Solved: Meta Ads Stuck, Learning Phase Not Progressing

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Read through your situation with the Meta ads and I can definitely see why you're feeling a bit stuck. It’s a common story for new store owners trying to get to grips with the platform. The good news is that what you're experiencing is fixable, but the solution probably isn't where you're looking. You're getting bogged down in the details of the 'learning phase' when the real issues are more fundamental to your strategy and how you're managing the campaigns. I'm happy to give you some of my thoughts on it.

We'll need to look at why the 'Learning Phase' is a dangerous distraction...

Alright, let's get this out of the way first because it's the thing that's causing you the most stress and making you do all the wrong things. The "learning phase" is probably one of the most misunderstood and overrated features on the Meta ads platform. You've spent $1600 worrying about a status message instead of focusing on what actually matters: are you making more money than you're spending?

Here’s the brutally honest truth: you are paying Facebook to find customers, not to complete a learning phase. When you get too fixated on that status, you start making tiny, nervous changes. You paused a campaign because a pixel glitched. You turn off a creative after a few hours of poor performance. You nudge the budget up by 20%. Every single one of these actions tells the algorithm "Stop what you were doing, I'm changing the rules again." It's like trying to teach someone to drive but grabbing the wheel every ten seconds. You're never going to get anywhere.

The algorithm is clever, but it’s not magic. It needs a consistent, stable set of data to work with. By constantly interrupting it, you are resetting its progress. CBO (Campaign Budget Optimisation) is designed to automatically allocate budget to the best-performing ad sets and creatives over time. When you manually turn off a creative because it had a bad morning, you're overriding the system and basing a decision on a tiny, statistically irrelevant dataset. The reason your "worst" creative spent half the budget could be because Meta was testing it against a completely different pocket of your audience that your "best" creative hadn't reached yet. You might have just turned off an ad that was about to find a goldmine.

You also mentioned starting with a Traffic campaign. This is a classic mistake. When you tell Meta you want "Traffic", it does exactly what you ask. It finds you the cheapest clicks possible. Who are the cheapest people to get to click on an ad? People who click on everything and buy nothing. You are literally paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you an audience of non-customers. The same goes for an "Add to Cart" campaign. You'll get people who add to cart. That's it. If you want sales, you need to set your campaign objective to "Sales" (or "Conversions" with a Purchase event) from the very beginning, even with a brand new pixel. The algorithm is smart enough to find buyers if you tell it to look for buyers.

I'd say you need to build a proper campaign structure...

Your current approach of running one campaign, pausing it, then starting another is chaotic. It doesn't give you a clear picture of what's working and it definitely doesn't let you target people based on how familiar they are with your brand. The way we structure accounts for pretty much all our eCommerce clients, from those spending a few hundred a day to those spending thousands, is with a funnel-based approach: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

Top of Funnel (ToFu) is your prospecting campaign. This is where you find new customers. The only goal here is to reach people who have never heard of you before and get them to your site. Your audiences here will be 'cold'. This means you'll be using detailed targeting (interests, behaviours) and lookalike audiences. You mentioned you have 25-30 sales – that's a good start! You should create a lookalike audience based on your list of customers. This tells Meta "go find me more people who look like the ones who've already bought from me." It's one of the most powerful tools you have. This campaign will have the highest budget, maybe 70-80% of your total spend.

Middle of Funnel (MoFu) is for warming people up. These are people who've visited your website or engaged with your ads (e.g., watched a video) but haven't taken a high-intent action like adding to cart. You're retargeting them to build more trust and remind them about your products. The message here is slightly different; it's less about introduction and more about reinforcement. This campaign gets a smaller chunk of the budget, say 10-15%.

Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) is where you close the deal. This is your highest-intent audience. These are the people who have added products to their cart or started the checkout process but didn't complete the purchase. This is your abandoned cart audience. Your ads here should be very direct, maybe with an offer like free shipping or a small discount to get them over the line. This is your most profitable campaign and usually has the highest ROAS, but the audience is small, so it only needs about 5-10% of your total budget.

