Ads Manager is used by over ten million advertisers to publish ads to almost four billion active monthly users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads.

After publishing ads, advertisers monitor their active ad campaigns, making optimizations and adjusting campaign characteristics to improve performance in key metrics.

Ads Manager makes real time recommendations to improve performance, which appear throughout the advertiser experience, across multiple platforms and surfaces.

The problem

At Meta scale, Ads Manager serves in-product performance recommendations to millions of advertisers across the platform, but this guidance lacked standardization and appeared inconsistently across fragmented product surfaces.

Recommendations were independent packages with no awareness of each other, fighting for attention. There was no clear way to pinpoint the biggest opportunity amongst competing insights.

As more insights became available, they became fragmented, or even conflicting, and their efficacy became diluted. Ultimately, advertisers were missing a clear answer to a simple question: what’s my biggest opportunity right now?

The solution

Opportunity Score became a foundational framework for insights across Ads Manager, designed to help advertisers improve campaign performance through actionable guidance. It unified recommendations under a 0–100 account score that prioritizes the most valuable, or most urgent, insights. Advertisers can identify and understand the relative weight of insights pulled from across their account, and take guided action through personalized plans.

Rather than optimizing around an abstract system score alone, Opportunity Score connects recommendations to meaningful business outcomes, projecting the impact each optimization could have on campaign performance.

Key objectives

For advertisers

Personalized insights

Create a scalable insights system that curates opportunities to make meaningful campaign performance improvements with personalized guidance orchestrated under a simple scoring model.

For Meta

Scalable framework

Establish a framework that helps product teams across the organization to build their product knowledge into a personalized insights system deployed across the platform.

For me

System-level design

Design a product system that eliminates guesswork, and transforms campaign optimization from fragmented maintenance work into more outcome-focused and decision-oriented workflows.

Program details

My role

I worked for over a year with product teams, leadership stakeholders, design teams, data scientists, product marketers, sales teams, and other cross-functional disciplines across teams and orgs to launch the final framework as it exists today.

I led design of the Opportunity Score alpha and beta experiments, conceptualizing the design patterns, scoring principles, and user flows that launched globally. My work influenced scoring and ranking mechanics, user research, go-to-market messaging, ranking taxonomies, as well as internal governance processes and design quality standards. An entire design language and brand was built around the Opportunity Score framework, anchoring it as a foundational infrastructure in Ads Manager.

Design philosophy

  • Advertisers can see the overall health of their account.
  • Advertisers can easily discover the next best action that can be taken for the most impactful incremental performance gains.
  • Advertisers can understand the value of each recommendation relative to other recommendations.
  • Advertisers can predict the outcome that acting on a recommendation for key business metrics.
  • Advertisers can take action on issues impacting their active campaigns, or dismiss recommendations to create the feedback loop that learns business constraints.
  • Advertisers feel validated for optimal setups, not punished for deviating from them.

Opportunity Score can be simplified down to two atomic elements

A global account score

On a 0-100 point scale, the score represents how optimized an account’s campaigns, ad sets and ads are overall. It updates in real time, giving a clear understanding of the account’s health at a glance. A score of 100 represents an optimally-performing ad account, following all best practices.

Available points represent the value of recommendations to improve the score. This is important, because it explains the value of the recommendation in the context of its impact to overall account health.

Insights to help raise the score

While campaigns are active, the system monitors for opportunities to improve ad delivery. When issues like fragmentated audiences or fatiguing creative arise, the score drops below 100, and personalized resolutions are recommended to advertisers.

As the advertiser is guided through actionable steps, the account returns to a more optimal state, and the score updates based on the point value of the recommendation.

Some of the touchpoints I worked on

Account overview

The Account Overview page was a core surface for Opportunity Score to integrate into, as it was already a go-to for catching up on performance trends and a “what do I need to know?” briefing.

Opportunity Score is now the focal point that sets the context for the Account Overview page.

Campaign table

The campaign table is the highest traffic surface in Ads Manager, and prominently features Opportunity Score, anchored to the top of the screen at all times.

The score is featured in the page header, and individual campaign-level insights to explore can be found in the Actions column for any active campaign.

Opportunities

The prominent anchoring of the score on the top of the campaign table is the entry point for the top recommendation.

This is the single most valuable opportunity that the system has detected for the advertiser to take to improve overall performance across the entire account.

Essentially, if an advertiser has time to take one action before logging off, this should be it.

Actions

The framework is integrated across every active campaign, offering actionable insights.

Recommendations appear in the Actions column in an easy to identify format that matches existing mental models:

  • 🔴Red means error
  • 🟡 Yellow means warning
  • 🔵 Blue means opportunity

Alerts

Ranking is complex. Insights moves metrics, but errors prevent ads, or even entire campaigns, from delivering at all. Warnings could mean anything from a typo somewhere to non-compliance with regulatory law.

I helped define the taxonomies and logics that prioritize the most important issues to resolve, both at the account level and at the campaign level.

Outcomes

For advertisers

Higher-confidence decision-making

Opportunity Score empowered advertisers to make more informed decisions and understand the value of the system’s personalized insights. More importantly, advertisers no longer had to guess which optimizations would drive the greatest impact. They could focus on incremental optimizations that are proven to be the most impactful.

On average, advertisers who used Opportunity Score in their advertising strategy saw a 5% lower cost per acquisition, allowing budget scaling to high-performing ad campaigns.

For Meta

Product adoption growth

Opportunity score exceeded adoption targets in alpha, and drove measurable increases in campaign creation completion rates and advertiser engagement.

The performance gains felt by advertisers had a significant effect, and led to statistically significant gains throughout the funnel (adoption → outcomes → revenue). In other words, as advertisers followed more recommendations, their ads performed better, and their spend on Meta ads grew.

For me

Promotion to staff product designer

Opportunity Score changed how I think about product design at scale. The work taught me system thinking over product thinking, and that designing effective systems depends not only on reducing cognitive overhead and building trust, but on removing underlying complexity.

In particular, I learned how often products unintentionally “ship the org chart” to users. Some of the most impactful design work came from unifying systems into experiences that felt cohesive and easy to understand.