NEW Facebook Learning Phase is Killing Your Ads

0:00over the past 12 months there have been so many changes to facebook ads and instagram ads but not many people are talking about the changes to the facebook learning phase and this is a really big deal the facebook ads learning phase has changed a lot and this means you now have to be very careful with the adjustments you make to your facebook ad campaigns in this video i'm going to explain what this big change the facebook learning phase is and how you can adjust to make sure you get this right so we all know that since the ios 14 changes facebook now has less visibility over the actions that people

0:27take once they click on a facebook or instagram ad and go through to your website they can't tell with the same degree of accuracy what people are doing and all that sort of stuff and that has affected how facebook campaigns learn how they work out who is most likely to take your desired action when they should advertise to them all the stuff that they used to calculate very easily and one of the impacts of that is that the learning phase is now very different instead of being a short 24 to 48 hour process where your facebook ad campaigns go into the earning phase for that time

0:55period and after that they are optimized at least to some extent ready to go and could perform really well the time period during which the campaigns learn is definitely extended effectively the learning phase has been elongated and facebook aren't talking about this i've got an article up here about you know the guide to the learning phase i've been through this in a lot of detail and facebook aren't mentioning that the learning phase is now a lot longer probably for obvious reasons they don't you know that that's a negative thing for facebook advertisers but we know it's true because we have campaigns that we're running for our clients that are

1:27very stable and have been stable for a long period of time and we are seeing them improve incrementally over time it's not like they did all the learning during the first few days or even the first few weeks no six months in they're getting better than they were three months in a year in they're even getting even better this is a trend we've been seeing um quite a bit recently i wanted to create a video on it and what all this means effectively is that stability is key keeping your facebook ad campaign stable not over adjusting is where you're going to see best results however it's very important to distinguish

1:58between the things that you can change and the things that you can't change in your facebook ad campaigns because if you don't change anything you're going to run into massive issues so i wanted to create this video where i go through the things that you can change the things that you can't change the things that you can change sometimes i think it's going to be tremendously valuable if you're wondering how to adjust and optimize campaigns so let's start by covering the things that you should absolutely never change in a live facebook ad campaign if you need to change any of the things i'm about to talk about you need to create brand new

2:26facebook ad campaigns don't adjust your existing campaigns otherwise you're going to get in the way of facebook's optimization process you're going to affect that elongated learning phase and you'll hurt your results so to demonstrate this i'm in an example facebook ad account we're going to go ahead and create an example campaign and the very first thing i'll talk about is a campaign objective facebook often won't let you but it's very important you never actually change that i've got the new campaign objective menu by the way you may have the old one the same applies either way and i will have a video about this new campaign objective

2:55setup very soon that's the first thing next thing is buying type um most time you're going to go with auction anyway but there are other options like region frequency never change that in an existing campaign next is campaign budget optimization there's a lot of debates versus versus cbo you can switch between the two i would definitely not recommend that you do most of time i like cbo but there are definitely cases where i'm going to set budgets at the ad set level but whichever one you go with you're in it for the long haul with this campaign do not go ahead and change that you'll hurt

3:24your results you need different campaigns to go with a different budget optimization setup then we can jump over to the ad set level and the next thing to never change is conversion location most people are going to be using website for this type of campaign but if you wanted to for example test sending people to messenger whatsapp all that sort of stuff that's absolutely fine to do and can be a great part of testing you might find out something that works really well for your business but don't adjust an existing campaign create a new one to test that next thing conversion event if you're obviously operating a

3:51sales campaign or a lead campaign or what used to be what used to be referred to as a conversion campaign you're going to be optimizing for a conversion event like purchase lead etc once you've selected a particular conversion event um i would definitely not go ahead and change that and then after the conversion event we scroll down the next thing is budget type not budget that's something you can change but daily budget lifetime budget i'm a big fan of going daily budgets basically all the time but whatever you go ahead with make sure you don't change again that's something that facebook won't often let you do but if they do which they do in

4:24certain circumstances do not change that and then finally i want to scroll down to the optimization and delivery section you can see that this optimization for ad delivery is automatically set to conversions whatever you have selected here and with this sort of campaign i definitely recommend conversions do not change it to anything else a lot of these things that we've just covered we just talked about they're all around campaign optimization and facebook's optimization process if you think about that in a similar way to how you might train an athlete okay under these settings that you start with facebook's going to try and learn going to try and train much like you might

