What is a Learning Phase in Google Ads... & Does it even matter

What is a learning phase inside of Google Ads, and is it something you should be worried about? Now I know for many business owners, as soon as you see that bid strategy is learning status update inside of your Google Ads account, it sends you into a cold sweat and shivers, and you're worried. Over the time, I've had hundreds and hundreds of questions around this, so I thought I'd finally release a video so I can answer all of your questions around, is this a learning, or have I been penalized, or Will this actually affect the performance of my business? I made some changes in my account. My bid strategy is now learning. What should I do? Should I make some extra changes or should I just sit it out and wait for 2 to 3 weeks? Or the worst one, which I call the death spiral, is, is that my account was going well. I made some changes. It didn't work. So I went through and made some more changes. And this is what I call the death spiral. So in this video, I want to take you through what actually triggers or what optimizations trigger a learning phase inside of Google Ads. What actually happens during that learning phase, what you should be doing when your campaign is in a learning phase as a business owner. I'm gonna give you a little hint here. It's just be patient and wait it out. And then we'll obviously also go through how long will a learning phase last. And then because I do like to keep my videos as practical as possible, we will jump into a real-life example of an actual campaign that we purposely threw into a learning phase so I can really walk you through the results of what happens and Because you may be surprised that we will intentionally throw campaigns into a learning phase more often than what you'd think. But when it comes to those questions of what is a learning phase and what can trigger a learning phase and how long does it last, let's go straight to Google's documentation so that we can actually see that we're pulling in the right data from here. So essentially, let's really go through what triggers a learning phase. And there's a lot of things that can happen. And the main ways that you want to be thinking about is that you increase your budget, You add in a new bidding strategy. So you could move from max clicks to maximize conversion or maximize conversion value, or you could change your target ROAS or your target CPA, or you could remove some ad groups. You could dump in a whole heap of different negative keywords, or you could also add in a whole new list of keywords. The core functionality I really, really want you to think about is essentially a learning phase is triggered when you disrupt the data that is inside the account significantly. With Google Ads, what you want to be thinking about is Google Ads is a platform that whether you're running maximize clicks, maximize conversion value, or maximize conversions, or target CPA, or target ROAS, is that you've— you're giving it a stated goal. You're saying to Google, give me more clicks at this budget, or you can spend this budget if you can get me conversions under $50 per conversion. And the way that Google achieves that is it looks data It can reach back 90 days, but the last 30 days is the most important. So essentially what it's doing is, well, hang on, you've now told me to get 10 conversions. You've told me that— now hang on, you've told me that I can get— I can spend money if I can get you conversions at $50, and you've told me that you've got a budget of $1,000 a month, but now you've increased that budget to $3,000 a month. That's a significant change, and that's why Google goes into a learning phase. Now we will come back to the screen because I do want to go through the duration. But what I wanted to— what I do want to take you through is I really want to walk you through conceptually how this happens. So what I want you to think about here is that if you could think your current Google Ads account, you've got your targeted keywords here. So let's just write your keywords at the moment, and that is currently what is happening. But it's not only your keywords, it's also your budget, it's also your settings, Etc., etc. And if you go, say for example, you might be running this at, let's just say, $1,000 a day, and Google gets an idea of these are the keywords that at $1,000 a day with this budget and with these settings. But then if you go through and increase that budget overnight to $3,000, Google is going to have to start reaching out to what I like to call things like your similar keywords, and then your related keywords. So Google is essentially saying, I understand how your campaign and how it works at $1,000, but I'm not sure how it works at $3,000 or at $2,000. And that's what a learning phase is. Now I know that is a little bit of a simplistic description, but I have found it does really, really let you know in a simple way of what happens or what Google is trying to do is you need to be thinking about your Google Ads account or your Google Ads campaign isn't just based around the keywords that you target, the ad copy that you use, the settings that you use, but your budget is a key factor. So if you drastically increase the budget, that's going to trigger a learning phase. But also what I want you to think about is if you remove a whole heap of keywords, let's just say you keep the budget the same, but you're spreading that across 50 keywords, you then reduce those keywords by pausing 2 or 3 ad groups down to 10 keywords or 15 keywords. Google is now going, well, I knew how it worked on those 3 core keyword themes. But now you're only giving me one keyword theme. It's going to trigger that learning again and go, how do I make this work? So now let's go through how long does this learning phase last. Now, as a blanket rule, if you were to ask whoever's running your account, whether it's your in-house team or whether it's an agency, they would generally give a response of anywhere between 3 days through to 14 days. Some people would play it safe, may even say 21 days. That is actually the right answer, but for the exact I guess mechanism of how this works is I want you to look at this, and this is data from Google, is it's 50 conversion events or 3 conversion cycles. So if you are a business that is getting 50 conversions, uh, and you're getting them in a 1-day period, you could technically move out of your learning phase in a day. And I have actually seen it happen. If you're getting 50 conversions a week, think about that. It's going to take you a week of learning. If you're getting 50 conversions in 3 days, your learning cycle is only going to be 3 days. Now the other option is all 3 conversion cycles. Now what that actually means is, let's just say from click to conversion, it takes inside of Google Ads— so not outside the business, inside of the Google Ads dashboard— on average people click. And the example that Google actually gives further down the screen is that if you've got a conversion, if you've got a conversion cycle of 2 days, your learning cycle would take 6 days. Because it, you know, 2 times 3 equals 6 days. But if your conversion cycle is actually 5 days, that then moves out that learning cycle to 15 days. If it's 10 days, it moves it out to 30 days. You kind of see the scenario there. So that's firstly the mechanics of how learning cycle works inside of Google Ads. But now let's jump into a screen share because I do want to walk you through a real-life example of this because I don't want you to be worried about a learning cycle because it's actually not a bad thing as long as you're using the right data to make your decisions inside of your business. And before we get into that screen share, just in case we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young and I'm from Define Digital