Facebook Ads Learning Phase Explained - Hernan Vazquez

All right, Facebook learning phase. What is it? How does it work? Will it hurt my ads if I don't fix it? All of those questions are the ones that I'm going to answer for you in this video. Hey, what's up everybody? Hernan Vazquez here and welcome to this video. If you're new to this video series. If you're new to this channel, to this page, whatever you're watching this video, welcome. Thank you for taking the time to watching this. And if you have been around for a while, thank you for your support. I really do appreciate it. Now, the main idea with these videos is to help you taking your ads to the next level, your paid media to the next level. What the next level means is up to you, but for me it means more leads, more conversions, and basically more money 100% ROAS or whatever that means. Now with that being said, you're welcome to join our free Facebook group. All you need to do is to go to hernanvasquez.com, which is spelled H-E-R-N-A-N V-A-Z-Q-U-E-Z.com/facebook, and you will be able to join our free Facebook group. It's 100% free. You're welcome to join, ask questions and whatnot. It's pretty cool. I have mind maps in there. I have new tutorials pretty much every week, so it's cool. You're welcome to join. Now with that being said, let's talk about the face Learning Phase. What is it? Okay, Facebook Learning Phase has been there for a while, since pretty much since they rolled out the conversion objective. But something that happened recently is that Facebook implemented a change, and it was like literally last week. As you know, Facebook implements changes pretty much on a daily basis at this point, and they have implemented that which makes the learning phase much more prominent in the Ads Manager. So now you can see a big yellow sign that means, or that says, learning limited. And a lot of people are freaking out, like they're saying, what does this mean? My ads are not working, they're not performing, and whatnot. So on this video, I want to put those fears to rest so that you can actually understand what that means and how you can solve it. So as you might or might not know, Facebook AI works better when it has a lot of data coming through it. What that basically means is that whenever you're choosing the conversion objective on your Facebook advertising, you're telling Facebook, hey Facebook, help me optimize, help me show my ads to these people that are more prone to convert. That basically means that if you have your pixel installed on your pages, Facebook will start learning and becoming smarter. And at some point, if you have been running enough volume and enough people are going through your funnel, then you can actually loosen your targeting. That means that you can target broader and broader and broader audiences, and Facebook will still do a great job bringing the type of people that you want to bring. I have a couple clients, you know, we're spending a couple hundred thousand dollars every month, and we don't do a lot of targeting, right? We just target pretty much everyone in the world at this point, and Facebook can actually go out and find us buyers, find us leads, find us people that will actually go out there and buy my client's product. And that is, that is the purpose of the entire Facebook algorithm, right? To go out there and find people that will buy, download your stuff, sign up for a webinar, apply for a phone call, or whatever your funnel might be. Now with that being said, Facebook needs to learn, okay? Facebook needs to learn what type of people are going through your funnel and what type of people are converting, but also what type of people are not converting. So Facebook is never not learning. So that's basically why I mean that if you have an ad that hasn't performed, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not performing. It might not be performing for you, but Facebook is knowing that those type of people are not performing, so I'm going to go out there and find other demographic, other interests to go through your funnel. So the learning phase, what Facebook is basically saying, the reps are saying, are telling us, is that Facebook, any given ad set, they need anywhere between 30 to 50 conversions per week to actually understand what's going on in your funnel. So 30 to 50 conversions per week per ad set. And if you're having less than that, that means that the learning will be limited. That's why you're seeing that yellow, you know, sign in your screen that is saying learning limited. Now, is that a bad thing? Well, not necessarily. The reason why is because if you're getting the results that you're looking for, let's say that you want to pay, I don't know, $3 per lead, and if you are getting those $3 per lead, as long as you keep your budget consistent and the results are consistent, the limited learning might not affect your ads. So just because it says learning limited there, you shouldn't be freaking out. You shouldn't be changing anything if your ads are performing. Now with that being said, there is a little bit of math that you need to do to go out of the learning phase. All right. So