Facebook Ads: Learning Phase
The Facebook ads "learning phase" is crucial to the success of your campaigns. Here's a brief explanation of what it means and a few tips to help your ads exit the learning phase.
Key Takeaways
The learning phase mandatory and helps the Facebook algorithm understand who is the optimal audience and the optimal places to deliver your ad.
Ads usually exit the learning phase after 50 events or actions have taken place in 7 days.
Avoid making changes to your ad while it’s still in the learning phase.
What is the Learning Phase?
The learning phase is a process that every single campaign that you run on Facebook (at the ad set level) has to go through. It helps the algorithm understand who is the optimal audience and the optimal places to deliver your ad. Typically, you see this in the delivery column indicating one of the three phases: learning, active or limited learning.
Learning Phase
This means it needs information to make sense of conversion data regardless if you're running a traffic campaign, a conversion campaign, or lead generation campaign. There's about 50 conversions, more or less, that is needed within a seven day period to perform the delivery algorithm for it to determine optimization.
Also, you're most likely going to run into issues with the learning phase when you're doing conversion campaigns, because it's a lot harder to get 50 sales than it is to get 50 people to your website or 50 video views.
Learning Phase is Mandatory
You can't opt out of the learning phase regardless of the type of objective you set for your ad. So understand, the learning phase process is essential to your campaigns. And during this period, you will typically see volatility within the delivery of your media:
One day, your CPE (Cost Per Engagement) can be very high and the next day it can be low.
Just remember, during the learning phase, it’s hard to get accurate report on how your ads are doing because the numbers are going to move around and be all over the place. This is because the algorithm is showing your ads to as many different people as possible to try to understand who's the optimal audience for your ads.
Your ad should be exiting the learning phase after 50 events or actions have take place in 7 days. At this point, Facebook has good understanding of who our audience is and who are most likely to take action on your ad.
Sometimes, your campaigns don't exit the learning phase when you have multiple audiences that you're targeting, along with multiple ad sets in your campaign. Some of the ads might exit the phase and others don't.
Best Practices
Avoid significant edits or making changes in the first seven days when your campaign is running. When you make significant edits, it will reset the learning phase. This means it will take longer before your ad set is going to be served to an optimal audience.
What is considered a significant edits? Something that will fundamentally change the optimization of your campaign, like a conversion event that you are optimizing for, is an example of a significant edit. This might cause the algorithm to deliver your media differently. Another example of a significant edit is if you start to change your targeting. This will impact the delivery of your media.
If you do want to make changes, do it at a minimum and be strategic about it. You will want to wait at least seven days. Don't want to be making changes all the time (eg. making changes daily).
We know that with the iOS 14 update, the aggregated event measurement protocol that Facebook now has, you are not seeing conversion data in real time. It's been delayed for a couple of days (three days on average). So you don't actually know what's really working because there's a three day lag.
It’s okay to make changes to your campaign for business reasons. You don't need to be afraid of resetting the learning phase. Just don't do it all the time, because it's not going to help you out. Again, you want to be strategic when you make these changes and you and you just want to minimize that frequency.
Another best practice to understand is that since the learning phase happens at the ad set level. Meaning each one of your ad sets needs to go through the learning phase.
Avoid having too many ad sets, especially, if you're talking to the same audiences. If you have a big amount of audience overlap, you will want to consolidate. That's going to help you successfully and quickly exit learning phases. If you have a ton of audiences, then you will be impacted by the learning phase. Wherever possible, the best practice is to consolidate audiences.
Now, the other reason you should consolidate is that you need 50 conversions per each ad set to exit the learning phase. You will need to have realistic budgets to achieve this.
If your CPAs are very expensive and you're running like $10/day budgets or $25/day budgets, it's just probably not going to be realistic that in seven days you are going to get enough conversion volume to exit that learning phase.
If you do not exit the learning phase you will notice that in your delivery column: learning limited. This means your campaigns will still run, your budgets will still spend, but Facebook didn't have enough data to get to the point where it can be, to confidently serve your ad most effectively.
However, if you're still getting sales, driving performance, and you're happy with the results under learning limited, then you can leave your campaign as is. Maximize the impact of your media by looking for opportunities to consolidate audiences and/or potentially increase your budget.
The learning phase is something that helps the delivery algorithm find your audience. You can’t skip this process. It's going to help you long-term but there definitely are some ways to mitigate it, to exit faster, and prevent your campaigns from staying in the learning phase.