Academy. Been running Google Ads since 2010, and we started Define Digital Academy back in 2022 for one reason. That's to help business owners like you. We wanted to empower you to be able to run your Google Ads profitably for your own business. And if you are spending over $5,000 or $10,000 a month and you want some real strategic guidance to scale to the next level, don't you follow that link in the description below? You can actually apply for our, what we call our on-demand program. You stay in the driver's seat, you're running your Google Ads account, but you've got us as your strategic advisors helping you every step of the way. Or if you're just starting inside of Google Ads, just in that link below, you can actually get some free resources, uh, our optimization lists, also our Claude optimization tools to help you get started with Google Ads the right way. All of that information is in the link below, but right now Let's jump into the screen share. All right, so let me take you through this account. Now, one thing that you won't be able to see in this screen share that I'm walking you through is that we actually triggered a learning phase right here. Now, for context, this is an Australian-based business. They are a professional services business, so they are wanting to get qualified leads coming into their business. They run online, and they— the actual owner of this business was really, really worried and didn't want their account to ever go into this learning phase, and it came from a bad experience that they had from a previous agency who didn't really know what— how to fix this. And what was happening was that every time that they saw their campaign or their bid status going into bid limit is learning, or there was any sort of status warning in their campaigns, it would spell disaster for their business. Now, we actually triggered this by increasing their budget by just under 30% in a week. Now, the reason why we did this is is because they were growing to a point and they just put on some new staff members, so they needed to just get a bump up in their conversions. And you can actually see that happened really, really quickly. Now it looks all neat and tidy, but what I do want to show you in through here is that the actual change was made on the 5th of August, which is just— and you can see it here, it bumped up straight away. So we added that budget The change went up, and you can see from here is that you know the previous peaks were at four, you know four twenty. We made that change, and on that day it went up to the first day when they made the change went up to five hundred dollars, and it stayed pretty consistently there. What I want to show you through here is that now the conversions have actually returned and gone through, but there was a week or two where that we were waiting to see what was happening from here. Now you should be more concerned about what's happening in your actual business, not inside of the Google Ads dashboard. Want to show you in through here is that this is actually their new clients. So we're not talking about conversions here, we're actually looking at new clients. And you can see from here in August, this is the week that we made the change. It actually took 2 weeks for it to take full effect. And you can see from here, they've actually had their 3 best weeks on record. So what the learning is here that I really, really want you to understand is please don't be scared of making a significant change as long as you have these data points in place. And let me just walk you through them. Now, the reason why we were confident to make these changes is if you can see from here, when we look at the week, we knew that this campaign was achieving pretty much 30 conversions a week. So it had 39, 31, 30, 32. So we would— we knew that when we were to make this change that we were going to be seeing a, you know, a pretty quick turnaround. We had pegged it at about at 9-day mark before the campaign went out of learning. It was about 6 days for this actual business. Let me also take you through another metric which is important to take account of, which is the search impression share. Now another reason why we're really, really confident that this would not be a significant issue for this business is because we also knew that their search impression share was really, really low. We still haven't gone over the 20% mark. Now if you're unsure what your search impression share is, is that we We knew that this week at 17, out of every 100 searches that we're targeting, we're only appearing in 17 of those 100 searches. So that's a key metric you want to look at when you're thinking about increasing your budget. Look at your search impression share. Now, how high can you drive it? We used to be able to say, look, we can get up to 65% before we see any issues. Now, dependent on the niche, you do need to be really, really cautious. I have seen some campaigns get out of whack or performance at high 30s or even low 40s. So the other key metrics that you do want to be looking at is your cost per conversion. And then also do keep an eye on your CPC. So thankfully in this example, and this is why we're really confident to increase it, you know, the cost per conversion will jump around a little bit. This will go down a little bit because there's probably a couple more conversions still to feed in at time of recording. But you can see from here, as we've been able to move this cost conversion back into a pretty standard baseline. And we've also been able to see those conversions go up in line with our spend. So with this video, what I really, really want you to take into account when it comes to your learning, your campaign going back into learning, is if you have conversion data on your site, so you've got good conversion data and you're getting over 30 conversions a week, I'm happy to be more aggressive with your increases. So even if you want to increase your budget by 30% at one time, The more you increase the budget, remember that concentric circle we're going out, the more risk that it may take 2 or 3 weeks to get that conversion data through. And that's why we are pretty confident as long as you're getting 30 to 50 conversions a week that you can increase your budget by about 30% if you want to get there faster. If you're really, really cautious and conscious and you don't want to see your metrics disappear at all, still stick to that 15 to 20% rule. Just remember as well that it's not just about increasing your budget, it's also about making any other changes in your account. If you've got a campaign which has 3 ad groups in it and you cut off one of those ad groups which holds 30% of your spend, that is also going to push your account or that campaign into a learning phase. But as I said, as long as you've got that conversion data on your side, remembering the rule from Google, its own documentation, 50 conversions or 3 conversion cycles, and your search impression share is still quite low, you can be pretty confident that that learning phase is only going to be a little blip in your performance for a week or 2 and you will see better results. Thanks for joining me. My name is Aaron Young from Defined Digital Academy. Now remember, if you would like to find out more about our on-demand program, if you'd like us to walk alongside you to help you get better results for your business with Google Ads like this business owner we're seeing right now, why don't you follow that link in the description and apply for our on-demand program. Or if you'd like to see a real-life case study of how we lowered a business's ad spend from over $105,000 a month down to about $55,000 a month and actually see them get better results and more leads into their business, why don't you go through and watch this video right here? Thanks for joining me. See you next time.