The Facebook ads learning phase is mysterious to many people, and I think some are flat-out scared of it. Sure, performance can be less than desirable when you’re in the learning phase and no one likes that, but there are plenty of things you can do to try and avoid it to see the best performance you can. In this article, I want to demystify the Facebook ads learning phase by talking about what it is, why it happens, how you can leave it, and how to stay out of it.
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What is the Facebook ads learning phase?
The learning phase simply refers to the period of time when Facebook tests serving your ads to members of your audience with different timing, locations, enhancements, and other factors to figure out what combination works best. Facebook heavily relies on machine learning to serve your ad to your target audience and attempt to get you the results that you’re looking for in your campaign. Without any performance data to go off of, that’s a really tall order.
During this learning phase, your campaigns will almost certainly see inconsistent performance day-to-day, and will likely see a worse average cost per result than it will once you reach the normal answer service. This language is direct from Facebook’s support documentation shown below.
For some, the learning phase looks like one really good day followed by three bad days, then one okay day, followed by four great days, and then two terrible days, and then one normal day.
For others, everything might be pretty consistent across the board with only minor fluctuations. It really just depends on the amount of volume you have coming through your campaign and how easily and quickly Facebook can learn how your target audience responds to your ads.
As for that last statement, this means that performance will, on average, be worse when you’re in the learning phase and better when you’re in regular delivery. But it doesn’t guarantee results will be great or even meet your goals. They’re simply stating that ads running in the learning phase don’t usually perform as well as they do once they’re up and running fully.
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What causes you to enter the Facebook ads learning phase?
There are two categories of changes that will enter you into the learning phase.
The first is creating any new campaign group or ad creative. Each time something new is created, it will enter the learning phase simply because it’s brand new Facebook needs to learn how it will perform. That one’s pretty straightforward.
The second set is a little more complex. Anytime you make what Facebook considers a “significant edit,” your ad will likely be put back into the learning phase.
In the image above, you can see an overview of the types of changes that Facebook considers significant edits.
For campaigns, you can see that a budget or bid change of a certain magnitude means that you will enter the learning phase. Usually, this means to change larger than 20% in a single day, but it could happen for changes of less than 20%. Additionally, any changes to bidding strategies will enter your campaign back into the learning phase because you’re now leveraging a new optimization event and bid strategy to try to achieve your desired results.
At the ad level, Facebook classifies any change made to your creative as a significant edit. This might seem drastic even if you’re only making some small tweaks to the creative or the text surrounding it, but Facebook doesn’t know how those small tweaks are going to perform with your audience. Think about it this way, you tweak that word or Facebook ad image for a reason. I would assume you did it because you think it’s going to improve your performance to a certain degree to make it work making that change. If you assume a change that small can have a big impact on performance, then that’s probably something Facebook needs to learn about again.
Lastly, at the ad set level, any changes made to creative as well as budget and fitting like we’ve talked about before, but additionally, any changes made to the target audience, placements being used, or the conversion objective are also going to put your ad back into the learning phase. Again, all of these changes will significantly impact where your ads show, who they show to, what the goal is, and what Facebook is trying to achieve with those impressions. So all of those changes mean that the algorithm needs to go back to the drawing board to figure things out.
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How do you avoid the Facebook ads learning phase?
First, I think it’s important for me to say that the goal of Facebook advertising is not to avoid the learning phase. To take advantage of Facebook’s very strong machine learning it needs to learn what you’re trying to achieve with your campaign, and as we said, anything brand new or a significant edit is going to cause you to enter the learning phase. So unless you want to run a campaign for 10 years without ever making a change for testing anything new, you’re always going to be entering and exiting the learning phase.
Now, let me step off my soapbox and talk about the way that you can try to structure your account or plan ahead for adjustment to avoid being in the learning phase for longer than you need to be. Again, the learning phase does tell you to expect to have less efficient and less stable performance, so although we have to get in and out of it, the name of the game is to stay out of it as long as possible.
So how can we avoid it?
Here are five ways to avoid the learning phase on a regular basis:
- Limit your number of significant changes or batch them for a more consolidated learning phase time.
- Aim to have 50 or more conversion events in a seven-day period.
- Avoid pausing campaigns or ad sets for longer than seven days.
- Have large enough target audiences to achieve the conversion goals.
- Make sure you have enough budget to achieve your conversion goals.
What if you never leave the learning phase?
Unfortunately, there are some accounts that will not exit the learning phase for one reason or another. Maybe your target audience is too small or you simply don’t have enough budget to go around. What happens if you’re in one of those scenarios?
For accounts that don’t exit the learning phase, you’ll be given an ad status of learning limited. Essentially, this means that Facebook thinks that even with more time it will not be able to confidently exit the learning stage. For the most part, you can expect the learning limited status to behave fairly similarly to being in the learning phase because, technically, Facebook is still trying to learn at that point. You’ll likely see less consistent performance on a day-to-day basis and you’ll almost certainly see lower performance than you would if you had left the learning phase.
If you find yourself in learning limited, visit the list above, and try to make some adjustments to your account. See if you might be able to consolidate or increase volume in one area or another to get data through so you can exit the learning phase and have better performance consistency.
Best practices for exiting the learning phase
To make it overly clear, here is a list of actions you can take to avoid the learning phase on Facebook.
- Avoid over-segmenting your campaign.
- Consolidate your budget where possible.
- Limit the number of significant changes you make to your account on a regular basis.
- Choose a conversion action with enough volume to exit the learning page.
Remember, the Facebook ads learning phase is all part of the Meta advertising experience
The Facebook learning phase does say that you will likely have inconsistent performance and lower results than what you’ll see for normal campaign service, but it is a part of doing business on Facebook. It’s just part of the game. The challenge is to make sure that you’re not in the learning phase longer than you need to be so you can take advantage of more consistent, normal performance regularly.
Hopefully, this rundown has given you a better understanding of what the Facebook learning phase is and the actions you can take (or avoid taking) to ensure that you’re not in the learning phase longer than you need to be. Plus, if you try the advice above but still feel stuck in the learning phase, see how our solutions are here to help you find success on your Facebook ads.