What is Facebook’s learning phase and how long does it take to exit it?

From Facebook’s guide to learning phase:

The learning phase is the period when the delivery system still has a lot to learn about an ad set. During the learning phase, the delivery system is exploring the best way to deliver your ad set – actively trying different audiences, placements, and more – so performance has not yet stabilized.

Ad sets exit the learning phase as soon as their performance stabilizes. Typically, performance stabilizes after an ad set receives around 50 optimization events within a 7-day period.

Further reading: Meta Business Help Center

Why are my Facebook ads going into the Learning Phase after enabling Facebook protection?

Our Facebook feature protects your social acquisition channels from suspicious activity by creating audience exclusion lists with invalid users.

When applying the audience exclusions to your active campaigns, some ad-sets may enter the learning phase, indicating that Facebook’s delivery system is now calibrating with the improved targeting audience and is exploring the best way to deliver your ad set - across audiences and placements.

When implementing Facebook protection features, we will be creating audience exclusions to your active campaigns. Once applying the audience exclusions, your ads might be going into review, due to the change in the ad-set targeting. Note that most ads are reviewed within 24 hours. Read more about Facebook ad review in the help center.

Should I expect the ads to enter the learning phase/in review again when ClickCease detects new invalid traffic?

No, once the audience lists are live in your ad-sets, they will automatically update and improve over time. You should not expect the ad-sets to enter the learning phase or ads review again.

Will ClickCease Facebook protection harm my campaigns performance?

We protect your Facebook’s campaigns from suspicious activity, such as: automated traffic, bots or web crawlers, click farms and more.

When enabling Facebook’s protection, we clean up your targeted audience with dynamic audience exclusion lists of those bad actors, allowing Facebook’s delivery system to improve its learning, optimization campaign performance over time.

I enabled the ClickCease Facebook feature and my delivery across placements have changed - why?

We protect your Facebook activity across all family of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network.

Each time one of your ads is shown, Facebook’s delivery system learns more about the best people to target and which placements to use. In some cases, based on our invalid traffic detection, Facebook’s delivery system may change its placement allocation.

I enabled ClickCease Facebook protection and now I’m stuck in the learning phase. What should I do?

We recommend to follow Facebook’s best practices for learning phase - avoid high ad volumes by consolidating ad-sets, avoid frequent edits and use realistic budgets to support the recommended setup of 50 conversions / week on the Ad Set level. More tips can be found in Facebook’s learning phase guide.