All You Need to Know About the Facebook Learning Phase

Ever faced this problem of not getting the optimum results from your Facebook ads even though you are spending a lot on the platform, and targeting the right audience? Are you tired of combating the “Learning” or “Learning Limited” error that your ads keep showing? The solution is to understand the Facebook learning phase – an ad review process that has been introduced by the platform to understand and optimize your ads better.

Learning the Facebook Learning Phase

The learning phase in Facebook ads enables the platform to analyze and review your ad, its audience, and the budget or bid you want to optimize it on to bring you the maximum results.
With each unique view of your ad, the platform’s delivery system gets to learn more about the audience and placements, which can yield better results. So the more an ad is shown, the better the delivery system gets in optimizing its performance. Thus, the learning phase actually helps you understand the status of the campaign and how consistently your ads are performing.

Previously, Facebook only used to show two prompts in this phase: Learning and Learning Completed. However, with updates to its system, it has now also introduced Learning Limited, which helps analyze the consistency and effectiveness of your ad setup.

The learning limited phase usually occurs when the platform is unable to collect enough data about your audience or ad’s performance – either due to a low budget, narrow audience, or ad level issues like high text in image or low quality, conversion or engagement ranking – because of which its learning mechanism has to work twice as hard to collect data for the ad, thus, the ad performance in this phase is less stable and cost per action increases.

Tips to Exit this Phase

Here are some tips from Facebook that can help you achieve a quicker learning process for your ads:

• Tip #1)   Avoid frequent edits in the ad set. Give the platform 2 to 3 days to review your ads and audience for better optimization so that it has enough time to perform. Also, If you need to make an edit, wait till the ad exits the learning phase or create a new ad set instead.
• Tip#2)   Don’t set your budget, bid cap or cost cap too low or too high. Adjust the audience according to your budget. Often too narrow or small audience sizes or limited geographical targeting usually end up going into learning limited.
• Tip#3)   Instead of dividing your budget into different ad sets, try combining them into one set of audience so that you have a higher budget and speed up the learning phase.
• Tip#4)   If your campaign includes two or more ad sets, keep the audiences different from one another. One useful hack is to target fans in one ad set, and friends of fans in another. The reason is because targeting the same audience in two different ad sets causes them to clash, impacting your ad auction process

As annoying as the Facebook learning phase seems, don’t avoid it or try to make too many changes in your ads. Yes, the phase may slow down your result generation process a bit, but it also helps you optimize your ads so you can get better results in the long run.

Learn more about digital marketing platforms, targeting and ads in our blogs.