How to Edit a Facebook Ad

You’ve launched a Facebook ad campaign, it's been running for a day, and you suddenly notice a typo in the headline. Or maybe an ad set is burning through cash without results. Your first impulse is to jump in and start making changes. Editing a Facebook ad is technically simple, but knowing when and what to change is crucial to avoid derailing a campaign that’s finding its footing. This guide will walk you through exactly how to edit your live ads at the campaign, ad set, and ad level, while explaining the risks involved so you can make changes confidently.

Before You Edit: A Crucial Warning About the Learning Phase

Before clicking that "Edit" button, you need to understand Facebook's "learning phase." When you launch a new ad or make a significant edit to an existing one, Meta's algorithm enters a period of exploration. It's actively testing different audiences and placements to figure out who is most likely to take your desired action (like making a purchase or filling out a form).

This phase is critical for long-term performance. The algorithm needs to gather enough data - typically around 50 optimization events (e.g., 50 purchases) within a seven-day period - to stabilize and exit the learning phase. During this time, your campaign performance might be unstable, with fluctuating costs per result.

Here’s the deal: Making significant edits to your campaign, ad set, or ad can restart this learning phase from scratch. This means the algorithm has to start over, potentially wasting the budget and data it has already collected. Your performance could dip, and costs could rise while Facebook re-learns how to best deliver your ad.

The key is to distinguish between minor tweaks (like fixing a typo) and major changes (like overhauling your entire audience targeting). We'll cover which is which in a bit.

How to Edit a Facebook Ad: a Step-by-Step Guide

All edits take place within the Facebook Ads Manager. Navigating it is straightforward once you understand its three-level structure:

• Campaign: The top level where you set your overall advertising objective (e.g., sales, traffic, leads).
• Ad Set: The middle level where you define your targeting, placements, budget, and schedule.
• Ad: The level where you create the actual creative your audience sees (images, videos, copy, links).

To get started, navigate to your Facebook Ads Manager and select the campaign you wish to edit.

Editing at the Campaign Level

Campaign-level edits are less common and often involve high-level strategy changes. Changing your objective is a massive shift that will always reset the learning phase.

What you can edit here:

• Campaign Name
• Advantage Campaign Budget (formerly Campaign Budget Optimization, or CBO) spending limits and amount
• Campaign objective (use extreme caution!)

Steps to edit a campaign:

1. Click on the "Campaigns" tab.
2. Find the campaign you want to edit. You can either check the box next to its name and click the "Edit" button that appears in the toolbar, or simply hover over the campaign name and click the "Edit" link that appears below it.
3. An editing panel will slide out from the right side. Here you can change the campaign name or adjust your Advantage Campaign Budget settings.
4. After making your changes, review them carefully and click the blue "Publish" button at the bottom right.

Pro Tip: Only change your campaign objective if the initial strategy was completely wrong. If you want to test a different objective, it's far safer to duplicate the campaign and start a new test from scratch.

Editing at the Ad Set Level

This is where most of your optimization-related edits will happen. You might need to refine your targeting after seeing initial data or adjust your budget based on early performance.

What you can edit here:

• Ad Set Name
• Budget and schedule
• Audience (locations, age, interests, custom audiences)
• Placements (where your ads appear, like Facebook Feed or Instagram Stories)
• Optimization & delivery settings

Steps to edit an ad set:

1. Click on the "Ad Sets" tab.
2. Find the ad set you want to modify. Just like with campaigns, you can check the box and use the toolbar's "Edit" button or hover over the name to find the one-click "Edit" link.
3. In the right-side editing panel, you'll find sections for budget, audience, placements, and more. For example, to change an audience, scroll to the "Audience" section and click "Edit."
4. Make your desired changes. If your cost per result is too high and you realize your interest targeting is too broad, you could narrow the audience to be more specific.
5. Click "Publish" to save your changes.

Keep in mind that changing your audience targeting or optimization event will likely trigger a learning phase reset.

