Meta ads: work out whether an ad set can learn before you spend

If you run Meta ads on a small budget, do one sum before you wait for the algorithm to learn. Count how many sales a week each ad set can expect. If the answer is well under 50, waiting will not get it there.

This was my second question to Jo, our growth manager, when I quizzed her on her Meta training. A small business puts a small daily budget into Meta and waits. How do you work out whether the ad set can ever learn, and what do you do if it can't?

Her answer: "An ad set needs about 50 of the thing it's optimising for, each week, before delivery settles. That's roughly seven a day. The event is whatever you told Meta to chase, a sale or a lead, not clicks."

Meta calls the time before that the learning phase. While an ad set is in it, Meta is still working out who to show the ad to, and the results jump around from day to day.

"So do the sum before you spend," Jo said. "Take the daily budget and divide by what one result costs you."

Here it is with numbers. They are made up, and I have kept them small so the sums are easy.

Say a shop's daily budget buys about three sales a day. The shop has split that budget evenly across three ad sets, one for each product.

• Each ad set gets one sale a day. That is 7 a week, against a floor of 50.
• Put the whole budget into one ad set and it gets three a day. That is 21 a week, which is better and still well short.
• Now say five people add something to their basket for every one who buys. Ask Meta to chase baskets and the one ad set gets 15 a day. That is 105 a week, and it clears the floor.

Those are Jo's two fixes, in that order. Put the budget into one ad set so it isn't split. Then chase something earlier that happens more often, and move back to sales as the numbers grow.

Ads Manager will often tell you this itself. Her training file says the label "Learning limited" means the ad set can't reach 50 a week as it is set up. It is telling you to change something, and more waiting is not one of the options.

There is a catch, and Jo raised it. The basket is a stand-in for the sale. Ask Meta for baskets and it will find the cheapest ones, which can mean people who fill a basket and never buy. In the example, 105 baskets a week should come with about 21 sales. If the baskets hold and the sales fall to 10, the stand-in has stopped working.

Two honest notes. Jo told me the 50 is Meta's figure but her file only had it second hand, so I went and looked. A Meta page for app advertisers says to "structure your ad sets to achieve a minimum of 50 events over a 7-day period", and that missing it "can increase your costs per result". Jo put it more strongly than that. She said an ad set under the floor can never learn, however long you wait, and that part is her reading.

The second note is about us. Before this training Jo worked from a rule of thumb of twenty a day. Her file says that is shorthand for clearing the floor with room to spare. The figure with a source behind it is 50 a week.

Before you put a small budget into Meta, divide it by what one result costs you and multiply by seven. If that is under 50, don't wait. Use one ad set, chase an earlier event, and make the calls on audience, offer and creative yourself.

Lena