Is “Learning Limited“ Ruining Your Facebook Ads Performance? Here's How To Get Out Of It

Ever since Facebook rolled out "Learning Phase" back in early 2020, more and more advertisers have gotten stuck with "Learning Limited", and then suffered from a major performance drop.

• “After about 2 days or 7/8 conversions, my ad set goes from Learning to Learning limited and the performance drops like hell!”
• “After Learning Limited, not a single sale at all! Am I doing anything wrong?”
• “I make enough sales to sustain around 1-1.5 ROAS, however there are not enough sales (50/week) to exit the learning phase. I may only make 20-30 purchases per week, and my ROAS isn't consistent.”

This ad set isn't generating enough purchases 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 usually shows up when you are not providing Facebook enough data to optimize. Here are the 3 main factors that cause Learning Limited:

1. Budget too low
2. Audience too small
3. High auction overlap (Using the same audience or ad in multiple ad sets)

You need around 50 conversions within 7 days to exit the Learning Phase. If you fail to do that, it’ll show “Learning Limited”.

So what are the keywords?

50 Conversions, 7 Days.

You'll come across some people optimizing towards higher funnel goals to meet 50 conversions / week, e.g. Add To Cart / Link Click, however, these may not help you to get a purchase at all. You can refer to my previous post about How To Drive Facebook Ads Traffic That Converts.

Now let's go into the game plan. Here's a 3-step guide that I use to exit the Learning phase within 5 days:

1. Test Extensively
   If you are running ads for a completely new product (without any past data), you should allocate some budget to figure out the right combination of audience & creatives for your product. For more details, you can refer to my post about How To Test Audience And Creative.
2. Combine
   Remember the 3 factors we discussed earlier? Now it's time to combine these ad sets & ads into a CBO campaign. By using CBO, the Facebook algorithm can determine which ad set or ad is the best based on performance. This will overcome both 'low volume' and 'overlap', at the same time giving Facebook sufficient data to learn and optimize.
3. Scale
   The goal is to achieve a minimum of 50 conversions within 7 Days. We'll need to do a little bit of mathematics here.

• Let's say you spent $50 and got 5 sales of $20 each, that would be 2 ROAS at a CPP of $10. Usually, 2 ROAS should make a good margin for most products.
• Now how much do you need to spend in a week to get 50 sales? 50*10 = $500.
• How much do you need to spend in a day? $500/7 = $71.43. But let's round it to $72.
• The minimum daily campaign budget you need to exit the Learning Phase is $72.

P/S: Never turn off your ad set for 7 days or longer. The ad set will reenter the Learning Phase once you unpause the ad set.

In summary, adjust your minimum weekly budget to be 50x your Cost Per Result. Conforming to the Facebook algorithm will help you to get the most desired results.