Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out!
Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts on your Meta ads situation. Your question about the learning phase is a good one, and it's something a lot of people get hung up on. The short answer is no, turning off a couple of underperforming creatives won't throw your whole campaign back to square one, but the real issue here isn't about one specific button press. It's about having a solid framework for how you test, optimise, and make decisions in your account so you're not constantly second-guessing yourself or tinkering your campaigns to death. Let's get into it.
TLDR;
- Stop worrying about the "learning phase" as a fragile, all-or-nothing switch. Minor changes like pausing a bad creative are fine and won't cause a catastrophic reset.
- The real reason your ads might be struggling isn't the learning phase; it's likely a weak offer, poor audience targeting, or uninspired creative. We'll fix that.
- Adopt a structured ToFu/MoFu/BoFu (Top, Middle, Bottom of Funnel) campaign structure. This stops your prospecting and retargeting efforts from cannibalising each other and gives you much clearer data.
- The most important advice is to define your customer by their 'nightmare problem', not by their demographics. Your ads must speak directly to that pain to get any traction.
- This letter includes an interactive calculator to help you figure out what you can actually afford to pay for a customer, which is the most important metric you're probably not tracking.
We'll need to look at the learning phase myth...
Right, let's tackle this head-on. Everyone in ad forums seems petrified of the "learning phase". They talk about it like it's a delicate souffle that will collapse if you so much as breathe near it. The truth is a bit more boring and a lot less dramatic.
The learning phase is simply Meta's algorithm figuring stuff out. When you launch a new ad set, it doesn't know who the best people are to show your ads to within the massive audience you've defined. So, it explores. It shows the ad to different types of people, at different times, on different placements (Facebook feed, Insta stories, etc.) to see what sticks. It needs about 50 conversions per ad set within a week to get a good read and "exit" the learning phase. Once it has that data, it can start predicting who is most likely to convert and focus your budget on them. Performance becomes more stable.
Making a "significant edit" can nudge it back into learning. What's significant? Changing your targeting, your bidding strategy, or swapping out all the creative at once. But pausing one or two rubbish creatives that are wasting your money? That's not a significant edit. That's just sensible management. The algrorithm is clever enough to understand you're trimming the fat. It will re-allocate the budget from the paused ads to the remaining ones and continue optimising. It might cause a tiny wobble in performance for a day, but it's far better than continuing to burn cash on ads that are clearly not working.
Obsessing over the "Learning Limited" status is a rookie mistake. A campaign can be "Learning Limited" and still be wildly profitable. It just means it's not getting those 50 conversions a week. That might be because your budget is too small, your audience is too narrow, or your conversion event is infrequent (like a high-ticket purchase). If the campaign is hitting your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) or CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) targets, who cares what status it has? Don't let a yellow warning icon bully you into making bad decisions. Focus on the results, not the status notifications.
The bigger picture is that constant, reactive tinkering is what really kills performance. If you're changing bids every day, tweaking audiences every 48 hours, and swapping creatives in and out based on a handful of clicks, the algorithm never gets a chance to find a rhythm. You're the problem, not the learning phase. You need a system.
I'd say you need a proper campaign structure...
Most people just throw a bunch of ad sets into one campaign and hope for the best. This is a recipe for disaster. Your cold prospecting traffic is competing with your warm retargeting traffic, your data gets muddy, and you have no idea what's actually working. A structured approach using a funnel model is much, much better. I use this for nearly every account, from eCommerce stores to B2B SaaS.
Think of it in three stages:
1. Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Prospecting: This is where you find new people. Your goal here is to introduce your brand to a cold audience that has never heard of you. The audiences you'll use are based on interests, behaviours, and lookalikes. You are casting a wide net to find potential customers. Your messaging here should focus on the problem you solve.
2. Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Consideration: This is for people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a key action yet. They might have watched one of your videos, visited your website, or engaged with a post. They know who you are, but they're not convinced. Your goal here is to build trust and educate them. You'll retarget these users with case studies, testimonials, or different angles on your product's benefits. It's about nurturing that initial spark of interest.
3. Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Conversion: This is your money-maker. These are people who are on the verge of converting. They've added a product to their cart, initiated checkout, or visited your pricing page. They are hot leads. Your goal is to get them over the line. You'll retarget them with urgency-driven ads – think discount codes, reminders about their abandoned cart, or social proof from recent customers.
You should set these up as three separate, long-term campaigns. One for ToFu, one for MoFu, and one for BoFu. Inside each campaign, you can then test different ad sets (audiences) and creatives. This seperation is critical. It allows you to:
- -> Control Budgets: You can allocate your spend strategically. Maybe you want to put 70% into prospecting (ToFu), 20% into nurturing (MoFu), and 10% into closing (BoFu).
- -> Tailor Messaging: You can't speak to a complete stranger the same way you speak to someone who almost bought from you. This structure forces you to create relevant ads for each stage of the journey.
- -> Get Clean Data: You can clearly see your Cost Per Acquisition for new customers versus returning visitors. You can see which prospecting audiences are actually feeding your funnel with quality traffic, and which retargeting messages are most effective at closing the deal.
For your situation, you have one campaign with five creatives. Are you targeting a cold audience? A warm one? Both? With a funnel structure, you'd know exactly where those creatives sit and what their specific job is. This clarity is the foundation of scalable and profitable advertising.
You probably should define what a "good" creative is...
You mentioned two of your creatives are "performing well". What does that actually mean? Is it a high Click-Through Rate (CTR)? Lots of likes and comments? Low Cost Per Click (CPC)? These are vanity metrics. They feel good, but they don't pay the bills. The only metrics that truly matter are the ones that are tied to your business objectives.
For most businesses, this means two things:
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): How much does it cost you to get a new customer (or a lead, or a trial signup)?
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): For every pound you spend on ads, how many pounds do you get back in revenue?
You absolutely must know what your target CPA and ROAS are before you even think about judging a creative's performance. How do you figure that out? It starts with knowing what a customer is worth to you. This is called Lifetime Value (LTV). Let's be brutally honest: if you don't know this number, you are flying blind. You have no idea if your £50 CPA is a bargain or a catastrophe.
Let's do a quick, back-of-the-napkin calculation. Let's say you sell a product for £100 with a 70% profit margin. The average customer buys from you 3 times over their lifetime.
LTV = (Average Order Value * Profit Margin) * Number of Repeat Purchases
LTV = (£100 * 0.70) * 3 = £210
So, each customer is worth £210 in profit to you. A common rule of thumb is to aim for a 3:1 LTV to CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio. This gives you a healthy margin for other business costs and profit. In this case, you could afford to spend up to £70 (£210 / 3) to acquire a single new customer. Your target CPA is £70.
Now you have a benchmark. When you look at your five creatives, you can judge them properly. A creative with a high CTR but a CPA of £120 is a failure. A creative with a "low" CTR but a CPA of £45 is a winner. You should pour more budget into the winner and turn off the failure. This is data-driven decision making, not guesswork.
I've built a small calculator for you below to play around with these numbers. This is arguably the most important calculation you can do for your business. Once you know what you can afford to pay, you stop making emotional decisions and start making profitable ones.
Affordable CPA Calculator
You'll need to understand your customer's nightmare...
This might sound a bit dramatic, but it's the absolute truth and the number one reason campaigns fail. It's not the bidding strategy, the pixel, or the learning phase. It's because the ads are speaking to no one. Most businesses define their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) with sterile demographics: "Women aged 25-40, interested in yoga, living in London." It's useless.
You need to define your customer by their pain. By their specific, urgent, expensive nightmare. What keeps them awake at 3 AM? What problem do they have that, if unsolved, could have serious consequences for their career, their finances, or their happiness?
Let's take a B2B example. I remember one SaaS company that sold a tool for developers. Their initial ads were all about features: "Our platform offers asynchronous code reviews and CI/CD integration." It bombed. Why? Because they were selling the tool, not the solution to the nightmare.
