About The Learning Phase | Meta Business Help Center - Facebook

Each time an ad is shown, our ads delivery system learns more about the best people and places to show the ad. The more an ad is shown, the better the delivery system becomes at optimizing the ad’s performance.

The learning phase is the period when the delivery system still needs to learn about how an ad set may deliver and perform. During the learning phase, the delivery system is exploring the best way to deliver your ad set when you either create a new ad or ad set or make a significant edit to an existing one. The Delivery column reads "Learning" when an ad set is currently in the learning phase.

While the delivery system never stops learning about the best way to deliver an ad set, ad sets exit the learning phase as soon as they can deliver stably. This usually occurs after about 50 results in the week after the ad set’s last significant edit. To better understand if you’re getting enough results after making a significant edit, you can view the number of results you've received and your last significant edit as reporting columns in Ads Manager. To see your results after a significant edit:

1. Go to Ads Manager and select the ad set you want to review.
2. Review the date of your last significant edit in the Last significant edit column.
3. Review the number of results in the Results column. Note: If you have customized columns, you may need to add these as columns.

Note: For Shops ads, you need a minimum of 17 purchases through your website and 5 through Meta for the learning phase to complete.

Best practices

During the learning phase, ad sets are less stable and usually have a higher CPA. To avoid behaviors that prevent ad sets from exiting the learning phase, we recommend you:

• Wait to edit your ad set until its out of the learning phase. During the learning phase, performance is less stable, so your results aren't necessarily indicative of future performance. By editing an ad, ad set or campaign during the learning phase, you reset learning and delay our delivery system’s ability to optimize.
• Avoid unnecessary edits that cause ad sets to re-enter the learning phase. Edits that meaningfully change how your ad set might perform in the future can cause an ad set to re-enter the learning phase. Only edit your ads or ad set when you have reason to believe that doing so should improve performance.
• Avoid high ad volumes. When you create many ads and ad sets, the delivery system learns less about each ad and ad set than when you create fewer ads and ad sets. By combining similar ad sets, you also combine learnings.
• Use realistic budgets. If you set a very small or inflated budget, the delivery system has an inaccurate indicator of the people for whom the delivery system should optimize. Set a budget large enough to get enough total results and avoid frequent budget changes (which can cause an ad set to re-enter the learning phase).

The learning phase is necessary to help the delivery system best optimize ads, so you shouldn't try to avoid the learning phase completely. Testing new creative and marketing strategies is essential for improving your performance over time.

Learning limited

If your ad set isn’t getting enough results to exit the learning phase, the Delivery column status reads "Learning limited." Learn more about ways to fix learning limited ad sets to improve your performance.

Learn more

• About managing ad volumes
• About combining ad sets
• About learning limited