The learning phase of Facebook ads. How to master it quickly and painlessly

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The learning phase of Facebook ads is a mysterious and perhaps even scary phase for many people. It’s true that ad performance during this phase may not be ideal, which is not a good thing for anyone.
The good news is that there are ways to avoid this phase, or at least get through it as quickly as possible and achieve better results. In this article, I would like to reveal what this phase means, why it happens, how to successfully end it, and how to ideally avoid it altogether.

What is the learning phase for Facebook ads?

The learning phase is a period during which Facebook tests your ads on different members of your audience, trying out different display times, placements, enhancements, and other factors to see which combination delivers the best results. Facebook relies heavily on machine learning to help deliver your ads to the right people and ensure your campaign achieves the results you want. But without any baseline performance data, this is a big challenge.

During the learning phase, you will almost certainly experience erratic re albania mobile database sults, where performance can vary significantly from day to day. The average cost per result tends to be worse during this phase than after the ad is fully up and running. This is also stated directly by Facebook in its documentation.

Stages of learning in practice
For some advertisers, the learning phase can look like they perform great one day, but the next three days are weak, then there's an average day, followed by four excellent days, followed by two disastrous days, and finally a day when everything seems normal.

Others may see more consistent results with less fluctuation. It all depends on how much data your campaign generates and how quickly Facebook can figure out how your target audience responds to your ads.

Facebook campaign performance after the learning phase ends
Performance during the learning phase is typically worse than after it ends, but that doesn't mean everything will be perfect once the phase is over. Facebook simply states that ads in the learning phase typically don't perform as well as they do after a campaign is fully launched.

What will get your Facebook ads back into the learning phase?

There are two main categories of changes that will take you back to the learning phase.

New campaign or creative
The first category is creating a new ad campaign or creative. Whenever you create something new, the ad automatically enters a learning phase because Facebook needs to figure out how this new element will work. This is pretty straightforward – it’s simply something the system has to “understand” again.