Price to book value is usually of secondary importance as a valuation metric, except in particular sectors or circumstances.
Book value is not designed to be a valuation measure. It primarily measures the historical cost of acquiring assets, so that those the cost of assets can be matched with the revenues they generate, in order to calculate profits. These costs are usually greatly different from the value of the assets are part of a going concern, or the price at which the assets can be sold.
The recorded historical cost of assets is often affects by how they are acquired: a company that grows organically will lack the goodwill on its balance sheet that a company that has grown similarly through acquisition would have, a company that buys intangible assets such a patents will inflate its balance sheet compared to one that develops similar assets internally. These can be corrected (and deducting goodwill, at least, should be a standard part of any balance sheet analysis), but it does make applying this ratio harder.
The more fundamental objection to price/book is that what it measures is further removed from what matters to investors than other valuation ratios. What matters to investors is what cash flows an investment can generate in the future: shares are bought for the value of the dividend stream they generate. Other measures are ultimately proxies for this: returns to shareholders come from incoming cash flows (which justifies valuations such as those based on free cash flow), profits provide useful corrections to cash flows, removing many one-off and distorting factors (justifying measures such as PE), assets are merely the means by profits and cash flows are generated.
Although there have been studies that show out-performance by strategies based on price/book value, the same is true for many value strategies. Given that there will be a strong correlation between low price/book and other value measures, this is really evidence of the value effect in general. There is little reason to prefer price/book to other value measures such as CAPE, PE, or dividend yield.
The exceptions are sectors and companies in which the value of companies does come from their assets (such as property and investment companies), and in these sectors the accounts usually reflect the market value of the major assets more closely, with regular revaluations or marking to market.