The key thing here is that each of these should be a separate, long-running CBO campaign, all optimising for Purchases. You put your different audiences in ad sets within these campaigns and your creatives within those ad sets. Then you let it run. You don't pause things after a day. You give it at least 5-7 days and enough budget to get meaningful data before you make any decisions. This structure brings order to your advertising and allows you to scale logically instead of just randomly starting and stopping things.

You probably should define your audience by their pain, not just their interests...

You mentioned using your "best creatives" but didn't say much about your targeting. This is where most campaigns live or die. A brilliant ad shown to the wrong person is just a waste of money. You need to go deeper than broad interests like "fashion" or "jewellery". You need to think about your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), but not in the way most marketers do.

Forget sterile demographics. "Women aged 25-40 who like handcrafted jewellery" tells you almost nothing useful. You need to define your customer by their pain, their problems, and their aspirations. What is the 'nightmare' your product solves? For an e-commerce store, it might not be a career-threatening nightmare like in B2B, but there's always an emotional driver.

Are you selling handcrafted jewellery? The 'nightmare' isn't a lack of accessories. It's the feeling of being generic, of wearing the same mass-produced stuff as everyone else. The aspiration is to express individuality, to own something with a story. So, instead of targeting the interest 'Jewellery', you could target interests like 'Etsy', 'Not On The High Street', followers of specific independent designers, or people interested in 'sustainable fashion'. These interests are much more likely to contain people who share the values that your brand represents. Your ad copy then doesn't just say "Buy my necklace." It speaks to that desire for uniqueness: "Tired of blending in? Wear a story, not just a brand."

This deep understanding of your customer's mindset is what allows you to write compelling copy and, crucially, to select targeting options that contain a high concentration of your ideal buyers. When you get this right, your ads resonate on an emotional level, and your costs go down because you're not wasting impressions on people who will never care about what you sell.

You'll need to understand your numbers to scale...

Right now, you're flying blind. You've spent $1600, got some sales, but you probably don't know the most important number for your business: how much can you actually afford to pay for a customer? Without knowing this, you can't make smart decisions about your ad spend. You're just guessing whether your results are good or bad.

The metric that unlocks this is Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). It tells you how much profit a customer is likely to generate for you over their entire relationship with your business. Once you know your LTV, you can work out your target Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). A healthy ratio is usually around 3:1 (LTV:CAC), meaning if a customer is worth £300 to you, you can afford to spend up to £100 to acquire them.

For a new eCommerce store, calculating a precise LTV is tricky because you don't have much historical data. But you can make some solid estimates. You need three numbers:

1. Average Order Value (AOV): How much does the average customer spend in one transaction?
2. Purchase Frequency: How many times does a customer buy from you in a year? (For a new store, you might have to estimate this based on your product type. Is it a one-off purchase or something people might buy again?)
3. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on each sale after accounting for the cost of goods?

Let's say your AOV is £50, you estimate a loyal customer buys twice a year, and your gross margin is 60%. Over one year, that customer's value is (£50 * 2) * 0.60 = £60. With a 3:1 ratio, that means you can afford to spend up to £20 to acquire that customer. Suddenly, you have a hard number to aim for in your ad campaigns. If your Cost Per Purchase is £15, you're doing great. If it's £35, you're losing money and need to fix your ads or your funnel.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To wrap this up, the path forward isn't about finding a magic trick to get out of the "learning phase." It's about building a professional, scalable advertising system. Your current approach is based on guesswork and reaction. A professional approach is based on structure, data, and a deep understanding of your customer. I've detailed the main recommendations for you below in a table to make it clearer.

Implementing all of this can feel like a lot, especially when you're also trying to run a new business. It requires a shift from just "running ads" to building a proper marketing engine. It involves strategic thinking, patience, and the ability to interpret data correctly without letting platform quirks like the "learning phase" send you off course.

This is where expert help often comes in. An experienced eye can set up these structures correctly from the start, identify the right audiences much faster, and manage the campaigns based on years of experience, avoiding all the common and costly mistakes. It's not just about technical setup; it's about providing the strategic oversight to ensure your ad spend is a profitable investment, not just an expense.

If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply this kind of structured approach to your store and get your campaigns on the right track, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We could take a proper look at your ad account together and give you a more detailed plan of action.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh