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

Are you in control of the learning phase for your Facebook campaigns? If not, you could be losing potential revenue every day.

If you love high CPMs on Facebook, celebrate when your cost per conversion skyrockets, or simply cannot get enough of low revenue, then you should NOT read any further.

However, if you would rather avoid these issues, do yourself the biggest favour today – keep reading (this will take less than 5 minutes) and get on top of Facebook’s learning phase!

You will get 3 practical hacks to maximise your campaigns’ performance and avoid expensive clicks and conversions.

Table of contents

• What is the learning phase?
• Why can the learning phase be a problem?
• Tip #1: Avoid making frequent 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 platform uses machine learning to optimise the delivery of every campaign running on Facebook. This means that every time your message is shown to someone in your target audience, Facebook learns a bit about how your ad performs with people who have similar behaviours. When the campaign is then shown to a new person, it learns something new again. The algorithm processes millions upon millions of data points to better deliver your campaign to those most likely to take your desired action.

This dynamic is at play in all Facebook campaigns. Facebook learns the best way to deliver your campaign to your target audience. For example, it might find that your campaign works best for women at 20:30 and for men at 7:50 in the morning.

It is both incredibly complex and surprisingly straightforward.

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

In principle, the learning phase is a good thing, right? YES! It is very good. But it only becomes beneficial once your campaign is up and running and starts delivering. This is when Facebook is confident it can achieve your campaign goals. Usually, delivery stabilises after your ad set gets 50 conversions within a 7-day period. If Facebook’s algorithm decides this is not possible, your ad set will be marked as “learning limited”. What’s important here is that you should aim to exit the learning phase efficiently. If you spend too much during the learning phase, you will get fewer conversions and a higher CPA – and that is not what you want! (right?)

Tip no. 1: Avoid making frequent changes to your campaigns

Making changes will send your campaigns back into the learning phase, as Facebook needs to process new inputs for delivery. The following changes at the various campaign levels will send you back into the learning phase:

Campaign level:

• Budget
• Bid amount
• Bid strategy

Ad set:

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

Ad:

• Any change whatsoever

In other words, Facebook pushes your campaign back into the learning phase whenever you make significant and impactful changes.

Solution:

Batch your changes! Always assess how important your changes are. Can they wait until you have several updates to make? Of course, if your campaign has an extra zero in the bid strategy or you have used completely wrong images, then you should make an immediate change. But if there is a small typo or you simply want to add another image to your dynamic ad, wait until you have several updates and let the campaign run as is in the meantime.

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

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

Typical reasons include:

It is easier to report and gain insights into campaign performance by unique audience.
Solution: Here, you can benefit from using the breakdown function in Ads Manager to get insights per audience.

It is easier to see the effect of each placement in relation 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” function.

Tip no. 3: Never avoid the learning phase completely

This may sound a bit odd after we have focused on exiting it successfully. But as mentioned at the start, the learning phase is where Facebook learns to optimise your campaigns. So you should still test new images, videos, texts, objectives and formats. Try to plan how often you will switch things up and test new ideas. A campaign can certainly be effective after the learning phase, but that does not mean it will remain effective 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 are spending too much here, you can likely achieve better CPA rates by reducing the percentage of spend in the learning phase.

If you log into your ad account and click on account overview, you will see at the top the percentage of your spend that is in the learning phase (hover over the small turquoise light bulb).

This was a brief overview and 3 practical tips for mastering the Facebook learning phase. Hopefully, this has helped you understand why you should not make too many changes to your campaigns so you can exit the learning phase quickly, but also why you should not avoid testing new ads during a learning phase.

If you have problems or questions about your Facebook ads, or need help to take your advertising to the next level, do not hesitate to contact us here, or give us a call on 71 99 34 74.