What is the learning phase?
The learning phase is the period after launch or a major edit when the platform is still working out who responds to your ad.
Performance during this window is unstable and usually worse than what follows, which is why judging a campaign in its first few days is a reliable way to kill something that would have worked.
Exiting requires conversion volume, and that's where small budgets struggle. Meta's threshold is roughly 50 optimisation events per ad set per week; a campaign generating ten leads a week will never reach it and stays permanently unsettled — the state Meta labels 'learning limited'.
Every significant edit restarts it. Changing the budget substantially, the audience, or the optimisation event all reset the clock, which is why constant tinkering keeps a campaign permanently in its worst-performing state.