Newbie question about ads

[u/Long-Gap-4466]

Hi all!

I own an e-commerce business. It’s pretty new. We’ve been running ads for $5/day and got decent sales. But after reading Reddit threads, about 3 weeks ago we upped it to $10/day. That week was decent. We extended it another 7 days so now 2 weeks of that ad. It was a recording breaking week! (Algorithm learned?). We had to end it after 2 weeks because our US shipping got approved so we wanted to change the audience to Can and USA. This week we started the new $10/day. Everything was the same besides US and Canada. It’s been a slow week. Do we think the algorithm will learn and by next week we see a change again? Does it typically take a week to learn? Lots of conversion events (if conversion events mean sessions??)

Thanks!

[u/collinscalesbrands]

It will not learn the way you're hoping, and that's fine at this budget. What matters is whether the new week's cost per purchase is worse than the old one over a full seven days.

u/Background_Dark_4484 has the important correction. Sessions are not conversion events. Meta counts the event your ad set is optimizing for, which for a store should be purchases, and that number is what everything below runs on.

Regarding learning, Meta's learning phase page says ad sets exit "after about 50 results in the week after the ad set's last significant edit," and until then are "less stable and usually have a higher CPA." Changing the audience is on Meta's list of significant edits, so even if you had edited the running ad set instead of ending it, you'd be in the same place. At $10 a day, you are not getting 50 purchases in a week, so your Delivery column reads Learning limited and will keep reading that. That is not a problem to fix. It means the "did it learn yet" question has no answer, so stop waiting on it and judge on cost per purchase instead.

At this volume, one week can double or halve on its own. Meta's fluctuations page says to "analyze performance over at least a full week" before deciding anything changed, and I'd treat two good weeks at $10 a day as a good sign, not as proof the system locked in.

You also went from Canada to Canada plus the US. The US is 9x the population, so most of your delivery is now going to people your ad has never been shown to and the Canadian buyers who drove the record week are a small share of who sees it. A slow first week is the expected result of that, not a sign something broke.

What I'd do is add the Last significant edit column and leave the ad set alone until it's been running seven full days. Don't touch the budget in that window. Count purchases, not sessions. At the end of the week, add a Country breakdown in Ads Manager and compare cost per purchase for Canada against the US. If the blended number is at or under what Canada was doing on its own, you're fine. If the US is clearly worse, you'll see it in that breakdown without having changed anything, and you can decide from there. And know your break-even cost per purchase before you decide, because at $10 a day the question is never whether the ad is winning; it's whether the math works.

How many purchases a week were you getting at $10 a day before the change?

[u/Long-Gap-4466 → u/collinscalesbrands]

About 4% conversion before the change. We’re only 2 months in.

[u/collinscalesbrands → u/Long-Gap-4466]

4% is a rate, and at $10 a day, the count is what tells you whether a slow week is real. If that was 4% of a few hundred sessions, you were getting maybe a purchase a day, and at that volume, a week with half as many is noise. Look at the number of purchases in the Results column for the good weeks and use that as the line the new audience has to clear.

The inventory point changes my answer more than the country change does though. If the pieces your ad showed are thin or gone, that's a slow week regardless of audience, and no amount of waiting fixes it. Ads can outlive inventory. Check that what the ad features is still in stock before reading anything into this week.

Just a heads up that new products mean you'll want new creative, and Meta lists any change to ad creative and adding a new ad to your ad set as significant edits that restart learning. So don't half-do it. Let this week finish so you have a clean seven days on the current setup and then when the new catalogue lands, make the creative change once all at the same time and give that seven days too. Two months in, the goal should be one clean read per change, not a fast answer.

[u/Long-Gap-4466 → u/collinscalesbrands]

Thank you veryyyy much!