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Deimante Lideikyte

Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert

Facebook’s Learning Phase Guide

Navigating your Facebook learning phase is a topic often shrouded in myths and misconceptions. Although you may feel a little overwhelmed, do not fret; the learning phase is a valuable tool in your advertising process. It is essential to understand how the Facebook ad learning phase can enhance your campaigns and what strategies to put in place if you want to set yourself up for advertising success.

With a little perseverance and the steps laid out in this blog post, your confidence in approaching the learning phase of Facebook ads will be sure to skyrocket! Alternatively, if you still need help, you may wish to enlist expert help and guidance from a digital marketing agency.

Understanding The Facebook Ad Learning Phase

So, let’s take it back to the basics and start from the very beginning. Facebook employs its machine learning expertise to detect the ideal audience for your ads. These will be the users who are most likely to engage with your campaign objectives. This step of the process will lay the groundwork to achieve optimal results.

Facebook Has Your Best Interests

Throughout this process, it is significantly important to remember that Facebook is not your advertising enemy. Your business may be one of the lucky ones who experience swift success with their campaigns; however, you could also have a longer journey ahead. The platform’s motivations are aligned with yours; their purpose is to make your campaigns thrive, as that translates into an increase in ad spend. To put it simply, if you’re succeeding, Facebook is too!

Don’t Fear It; Embrace It

Your Facebook learning phase often goes hand-in-hand with apprehension from a lot of marketing experts, even though it is a beneficial platform. Throughout this phase, Facebook will be fine-tuning your campaigns based on the data you have previously provided them about your targeting, conversions and ad spending.

The learning phase conducts experiments to test different audience segments and the optimal times to display your ads to users. It will also explore various placements, including Facebook, Instagram or both. You may find that this experimentation process pulls inconsistent results and cost fluctuations; however, this will be temporary. You need to trust the process. In the end, this paves the way for achieving the lowest cost per action on Facebook.

And So The Journey Continues…

You may be pleased to know that the learning phase doesn’t end there; it will not conclude when it exits this stage. Facebook will now continuously learn what is performing well for your business as the most significant learning occurs at the campaign’s outset.

How Long Will Your Learning Phase Last

Most often, your learning phase Facebook ads will be concluded when you have accumulated around 50 optimisation events. Remember, the type of event will depend on your campaign objectives. For your lead generation campaigns, it’s 50 leads; however, for a conversions campaign, it’s 50 conversions. If you have a conversion campaign, this must occur within your chosen conversion window.

If your conversions are falling a little short, consider adapting the objectives of your campaign, such as your traffic. After the learning phase, Facebook ads are continuously refined as Facebook continuously refines your ad settings. The more optimisation events you have amassed and the longer periods of time your ad sets run, the more seamless your campaigns will become, at a lower cost while producing consistent results.

Why Does The Facebook Ad Learning Phase Matter

The Facebook learning phase is a prerequisite for consistent success in your Facebook marketing campaign. Throughout this part of the process, you should avoid making substantial changes to your ad sets, as this could reset the learning process and erase any valuable data that has already been collected.

There may be a few instances during the Facebook learning phase in which you want to prematurely judge your ad sets’ performance; however, it is essential to wait until the learning phase of Facebook ads has concluded. This allows you to assess their true success and provides you with a more realistic and reliable understanding of their performance.

Learning Phase Facebook Ads Adjustments

Even though it is beneficial to test new audiences or creatives, it’s significantly important to be aware that these steps and big changes may restart your learning phase. If you are looking to strike a balance, make minor edits to your campaigns around once a week or batch adjustments if it is necessary. 

Your lower budget campaigns should be limited to changes, no more than every two weeks. You should also keep in mind that if you wish to alter your campaigns, this may lead to temporary inconsistencies in the results you see, but that is just a part of the process.

Now It’s Time To Ease Off The Gas

So now you have made changes to your campaigns, it’s time to stop for a second. Allow your campaigns the opportunity to exit the learning phase before judging the impact. It’s important to avoid rushing this; you need to allow yourself and your campaigns some time to breathe.

Understanding Restart Triggers

Now, you should be able to make changes; we should be ensuring that they avoid triggering a Facebook learning phase restart. Facebook identifies significant edits to campaigns, such as changes to targeting, ad creatives or optimisation events as restart triggers. Approaching this stage with awareness and caution of this will help you plan for a successful campaign.

Ready To Exit? Stuck In Learning Limited?

Navigating your learning phase correctly may mean that you encounter the learning-limited phase. If this happens, there is no need to panic! It is not an uncommon situation, especially for those with smaller budgets or narrower audiences. Your learning restricted warning may appear, suggesting you need to make adjustments to improve your performance. If this is the case, never rush to remove the warning, as drastic changes could surge your cost per conversion. Focus on optimising and scaling your account instead.

Despite the apprehensions that surround the Facebook learning phase, it plays a significant role in the success of your campaigns. It will offer room for experimentation and improvement without any constraints. Embrace this process, and you may even achieve a lower cost per conversion. Otherwise, you can always rely on us, an experienced Facebook marketing agency that will help you reach your goals.

If you happen to have found this blog post helpful, check out our other blog posts written by our digital marketing experts. We have answers to all of your advertising enquiries. We cover a great spectrum of digital marketing topics, getting you one step closer to achieving your goals. If you are on the lookout for full-service marketing support for your SMB business, feel free to reach out to us. We’re here to assist you on your journey to advertising success.

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