The phases of your Facebook Ads campaigns

Already active on social media, and particularly on Facebook, you are looking to give your page a boost and grow your visibility? Then Facebook Ads campaigns are the way to go.

Relatively quick and straightforward to set up, you do however need to keep their mechanics in mind. Once launched, your campaign will go through several stages — several evolving phases — during which you may need to step in to optimise your results.

In this article, we will look at these 3 phases, and in particular the learning phase, which remains the most decisive for the success of your campaigns.

The learning phase

The reason we focus primarily on this phase is that it is the one that gives you the opportunity to make beneficial adjustments to your campaigns. Let us take a closer look.

This stage begins immediately after your first adverts are published. It is, in a sense, their launch — the moment when everything falls into place.

Facebook takes your targeting options into account and "learns" by discovering the profile of the first people who click on your ads, pay attention to them, or carry out any action you have defined.

Within this "broad" audience you have set, Facebook digs deeper to discover which segment is most likely to convert — that is to say, it identifies who will most probably make a purchase.

This phase can last anywhere from a few hours to several days, and will be characterised by a CPM that gradually increases. It can even fluctuate.

For the sake of accuracy and to ensure the best possible results going forward, it is inadvisable to make too many changes to your campaigns during this period (targeting, ad content, conversion elements, bidding strategy, budget, etc.).

If you make too many changes even after this phase has ended, your campaign could well fall back into the learning phase as it studies its characteristics afresh.

What comes next

Once Facebook has sorted through the data, you have been able to adjust your campaigns and welcome your first results.

But while a campaign that is performing well is entirely positive for you, do not forget that it will not last indefinitely. You must keep a close eye on how it evolves so you can step in at the right moment.

After the learning phase, here is what to expect.

The "cruising" phase

Once your campaign has found its rhythm, results will remain relatively stable, without too many changes, for a period of time. This is what might be called the "cruising" phase (and yes, the metaphor is intentional).

During this period, the CPM reached at the end of the learning phase — and therefore considered optimal — is maintained.

This is ultimately where your campaign will deliver the most results, as it does its job having already gone through its testing stage in the previous phase.

"Saturation"

And then, suddenly, you see your CPM skyrocket… Is that a good sign? Not really — in fact, it may be time to act.

The "saturation" phase occurs when 80 to 100% of the target audience has already been reached, having covered those with the highest potential. Facebook will therefore invest more to reach the hardest-to-reach segments of the target audience — hence the rising costs.

We recommend stopping your campaign at this point. You will already have benefited from the strong results it generated, and you risk incurring higher and unnecessary expenditure going forward.

To conclude

To wrap up, also take into account the frequency of your ads across these 3 cycles. Frequency refers to the number of times the same person sees your advert.

The longer the campaign runs, the more Facebook will show your ads to the same people, and repeatedly so. The best frequency scores therefore occur during the learning phase, where virtually all views will be unique.

If you were still on the fence, this final argument proves once again that every campaign has a beginning… but above all, an end. Stay vigilant and ensure you secure the best possible results!