that basically means this. Let's say that you're paying $3 per lead, right, that you're running ads to a free PDF or a webinar or whatever that is, and you're paying $3 per lead. Now, here's what happens if you're paying $3 per lead and if you have an ad set budget, an ad set level budget, that means that the budget on your ad set is like $10 at most. Any given day, you can get 3 Maybe 4 leads if Facebook will overspend on that any given day. Now, 3 leads per day times 7 days, that means that at most you can get 21 to maybe 25 leads. That is not enough for Facebook to go out of that learning phase. So, uh, alas, you will get that learning limited sign. Now again, if your ads are doing okay, don't freak out. Just keep them running. You don't need to touch them, but have in mind that there's a couple of things that you can do to go out of the learning phase faster. Number one is to actually spend more money. If you're getting the results that you're looking for, there's no reason why you wouldn't spend more money to make more money. So if you take it from $10 to $20 a day and the cost per lead stays the same, which might go up slightly, but it in some cases will stay the same. If that happens, that means that from $21 to $25, you went to from that to maybe even 50 leads a day. That means that that will make that ad set get out of the learning phase, and you're basically spending double and you're getting the double amount of leads. That means that you're getting twice as much data into that ad set, which will make it go out of the learning phase faster. So it's basically a numbers game, right? If you're spending $10 a day and you're spending $5 a lead, then— and you're paying $5 a lead, you cannot expect Facebook to get a lot of data. So if at some point your funnel is working, then you can go ahead and increase the budget so that you can actually get more data going through the pixel. Now, option number 2, I know that increasing the budget isn't always an option. So option number 2 is to actually optimize your ad set for an earlier step in the funnel. What do I mean? Let's say that you have 2 steps in your funnel. You have a landing page and you have a thank you page, right? The landing page where they see the PDF They see the benefits, they see everything. That's where they put their email and contact information. Then the next page is the thank you page. Now the thank you page is the one that you want to trigger a lead event on, right? That's how you're signaling Facebook that you got a lead. But then on the first page, and this is something that a lot of media buyers don't do, is to actually trigger what's called a view content event. That means that people that are going through that funnel, that are seeing that page, maybe they're not opting in, but they're seeing that page that means that it's a relevant view content for you. It's a relevant page view. So you want to trigger a view content event on that page. And maybe if you're not getting the results that you want, maybe instead of optimizing for leads, you want to launch a couple of new ad sets and optimize for view content of that specific page. You can do that through custom conversions. You can do that through a bunch of different ways. But what I'm saying is that if you optimize for that first event instead of the last event, or maybe for leads instead of purchasers, which might happen much later in the funnel, then at that point you will be feeding Facebook a lot of data much faster so that it can learn faster. Now again, if your ads are working, please don't do this, okay? Don't touch anything on the ads. Basically, don't do this. But if you want to experiment a little bit, go ahead, duplicate the ad sets, and optimize for an earlier step in the funnel. Again, I don't recommend this. This is only if you want your ads to get out of the learning phase faster. But if you're seeing that bright yellow sign that's saying learning limited and you still want to, you know, keep— and you're getting results, just keep everything the same. You could spend a little bit more money though if you wanted to. So there you have it, guys. That's the learning phase and that's how Facebook understands who's going through your funnel, who's buying from you, who's downloading your stuff. Again, I don't think there's such thing as a bad ad or a bad ad set or bad campaign because worst case scenario, you're buying data, you're making your Facebook pixel smarter, you're making your ecosystem as an advertiser smarter just by spending money on ads. I hope this helps you. If you have any additional questions, feel free to post them in the comments below or above, whenever you're seeing this video. Go ahead, drop me a message, let me know what you're thinking, let me know what your problems are. And again, come and join the free Facebook group. It's 100% free. You need to go to hernanvasquez.com/facebookgroup. Facebook. That is HernanVazquez.com/Facebook. And just answer the couple questions that I'll ask you just to cater the experience better for you. Hope that you enjoyed this video. Thank you for watching it, and I'll see you guys on the next video. Bye-bye.