Introduction:
According to Facebook, "The learning phase is the period when the delivery system still has a lot to learn about an ad set. During the learning phase, the delivery system is exploring the best way to deliver your ad set – so performance is less stable and cost per action (CPA) is usually worse."
In other words, when you create any campaign or ad set, Facebook starts to optimize your campaign & ad set for the said objective (conversion). To effectively do this, Facebook starts experimenting & show your ads to different types of people within your target audience. This way Facebook understands who is most likely to take the desired action (who's likely to buy your product). This is called the Learning Phase.
How long does Learning Period Last?
Once you've 50 optimization events, Facebook Learning Phase comes to an end. In simple words, you should get at least 50 sales within a specified conversion window for the Learning Phase to end.
Where can I check whether my campaign is out of Learning Phase or not?
You can check the same in the Delivery Column in the Facebook Ads Manager.
1. When the Campaign is currently in the Learning Phase
2. When the Campaign has completed the Learning Phase
What does Learning Limited mean?
In case you see the "Learning Limited" sign for any of your campaigns & hover around it, Facebook will give you the following reason:
"This ad set isn’t generating enough leads to exit the learning phase. This usually occurs when your ad set is limited by audience size, cost control, budget, or other settings. Consider making changes to your ad set to improve performance.”
Learning Limited happens because of two things:
-- Your budget is small.
-- Your audience size is small.
However, we've seen cases where even when the campaign is showing "Learning Limited", it is performing really well. So you may ignore this in case your performance is good.
In case it's doing bad, you may either consider editing your targeting or increase the budget in your campaign.
What can trigger the Learning Phase?
You should not be making major changes to your campaign, ad set, etc as it may reset your learning phase. Following are the things that can trigger your Learning Phase:
-- Making changes in your Targeting.
-- Making changes to your Ad Creatives.
-- Pausing your Campaign or Ad set for 7 days or longer.
-- Adding changes to Optimization Events
-- Populating a new Ad to your campaign.
IMPORTANT: During the Learning Phase, your performance might fluctuate & be inconsistent. This happens because Facebook is still trying to learn that what will work best for your brand & what will not. And hence, the performance might not be very well for the initial time period.
Google:
Google Ads Learning Phase:
Similar to Facebook Learning Phase, during Google Ads Learning Phase Google will use it's advanced data algorithm to find the “perfect customer profile” to determine how it will bid using your selected Adwords bidding strategies.
When learning campaigns in Google, it is very important to include the search term & keywords. Suppose you're a brand dealing with "Dog Food", so your search term will be Dog Food, Food for Dog, etc.
At the same time, you should also include negative search terms/keywords in your campaigns to optimize your campaign towards the audience to whom you don't want to show your ad. For example, your negative search term could be Fish Food, Cow Food, Cat Food, etc.
What can trigger Learning Phase in Google?
> A sudden increase of the TROAS (Target ROAS) by a greater number can generally affect your learning. Suppose if the campaign currently has a TROAS of 3x, a sudden increase from 3x to 5-6x will certainly impact your learning.
> A sudden big increase in the spend, very much like Facebook, can trigger the Learning Phase o Google Campaigns. Hence, any scale-up in Google should also happen in a gradual manner.
Generally, Google takes at least 15 days to 1 month of time to come out of the learning phase. Since the Google is still learning what will work best & what will not, the performance might not be very stable during this time. But once Google completes the learning, performance in Google ads starts staying stable.