How Does Meta Judge Ad Quality?

The Meta pages cited here give no score or formula for ad quality. They name examples of what Meta looks at: how people react to your ad, what the ad and its landing page contain, and how your page, domain or account has behaved before. Meta says higher quality ads perform better in the auction and ads with a lower quality ranking tend to cost more. Everything below is as checked on 2 Oct 2026.

What does Meta mean by ad quality?

Meta says its ad system is designed to maximize value for people and businesses, and that the auction is designed to help create higher quality experiences for people. That is why, in Meta’s words, higher quality ads perform better in the auction.

Ad quality is determined by analyzing many sources, including feedback from people viewing or hiding the ad and assessments of low-quality attributes and practices. Meta’s best-practices page adds that when an ad has any of the listed low-quality attributes, the ad quality component of its total value may be relatively low. Quality is one component of that total value, not the whole of it. The auction entry linked below covers how the pieces combine.

Which signals does Meta watch?

Meta says it monitors for certain actions and signals that people may take or provide when engaging with an ad, and says these include:

• Hide ad
• Hide all ads from this advertiser
• Hide ad due to repetition
• Report ad
• Landing page bounce rate
• Landing page dwell time

The pages cited here give no weights for these signals and no way of combining them. Treat the list as examples of the inputs, not as a recipe.

What counts as a low-quality ad or landing page?

Among what it calls key low-quality attributes, Meta lists three for ad content:

• Withholding information: enticing someone to click a link to understand the full context of something.
• Sensationalized language: exaggerated headlines, or commanding a reaction from people, to a degree that creates an unexpected experience on the landing page.
• Engagement bait: spammy content that urges people to engage in an inauthentic way to get more likes, comments and shares.

For the post-click experience, Meta lists a lack of substantive or original content, a disproportionate volume of ads relative to content, pop-up or interstitial ads that disrupt the experience, unexpected content experiences such as spreading one article across several pages, and misleading experiences such as websites that misrepresent products, expected shipping times or customer support. Meta says legally required disclosures and logins to private content, such as paywalls, are not counted as pop-ups.

Meta also says an ad that violates its low quality or disruptive content advertising policy is rejected.

What does lower quality cost you?

Meta says ads with a lower quality ranking tend to cost more, which may reduce distribution and lead to fewer results. It also says that if you repeatedly post policy-violating or lower quality ads, its systems may start considering all ads from your page, domain, ad account or other associated entities as lower quality. Ads created from those entities then become less competitive in auctions.

The same page says you can improve performance by removing low-quality attributes or by making sure your page, domain, ad account and associated entities comply with Meta advertising standards. Meta adds that, over time, your ad performance should improve.

How can you check your own ad quality?

1. Open Meta Business Support Home, where Meta says you can check the quality of existing ads.
2. Look at quality ranking in ad relevance diagnostics, which compares your ad’s perceived quality with ads competing for the same audience.
3. Compare your ad and landing page with the low-quality attributes above, and remove any you find.
4. Check that your page, domain and ad account comply with Meta advertising standards.

Quality ranking comes back as above average, average (the 35th to 55th percentile) or below average in the bottom 35%, 20% or 10% of ads. Meta says it is available for the last 35 days. In certain instances, Meta also sends a notification when low-quality attributes are severely affecting your ads.

FAQ

Is ad quality the same as quality ranking?

Meta links the two. Its pages say you can measure your ad’s quality relative to other ads competing for the same audience by using quality ranking, and that it measures ad quality through various signals, such as feedback from people viewing or hiding the ad and assessments of low-quality attributes.

Is there a formula for ad quality?

The Meta pages cited here do not publish one. They list examples of the signals and the low-quality attributes, and say quality is one component of an ad’s total value in the auction.

Can one low-quality ad hurt my other ads?

Meta’s wording is about repetition. It says that in certain instances, if you repeatedly post policy-violating or lower quality ads, its systems may start treating all ads from your page, domain, ad account or associated entities as lower quality. The pages cited here do not say a single ad triggers that.