5:02take an athlete and train them for sprinting to be as fast as they possibly can if you then take that same athlete and go oh by the way you're running a marathon tomorrow they're not going to do anywhere near as well as if they had been training for a marathon in the run-up that you can apply the same thing to these facebook ad campaigns if you get the facebook campaign to learn under certain circumstances and then go oh we've completely changed some of these settings all the things that i've just mentioned any one of those it's like taking the sprint athlete and getting them to run a marathon it's not going to

5:29work as well you need to create brand new campaigns that can learn under the right conditions if you want to change any of the things i've just talked about next we need to talk about the things that you don't need to create a brand new campaign for if you change but you do need to create a brand new ad set within the campaign if you change them okay so if we scroll up to targeting the audience section if you change anything about the actual targeting who you're advertising to i'd much prefer you pause your existing ad set duplicate it create a new version with the changes and run things that way

6:00the same logic applies to what we just talked about the campaign now you don't need to create a whole new campaign for this like you did with all the previous things i mentioned you can just create a brand new ad set and that's important because you're going to want to be testing different targeting options new targeting options that can help you improve performance but any of this stuff right custom audiences look-alike audiences locations age gender detail targeting languages change any of that i want a brand new ad set the exception to the rule here would be um if you're turning on or off detailed targeting expansion don't need a brand new ad set

6:30for that you can just test that and if you're wanting to add in any exclusions you know for example you may want to decide that you want to exclude people who have bought from you in the past 30 days you can add that in without necessarily creating a new adsense those would be the exceptions of the targeting stage next thing placement options if you're say going from automatic placements to something manual where you're getting a lot more specific i would rather you created a new ad set as opposed to changing your existing ad set and then finally if we scroll down we've got cost controls if you've started

6:58without a cost control which most people will do and you want to add one in be better off creating a new ad set for doing that likewise if you wanted to um remove one same same situation right it's all about the optimization process if you get a facebook ad set just like the campaigns to learn under certain circumstances and you go ahead and change it you're in for a hard time so any of those three things new ad set but not new campaign previous ones new campaign and then next we need to talk about the ad so if we jump over to the ad now just like there are things that

7:26you need to create a brand new campaign for if you change and there are things you need to create a brand new ad set for if you change there are also things that you can keep the campaign keep the ad set but need new ads for if you change and that is anything in the ad if you change the primary text the headline the creative where the ads taking people to um the call to action buttons even anything like that i would be looking to create new ads and that is absolutely something you want to do you want to be testing new ads you want to be testing

7:54new creatives you want to be introducing new stuff to overcome ad fatigue but don't adjust existing ads create new ads allow facebook to learn with the new ads under the new circumstances it's also useful for being able to look back at historical data and see that okay that ad produced that results that app produced that results if you adjust ads and you look over time you're like okay well which time frame corresponded to which version of that ad it becomes a lot more messy so for data purposes that's also helpful now i want to be very very clear about an important point here i am not saying that because there

8:27is now an elongated learning phase that you should never make adjustments to your campaigns that's not what i'm saying at all you have to adjust your campaigns to improve performance and you have to do so to overcome things like ad fatigue you just need to know what to adjust and what create new versions of instead and that's what this video has been doing so absolutely test new targeting options absolutely introduce new ads into your campaign um to work out what resonates best with your target market to overcome ad fatigue for all that sort of stuff absolutely increase your budget if you're seeing great performance or decrease it there are all

8:59sorts of things you can change now even with those i still wouldn't recommend you do so very frequently no more than once every seven days i wanted to make that very clear because that's a very important point before i tell you more about how to structure your facebook and instagram ad campaigns i just wanted to quickly tell you about my company lead guru which is a specialist facebook and instagram ad agency and as you can see from this page here we offer done for you facebook and instagram ad services so we create manage and optimize campaigns for our clients many of our clients come from consuming my content

9:30and go on to work with us and see fantastic results from doing so so if you want a professional company to help you get better results with facebook and instagram services you can come through to our website page like this and you can go ahead and click on the schedule free session and you can go ahead and book a call directly into our calendar you can see here with one of my team members and they can explain more about how we work you can tell us about your business we can see if we'd be a good fit hopefully we get a chance to work together we do

9:54have a 3k per month minimum budget requirement so if you meet that or you're about to be in that sort of range then by all means go ahead and book a free call we do we'd love to potentially work with you as you've seen in this video there are lots of elements of a facebook ad campaign that you absolutely do not want to change which means it's very important that you set your campaigns up the right way the very first time to help you do that i'd strongly recommend you go ahead and check out this video here in this video i demonstrate a full facebook ad

10:20campaign setup in the quickest and most concise way possible it's only about four minutes long but in that i show you exactly how i'd recommend you structure and set up your facebook ad campaigns go ahead and check it out