About the Learning phase in Facebook Ads

Oh, the learning phase and the misconceptions around it. Let’s start with the definition first.

Definition

“Learning phase is the period in which Facebook Ads learns about your ad set and optimizes the delivery system in order to find the best way to deliver your ad set. An ad set will exit the ‘Learning phase’ when the ad set has 50 optimization events since the last significant edit.”

Confusing to say the least.

So let’s take things from the start and begin breaking some definitions down.
The ‘time period’ nowadays is, almost always, 7 days.
The ‘optimization event’ is whatever you choose it to be when you create the campaign. Eg. ‘Purchases’
The last ‘significant edit’ refers to any of the following:
Any change to targeting
Any change to ad creative
Any change to optimization event
Adding a new ad to your ad set
Pausing your ad set for 7 days or longer (the ad set reenters the learning phase once you unpause the ad set)
Changing bid strategy
Ad set spending limit amount
Bid control, cost control, or ROAS control amount
Budget amount

When you create a campaign, Facebook Ads will begin delivering the ads of an ad set to the best (possible) people and for the optimization event, you had selected.
While the delivery system keeps learning, the CPA [cost per action] will become volatile. This means that your conversions could cost way more or way less than the industry average. This is to be expected with Facebook Ads.
What you could do to avoid your ad set from exiting the ‘Learning phase’ is to:
Avoid editing your ads because you will reset the ‘Learning phase’,
Avoid creating too many ads because the delivery system will learn less About each ad. You shouldn’t test more than 5 ads per ad set,
Avoid budgets that will limit your ad set delivery. An appropriate daily budget should be (industry CPA X 50) / 7.

If for whatever reason your ad set never manages to generate 50 optimization events then your delivery column will show ‘Learning limited’.
This shouldn’t discourage you because it won’t affect your sales too much. Personally, most of my campaigns are in ‘Learning limited’ but I still managed to get 230X ROAS one day.
If, however, you choose to fix the ‘Learning limited’ then here are some things you should try:

New creatives
Dynamic ads
Ad set combination
Campaign combination
Utilize CBO campaigns
Audience expansion
Budget increase
Rethink your bid or cost control
Rethink your Targeting

That said, The ‘Learning phase’ should be viewed as an indicator of the ‘general landscape’ instead of something that will make or break your campaigns.

Bye for now
Panos