagement
Conversion Rate Ranking — expected conversion likelihood
Quality Ranking measures:
expected user value
predicted satisfaction
likelihood of negative feedback
content clarity, relevance, and creative structure
comparison to competing ads in the same auction environment
The ranking is not an absolute score—it is relative to other advertisers targeting the same users.
2. Where does it exist in the ad platform?
You’ll find Ad Quality Ranking in:
Ads Manager → Ads Level → Delivery Column → Quality Ranking
Its values appear as:
Above Average (Top 35%)
Average (Middle 30%)
Below Average (Bottom 35%)
Below Average (Bottom 20%)
Below Average (Bottom 10%)
These ratings only appear once the ad receives enough impressions for the system to evaluate its behavior and user feedback patterns.
3. What does it control or influence?
Ad Quality Ranking influences several core performance drivers:
A. Auction Priority
Higher-quality ads get cheaper and more frequent auction wins.
B. Cost Efficiency
High Quality Ranking → Lower CPM
Low Quality Ranking → Higher CPM
Because poor-quality ads need more aggressive bidding to win auctions.
C. Creative Rotation
Meta favors high-quality creatives, serving them more often.
D. User Experience Signals
Negative feedback lowers quality scores and increases costs.
E. Placement Priority
High-quality ads win premium placements (Feed, Reels) more consistently.
F. Learning Phase Speed
Higher quality → faster signal accumulation → quicker exit from Learning.
Ad Quality Ranking directly affects whether your ad becomes a scalable winner or a costly underperformer.
4. Why does it matter for advertisers?
Because Quality Ranking is one of the strongest predictors of CPM, and CPM affects:
ROAS
Total profitability
High-quality ads require less budget to generate more results, because the platform sees them as valuable to users.
Low-quality ads require more budget to generate fewer results, because the platform punishes content that creates a poor user experience.
In other words:
Quality Ranking determines how expensive your entire funnel becomes.
5. How does the platform use it during delivery?
A. User Feedback Processing
Meta analyzes:
hides
reports
bounce behavior
scroll velocity
interaction depth
Negative signals weigh heavily.
B. Creative Scoring
The system evaluates:
clarity of message
imagery relevance
call-to-action alignment
landing page consistency
compliance and authenticity
C. Auction Calibration
Higher quality → lower bid requirements.
Lower quality → higher bid requirements.
D. Comparative Modeling
Your score is benchmarked against ALL other ads shown to similar users.
It is not about how good your ad is in general, but how good it is compared to what your audience sees daily.
6. Common mistakes or misconceptions
1. Assuming “Below Average” means the ad is bad
In highly competitive niches (fitness, skincare, finance), even strong ads often rank below average due to intense marketplace quality.
2. Trying to fix Quality Ranking with targeting
This is a creative issue, not an audience issue.
3. Thinking Quality Ranking is static
It is dynamic and updates based on real-time engagement trends.
4. Ignoring landing page misalignment
If the ad promises something the landing page doesn’t deliver, quality drops.
5. Running too many creative variations
Each variation gets fewer impressions, delaying Quality Ranking accuracy.
6. Allowing creative fatigue to persist
When engagement drops over time, quality drops with it.
7. What to learn next related to this system?
The next logical concept after Ad Quality Ranking is:
Engagement Rate Ranking & Conversion Rate Ranking
Because these three comparative scores form the complete diagnostic triad for:
relevance
expected outcomes
auction performance
Additional related follow-ups include:
Estimated Action Rate (EAR)