Editing at the Ad Level (The Creative)

Editing the ad creative itself is the riskiest of all because it can eliminate one of your most valuable assets: social proof.

The critical warning: When you edit an ad's creative elements (image, video, or primary text), Facebook often treats it as a new ad. This can cause all of the existing likes, comments, and shares to disappear. Losing that social proof can make your ad seem less trustworthy and may hurt its performance.

What you can edit here:

• Ad Name
• Primary Text, Headline, and Description
• Image or Video (This will almost always reset social proof)
• Call-to-Action (CTA) Button
• Destination URL
• URL parameters (UTM codes)

Steps to edit an ad:

1. Navigate to the "Ads" tab.
2. Find the specific ad you want to edit. Hover and click the "Edit" link.
3. In the edit panel, you can adjust the ad copy, update the destination URL, or change the CTA button.
4. Once you're done, review your changes and click "Publish."

What You Should Modify vs. When You Should Duplicate

To make this simple, here’s a quick guide on what’s generally safe to edit versus what warrants duplicating the ad or ad set for a clean test.

Generally Safe to Edit (Low Risk)

• Fixing a Typo: Correcting a spelling or grammar mistake in your ad copy is a low-risk change. While it may briefly put the ad back into review, it's unlikely to have a major impact on performance.
• Updating a URL: If a link is broken or you need to direct traffic to a new landing page, this is a necessary and usually safe edit.
• Pausing/Restarting an Ad: Toggling an ad or ad set on and off doesn't count as a significant edit.
• Slight Budget Adjustments: Slowly increasing the budget of a well-performing ad set (think 15-20% every few days) usually doesn't reset the learning phase. Drastic changes, however, will.

Edit with Caution (High Risk of Resetting the Learning Phase)

• Changing Creative: Swapping out an image, video, headline, or primary text is a big change. You risk losing social proof and will almost certainly restart the learning phase.
• Overhauling Audience Targeting: Adding or removing entire interest groups, Lookalike Audiences, or significantly changing an age or location bracket is a major edit.
• Changing the Campaign Objective: This is a fundamental change to what you're asking the algorithm to do. It should almost never be done on a live campaign.
• Changing the Conversion Event: Switching from optimizing for "Add to Cart" to "Purchase" completely changes the goal. This will restart learning.

The Pro Move: Duplicate Instead of Editing

For any high-risk changes, the best practice is to duplicate rather than edit. Duplicating your existing ad set creates an identical copy, allowing you to make your desired changes in the new version while the original continues running untouched.

This approach gives you several advantages:

1. It preserves performance: Your original, stable ad set keeps running and generating results. You don't risk ruining a good thing.
2. It allows for clean A/B testing: You can create a true apples-to-apples comparison. For example, duplicate an ad set and only change one thing - like the audience - to see which one performs better.
3. It protects your social proof: The likes and comments on your original ad remain intact.

To duplicate, simply check the box next to the campaign, ad set, or ad you want to copy and click the "Duplicate" button in the toolbar. Make your modifications to the new copy and publish it. Let both run for a few days, then analyze the results and pause the loser.

Final Thoughts

Editing a Facebook ad is a straightforward process, but it requires a bit of strategic thinking. The most important thing is to understand the learning phase and the potential impact of your changes. For minor fixes like typos or broken links, a quick edit is fine. For anything more significant, duplicating and creating an A/B test is almost always the smarter, safer, and more profitable way to optimize your campaigns.

Knowing what to edit often comes from digging through Ads Manager reports, trying to connect performance dips with specific changes. We've found an easier way is to connect all our data sources into one place. Instead of cross-referencing spreadsheets with Ads Manager tables, we build real-time dashboards where we can just ask questions like, "Which campaigns saw a drop in return on ad spend after May 15th?" or "Show me a chart of CPC vs. CPM for my top ad sets this month." This helps us pinpoint exactly what needs tuning without getting lost in the weeds. If you're ready to make faster, data-backed decisions on your ads, you should check out Graphed.