First off, i am not talking about the editorial review – from my experiences they approve the ad within at least 8 hours but as quickly as 2 or 3 (in my experiences anyway…). While im mentioning the facebook editorial team, i must say – despite the negative criticism ive seen on blogs (mostly affiliate marketing blogs) they seem to be fair and rational. As long as you are not trying to trick someone into something they dont want to do – and your ad is actually an advertisement for the page you are taking the user, you will be fine and your ads will get approved.
Thats it for now on editorial team & speed – more on that in post dedicated to the subject.
So if im not talking about the time it takes to approve an ad what am i talking about?
The time it takes for your ad to reach maximum (or at least decent) exposure. In my (limited) testing it takes approx 36 hours – after your ad is approved – before you see the type of impressions / clicks that will be normal for the ad. While i have observed this with many ads, im going to post 1 example below on a pretty new ad i have been running this week on fb. Take a look at the following screengrab.
Looking at the report screen above you can see, that on 2/08 i got 49 clicks (note; 2/8 is the first day i got clicks on this ad – not sure why the facebook ad UI only lets you view the stats by “Daily stats for the week of XXX”). So everything was looking good & the next day 2/09 i got a nice amount of clicks on the ad (264) but was wondering if there is where i would be capped (obviously changing the ad, targeting &/or cpc would change the click volume – but i wanted to see what this ad/targeting/cpc combo would generate).
Much to my suprise, the next day the ad generated almost double the amount of clicks (463) while the cpc, avg cpc & CTR % stayed exactly the same.
I have a strike through 2/11 bec this report was run in the morning on 2/11 and it is only showing partial stats for the day. but i can tell you, that as of writing this at 3pm on 2/11 the numbers today look identical to yesterday.
So while this is only 1 example of a facebook ad that took ~36 hours, i have seen this time and time again with the numerous facebook ad campaigns i have been creating & managing. I expect that as time goes on, this process will happen faster & advertisers will be able to almost turn the click-faucet (think adwords 
Please let me know what you think in the comments.
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