Do you ever wonder if your Facebook advertisement targeting is paying off? We're here to help!
This blog will break down the learning phase, which is Facebook's tool to optimize a business’s targeting settings on advertisements to make reaching audiences more effective.
For more on some of the latest Facebook updates, check out these blogs:
What Is the Learning Phase?
Whether you realize it or not, Facebook is testing your ads for you. Although you take the time to narrow down the audience you wish to reach through your advertisements, Facebook then takes that information and refines it.
By enacting its learning phase on your new advertisement, Facebook is working through an experimental period with the ad, which will help to uncover which users within your targeted audience are likely to take your desired action.
The learning phase is working to collect this user interaction data to eventually create a data set, which is evidential of the demographics you should focus on targeting your current ad toward.
The Rules of the Road
One of the essential strategies in achieving a complete and accurate set of data from the learning phase is to keep from making any significant changes to the advertisement, ad set or campaign.
Here’s a list of what to avoid doing:
- Targeting changes
- Ad creative changes
- Optimization event changes
- Making large increases in daily budget
- Pausing the ad set for seven days or longer
- Adding a new ad to the ad set
By making any of these changes during the current learning phase, it is likely to reset. This will cost you both time and money to start the process over again, so be aware of any adjustments you make.
Also, be mindful of the fact that the results of your advertising campaign will vary during the time that the learning phase is running. Don’t base the success of your ad campaign on your results during this time.
While it may be tempting to add more budget while a campaign is running, it's important to note that increasing your budget will send your ad back to the learning phase. A best practice to follow is to make small increases of ten to twenty percent to scale up your budget over time.
First, allow the learning phase to complete and for Facebook to optimize your campaign. Then, you can feel comfortable judging the success of your advertisement!
When Is It Complete?
The learning phase will complete when an advertisement receives 50 optimization events.
These optimization events are based around the optimization goals for your campaign. For example, if your campaign optimization goal is to increase website traffic, the optimization event would complete when you receive 50 website visits from the ad.
If the results of your advertising campaign look promising for the future, you can continue running them, and Facebook will continue to analyze campaign data. Otherwise, you can go back and modify the campaign for optimization improvements!
Final Thoughts
There are technicalities that come with running advertisements on Facebook, so stay informed on processes like the learning phase is essential.
Our team at RevLocal is here to help you translate the data results from your Facebook’s learning phase into campaign successes! Contact us here to learn about all the possibilities!
Also, read up on all of the paid advertising services that we can offer your business.