Suppose you’ve done any advertising on Facebook at all. In that case, you probably know that the learning phase is something that most advertisers on Meta try to avoid. During the learning phase, your ad results are not as good as they could be. There is a lot of mythology about preventing the learning phase, including advice to scale your campaign by 10% or 20% a day.

Most of this is just guesswork and doesn’t reflect my experience at my agency.

That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that Facebook has a new feature that TELLS you how much you can increase your ad spend without going into the learning phase.

This is really game-changing because when Meta gives you data that you used to have to guess, you can make better decisions about your ad campaigns.

Meta’s New Learning Phase Feature

New Rollout

Before I explain why this learning phase feature is so amazing, I must tell you that this is a new rollout in Meta. That means it is available in some accounts and not others; within the same account, you will see it on some campaigns rather than others.

If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t worry. It is likely to be in your account soon.

Know Exactly How Much You Can Scale

One of the things I like best about this data is that Facebook tells you EXACTLY how much you can raise your ad spend without the learning phase. That means it’s quicker to scale a campaign.

There’s less guesswork involved, and the amount you can increase your budget is usually far higher than the 10% or 20% that most gurus recommend.

This is GREAT news. As you can see in the example below, Meta says you can go from a $195-a-day ad spend to a $349.05 ad spend without triggering the learning phase.

This is a 79% increase! This would allow you to scale your campaigns faster and more efficiently.

What I See In My Agency

Now… this is something that I’ve talked about for years. We’ve actually seen it in the ad accounts that we run for our clients. We know that we can make much bigger ad spend jumps than what is usually recommended.

You can increase in much larger increments, but less often. This is especially true at lower budget levels.

This is no longer true once you spend several thousand dollars a day.

This makes sense because Meta is really good at working out who the best possible prospect within your target audience is. But as you spend more, you go to a bigger audience, and the prospects may not be quite as hot, so you can’t scale at such large percentages with more significant numbers.

This also means that as you spend more, you will likely have higher costs per acquisition, even if you don’t end up in the learning phase.

This is normal, but it’s often worth paying a slightly higher cost per acquisition to get more customers. Make sure you do the math for your own business to see if paying somewhat more per lead or sale makes sense for you.

Quick Tips

A couple of quick tips: If you are scaling manually, it’s a good idea to scale within the increments that Meta tells you. For instance, if you are at $195 and Facebook tells you you can scale to $349, you don’t want to jump up to $400 as it will likely push you back into the learning phase.

It’s best to avoid the learning phase if you can. If you return to the learning phase, give the campaign 48 hours to re-optimise and evaluate on day 3.

Sometimes, you can’t avoid the learning phase. If you sell very high-end products or services, getting enough sales may be impossible to avoid the learning phase. Don’t worry; you can get campaigns performing well in the learning phase and in learning limited.

Once you increase the budget, you typically want to leave it where it is for about seven days before making another increase. This new Facebook feature benefits advertisers and can help you scale more efficiently.

We’ve found another super simple and easy way to scale. You can find out how to do that here. It’s completely automated and takes nearly all the stress out of scaling. We’re using this method more and more in my agency, and it is worth checking out.