The Facebook ads learning phase is a critical part of any ad campaign optimization process. Throughout the years I have worked with many small family owned businesses in Adelaide and Australia that have struggled exiting the learning phase because of limited budget.
In this article, we will go through the basics and help you get started with optimizing your own ad strategies so your ad can exist the learning phase and move towards its goal.
What’s the Learning Phase
When you start a new campaign your ads will enter the learning phase. This is when Facebook is still learning about an ad set and the target audience. During this time, performance can be less stable and cost per action (CPA) is high because Facebook is exploring the best way of delivering the ads – but once it finds what works well for its audience then all future creations will have higher conversion rates.
The Delivery column reads “Learning” when an ad set is in the learning phase. In this stage, delivery systems always continue to learn about how best to deliver your ads with a goal of making them as effective and efficient for you as possible – but once performance stabilises (usually after around 50 optimization events), then they exit out into ‘Delivery.’
Checklist for exiting Facebook’s learning phase
If you are struggling with the ad budget or time, these are some tips for passing or avoiding the learning phase quicker:
#Don’t edit after going live
It is important to wait until your ads have been live for a while before editing them. Uploading new versions of an ad will reset all of its learning, which means that Facebook won’t be able optimise performance as much in this go-round – giving you less accurate results about future campaigns or even individual images depending on how long ago they were created.
#Less is better
The more ads or ad-sets you have, the harder it is for each one to stand out from other similar ads. This means that your delivery system won’t learn as much about what works and doesn’t with different audiences or locations; instead they’ll just see everything at once without being able carve up user interest and understand why some people clicked on this particular promotion over another nearby competitor.
The best way I’ve found so far? Simply create fewer but better quality ads.
#Be realistic about your budget
There’s a good chance you’re not spending enough to get out of the learning phase and hit the 50 mark. This may be especially true if your optimization is based on conversions, as this will generate fewer events for budget allocation than other objectives like newsletter signups or traffic.
Start with a smaller audience that you can reach. For example if you are a small-scale accommodation provider in Adelaide and only have a $100 budget to fill a weekend gap, start with a niche audience in Adelaide not all Australia or just focus on your remarketing.
When the ads are in a learning phase, it’s important to be strategic about how and where your ads show up. The three points that I shared can help speed things along. If your ads are still stuck in a never-ending learning phase then give us a call, we can optimise the campaigns and help you come up with a realistic and achievable results.
