Take control of Facebook’s learning phase and boost your revenue

Are you managing your Facebook campaigns’ learning phase effectively? If not, you could be losing potential revenue every day.

If you like high reach costs on Facebook, feel pleased when your cost per conversion skyrockets, or simply cannot get enough of low revenue, then you should NOT read on.

However, if you want to avoid these situations, do yourself the biggest favour today: read on (less than 5 minutes reading time) and get to grips with Facebook’s learning phase!

You will receive 3 practical hacks to maximise your campaign results and avoid expensive clicks and conversions.

Contents

• What is the learning phase?
• Why can the learning phase be a problem?
• Tip #1: Avoid making too many changes
• Tip #2: Avoid too many ad sets
• Tip #3: Never avoid the learning phase completely
• Bonus

But first… What is the learning phase?

Facebook’s ad tool uses machine learning to optimise the delivery of every campaign running on Facebook. This means that every time a message is shown to someone in your target audience, Facebook learns a bit more about how the ad performs with people who behave similarly. When the campaign is shown to someone new, it learns something new again. The algorithm compares millions upon millions of different data inputs to better display your campaign to those most likely to take the action you want.

This dynamic is present in every Facebook campaign. Facebook learns how best to deliver your campaign to your audience. For example, it may discover your campaign performs best with women at 8.30pm and with men at 7.50am.

At the same time, it is incredibly complex and remarkably simple.

Why can the learning phase be a problem for you? (Don’t worry, the 3 tips are coming up)

Basically, the learning phase is a good thing, right? YES! It’s great. But it only becomes effective when your campaign is live and starts delivering. This is when Facebook is confident it can achieve your campaign objectives. Delivery typically stabilises after the ad set has achieved 50 conversions within a 7-day period. If Facebook’s algorithm determines this is not possible, your ad set will be marked as “learning limited”. The important thing to note is that you should aim to exit the learning phase effectively. If you spend too much during the learning phase, you’ll get fewer conversions and a higher CPA – and you don’t want that! (right?)

Tip no. 1: Avoid making changes too frequently

Making changes will send your campaigns back into the learning phase, as Facebook must account for new inputs in its delivery. The following changes at different campaign levels will trigger the learning phase again:

Campaign level:

• Budget
• Bid amount
• Bid strategy

Ad set:

• Target audience
• Placement
• Optimisation event
• Adding content (e.g. images)
• Bid strategy
• Bid amount
• Budget
• Pausing for more than 7 days

Ad:

• Any change at all

In other words, Facebook will push your campaign back into the learning phase whenever you make significant and meaningful changes to your campaign.

Solution:

Group your changes! Always consider the importance of your changes. Can they wait until you have several updates to make at once? Of course, if your bid strategy has an extra zero or you’ve used completely inappropriate images, you should make immediate corrections. But if it’s just a minor typo or you simply want to add another image to your dynamic ad, wait until you have more adjustments and let the campaign run as is.

Tip no. 2: Avoid working with too many different ad sets in the same campaign.

With multiple ad sets under the same campaign, each ad set is shown and tested by Facebook less frequently, unnecessarily extending the learning phase. If you currently have too many ad sets in your campaigns, ask yourself why you’re using so many.

Common reasons include:

It’s easier to report and gain insights into campaign performance for each unique audience.
Solution: Here, you can use the breakdown function in Ads Manager to gain audience-level insight.

It’s easier to understand how each placement performs compared to your message.
Solution: Use the automatic placements function so Facebook can learn which placements work best for your message.

It allows you to run different languages for different markets/countries.
Solution: Use the “multiple languages” feature.

Tip no. 3: Never avoid the learning phase completely

This may sound strange after focusing on how to exit it successfully. But as mentioned at the start, the learning phase is when Facebook optimises your campaigns. So you should absolutely keep testing new images, videos, copy, objectives and formats. Try creating a plan for how often you’ll update and experiment. A campaign can be effective after the learning phase, but that doesn’t mean it will remain so over time.

BONUS:

It was only in 2020 that Facebook really started to provide information about the learning phase. For example, you can now see what percentage of your campaign spend is used during the learning phase. If you’re spending too much here, you will almost certainly achieve a better CPA by reducing the percentage of spend in the learning phase.

If you go to your ad account and click on account overview, you’ll see at the top the percentage of your spend currently in the learning phase (hover your mouse over the small bulb with a turquoise background)

This was a quick overview and 3 concrete tips for mastering the Facebook learning phase. Hopefully, this has helped you understand why you shouldn’t make too many changes to your campaigns, so you can exit the learning phase faster, but also why you should not avoid testing new ads in the learning phase.

If you have any issues or questions about your Facebook ads, or need help getting your own advertising off the ground, do not hesitate to contact us here or give us a call on 71 99 34 74.