The nightmare for their ICP (a Head of Engineering) wasn't a lack of features. It was the fear of her best, most expensive developers quitting because they were so frustrated with the slow, broken workflow. It was the terror of missing a critical launch deadline and looking incompetent in front of the board. That's the pain.
We changed the ad copy to speak directly to that nightmare: "Losing your best engineers to a clunky dev process? Your team is spending more time waiting on reviews than writing code. Get your projects back on track and keep your A-players happy." The results were night and day. We weren't selling a feature anymore; we were selling career security and a peaceful night's sleep.
This applies to any business. If you sell handcrafted jewellery, you're not selling gold and silver. You're selling the solution to the nightmare of giving a generic, thoughtless gift. You're selling the feeling of being the person who gives the perfect, unique present. If you're an electrician, you're not selling "wiring services". You're selling the solution to the nightmare of a potential house fire or a power outage during a big family dinner.
Before you write another line of ad copy or design another creative, you must do this work. Sit down and write out the nightmare. What are the real, emotional stakes for your customer? Once you have that, your ads will practically write themselves, and they will resonate on a level your competitors, with their demographic-based targeting, can only dream of.
This is the main advice I have for you:
To pull this all together, here is a practical, step-by-step plan. This isn't just about tweaking your current campaign; it's about building a proper advertising machine that you can rely on to grow your business predictably. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:
| Step | Action | Why It's Important |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Define Your Numbers | Use the calculator above to determine your customer LTV and your maximum affordable CPA. This is non-negotiable. | This moves you from guessing to making data-driven decisions. It becomes your benchmark for success for all future ad campaigns. Without it, you're just burning money. |
| 2. Re-structure Campaigns | Pause your current campaign. Rebuild your account using the ToFu, MoFu, BoFu structure with three separate campaigns. | This provides clarity, control, and clean data. It stops your audiences from competing and allows you to tailor your message to the user's specific stage in their journey. |
| 3. Identify the "Nightmare" | Forget demographics. Write down the single biggest, most urgent problem your ideal customer faces. What are they truly afraid of? | This is the foundation of all effective advertising. Ads that speak to a deep pain point will always outperform ads that just list features or benefits. It's how you create an emotional connection. |
| 4. Relaunch with a Testing Mindset | In your new ToFu campaign, create 2-3 ad sets testing different audiences (e.g., interests vs. lookalikes). In each ad set, run 3-4 creatives that all speak to the "nightmare" from different angles. | This creates a structured testing environment. You're isolating variables to see which audience and which message performs best against your target CPA. |
| 5. Optimise with Patience | Let the campaigns run for at least 4-7 days before making any major decisions. Only pause creatives/ad sets once they have spent 1-2x your target CPA with no conversions. | This gives the algorithm time to work and gives you enough data to make a statistically sound decision. It stops you from making reactive, emotional changes that kill performance. |
I understand this is a lot to take in. It's a shift from just "running ads" to building a proper customer acquisition system. The difference in results, however, is massive. We've taken clients who were barely breaking even and, by implementing this exact strategic framework, helped them achieve things like a 1000% return on ad spend for an eCommerce brand, or reducing a SaaS client's CPA from a painful £100 down to a profitable £7.
This isn't about finding a magic "hack" or secret setting in Ads Manager. It's about applying solid, first-principles marketing strategy to the powerful tool that is Meta Ads. It takes discipline and a bit more upfront work, but the payoff is a predictable, scalable, and profitable advertising engine for your business.
If you feel like this is the right direction but you're a bit overwhelmed by the prospect of implementing it all yourself, that's completely normal. This is what we do all day, every day. We help businesses like yours build and manage these kinds of high-performance advertising systems.
We offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can take a proper look at your ad account and your business goals together. We can walk you through how this framework would apply specifically to you and give you an honest assessment of the potential. It's often the most valuable 30 minutes a business owner can spend on their markeing.
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
