Are your ads being ruined by  Facebook’s Learning Limited

Learning Limited is a delivery status that Facebook introduced in 2019 that lets advertisers see the status of an ad set’s optimisation.

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What is Learning Limited?

Learning Limited is a delivery status that Facebook introduced in 2019 that lets advertisers see the status of an ad set’s optimisation.

It appears as a yellow hazard triangle at the ad set level and can be worrying for marketers seeing it for the first time.

Scroll over it and Facebook provides an explanation – the ad set isn’t generating enough leads to allow it to fully optimise and leave the learning phase, this is caused by either budget, cost controls or size of audience.

What is the Learning Phase?

This is the phase of time when Facebook‘s delivery system sends your ads out to numerous people in your targeting to discover the best way to deliver your ad set. During this phase, performance can be chaotic and results aren’t generally the best.

New ad sets default automatically into the learning phase and ad sets that you significantly edit will return to this stage, therefore it’s important not to be tempted to tweak too much in the learning phase!

You can expect your ad set to exit the learning phase after about fifty event triggers are registered. If this doesn’t happen, the Learning Limited warning will appear.

What can you do when the Learning Limited warning appears?

  • Increase your budget – aim to be spending five times what your average CPL or CPA is per day.
  • Reduce the number of ad creatives – depending on your budget try to limit creatives to 2-3 in an ad set.
  • Increase your audience size – duplicate the ad set and pause the original rather than making changes to the existing set when doing this (in case you need to go back to the previous optimisation).
  • As a last resort – change the optimisation (again, duplicate the ad set instead of making changes to the existing one).
  • Do NOT switch your campaign to a different objective – a partially optimised conversion campaign will always perform better than a traffic campaign.

Important Reminder!

Remember to follow the Golden Rule of Facebook advertising: If it’s not broken, don’t fix it!

If you’re getting a good amount of leads and have healthy ROAs, it’s best to just continue managing your campaign as you are.

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