When your Ads are in the learning phase you just have to be patient…sit on your hands…avoid tinkering…go for a walk! Whatever you do just avoid popping in for a quick edit as you’re likely to disrupt the learning and lengthen this phase.

SO WHAT IS THE LEARNING PHASE?

When you have set up and published an Ad in Ads Manager, you will have chosen a number of options to direct Facebook on how to feed the Ad out. For example, if you have selected a conversion objective Facebook will be looking for the people who are most likely to take action and make a purchase from an Ad, if you have added detailed targeting Facebook needs to find those people and understand more about them.

It’s all super clever machine learning based but it needs that ‘learning’ phase to optimise for your objectives and enable feeding the ads out the best way possible. So, over the first few days that your Ads are live Facebook is learning more every time the Ad is shown to someone. More about the best placement to use, more about the best time of day to reach your ideal clients, more about creatives that resonate best – the more you let it learn the more you are letting the algorithm do the heavy lifting for you, and that’s always a good thing.

So with this in mind while it’s still learning, it’s not yet reached it’s optimal performance so Ads in the learning phase will likely have a higher associated CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per acquisition) – no tinkering means bringing them out of the phase sooner and stabilising the campaign and it’s costs!

SO HOW LONG WILL THE LEARNING PHASE LAST?

The Learning Phase should end when the Ads hits approximately 50 optimisation events and stabilises. So for a lead-gen campaign 50 optimistation events would be 50 leads, for a traffic campaign it would be 50 click thrus. For Conversions there’s a 7 day window that you need the 50 conversions to fall within to exit learning (if you aren’t hitting this it might be worth testing add to cart instead of conversions or trying a different objective!)

LEARNING LIMITED?

Sometimes an Ad will show a ‘Learning Limited’ warning – this means that the Ad has not been able to hit enough optimisation events to exit the learning phase, and this could be down to one of these factors:

• Not enough Ad budget to feed the Ad out sufficiently

• Not enough conversions within the conversion window

• Too small an audience

SO CAN I EDIT AN AD?

Yes, just try to wait until it’s out of learning, and be wary that whilst some minor amends (eg. Small adjustments to the budget spend or adding a bid cap) won’t have an impact, the majority of changes will send an Ad back into the Learning Phase. If you have a few edits – make sure you do them all at once! The following are changes that we know will send an Ad back into Learning:

The Learning phase is a key part of running Ads which enables the platform to help optimise your campaign but it needs the right set up and minimal interference to do it’s job! So, even if you have just spotted a typo – sit tight and try not to edit! And remember not to start judging the performance of your campaign until it’s completed it’s learning and is feeding out with more stability.

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