Don't Fear Facebook Ads Learning Phase

Hey,


The Facebook Ads Learning Phase is something many advertisers fear, but it really isn't as bad as it's sometimes made out to be.

Before we dive into why you shouldn't be afraid of the Facebook Ads Learning Phase, it's worth briefly covering what the Facebook Ads Learning Phase actually is.

What is The Facebook Ads Learning Phase?

In short, the Learning Phase is something every single Facebook Ad goes through in the beginning of its lifecycle, and multiple times throughout its lifecycle (if you follow my advice in today's newsletter) as Facebook:

– Identifies which people in your target audience respond and engage best with your Ads

– Finds more people in your target audience like this

– Tests showing your Ads at different times of the day to see when your Ads receive the best response

It goes a lot deeper than that, but the reason it's doing all of this is to help us achieve our chosen Campaign Objective, which, for authors, is generally the Traffic objective.

When choosing the Traffic objective, we're asking Facebook to generate as many clicks as it can with our available budget for the lowest possible cost.

During the Learning Phase, that's exactly what it's trying to do and it's best if you just let Facebook do its thing, which is why I always recommend to never touch your Ads during the Learning Phase.

The Impact of The Facebook Ads Learning Phase

During the Learning Phase, your results and performance won't look too healthy, because of all the testing Facebook is doing on our behalf.

Once the Ads have exited the Learning Phase, however, which takes around 50 conversions (in our case, a conversion is a click), that's when the performance will improve and stabilize.

When your Ads are in the Learning Phase, you are likely to see:

– High CPCs (Cost Per Clicks)

– Low CTRs (Click-Through Rates)

– High CPMs (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions)

– Only a handful of Sales and/or Page Reads

Just like a good cheese or a good wine though, once your Ads have exited the Learning Phase and have matured, providing your Ads are engaging and compelling, and your audience is relevant, you'll start to see better and better improvement.

What Affects The Learning Phase?

This is where many advertisers get hung up, including me in the past!

They have already been through the Learning Phase once before with these Ads and they're afraid to make any changes or adjustments to their Ad Sets and Ads, because any of the following can put your Ads back into the Learning Phase:

– Changing the Targeting

– Changing the Budget (if it's a big increase or decrease)

– Changing the Placements

– Making any adjustments to the Ad Creative

The knock-on effect of trying to avoid the decline in performance that comes from Ads being in the Learning Phase, is that advertisers become afraid to test new ideas.

Taking this approach of avoiding the Learning Phase will only hold you back and prevent you from improving your Facebook Ads results.

Testing is an imperative part of any form of marketing and advertising. Without it, you won't discover new insights, you won't be able to scale, and ultimately, you won't be using the platform to its full potential.

Here's The Fix...

Depending on your budget, your Ads will be in the Learning Phase for 1-3 days.

The smaller your budget, the longer your Ads will be in the Learning Phase, because it's going to take more time to generate the clicks needed to exit the Learning Phase.

Typically, with a $10 per day budget, your Ads will be in the Learning Phase for about 2 days.

Now, even at 3 days, it's not a drastically large amount of time to wait, considering the long-term benefits of what going through the Learning Phase will do for your Ads.

So, with that, here's how I manage my Facebook Ads:

– Day 1: Launch Facebook Ads

– Day 2: Facebook Ads exit Learning Phase

– Day 3-7: Let Facebook Ads mature and stabilize now they've exited the Learning Phase

– Day 8: Review results and optimize accordingly, sending the Ads back into the Learning Phase

– Day 9: Facebook Ads exit the Learning Phase again

– Day 10-15: Let Facebook Ads mature and stabilize now they've exited the Learning Phase

– Day 16: Review results and optimize accordingly 

As you can see, I'm not touching the Ads from one week to the next, unless there's something drastically wrong. I'm just letting Facebook do its thing.

When it comes time to optimize, I'm carrying out tasks such as:

– Testing new Audiences

– Testing new Primary Text in the Ads (The Monthly Templates will help with this)

– Turning off poor-performing Ads and Ad Sets

– Tweaking the demographic targeting

– Testing new images in the Ads

Without all this testing, there's just no way to optimize, improve and scale your Facebook Ads.

To do all this testing, however, your Ads will need to re-enter the Learning Phase, and you need to be ok with that.

By trying to constantly avoid the Learning Phase, you're going to be doing yourself more harm than good.

Learn to love and embrace the Learning Phase; that is how you win.

To Your Success

– Matt