Hey David,

Glad to hear that you are getting things on track. $1.81 is not bad at all, especially if you are just getting going.

I use dynamic creative to get data. Once I have clearly winning elements I create a new campaign (not using dynamic creative) and I use all of the winning elements in one ad set. This usually drops my costs even more. Assuming it does I start spreading my budget out over different ad sets. If it does not, I start another round of dynamic creative, testing new elements.

When you pause the campaign like that you do start the algorithm over. I would not do that. You're right that ads do suffer a bit on weekends (sometimes), but my attitude is that the ad needs to be strong enough to whether the ups and downs. The kinds of variations you mentioned are very common, especially when an add is new, and even more so when dynamic creative is still on. That is usually the algorithm learning.

I had been told by a FB ad rep that the algorithm wants to see about 5 actions a day to be effective. A friend of mine was told 25 per week by his ad rep. Sounds like you were told 50. I don't think there is a hard and fast rule. But the more data the smarter the algorithm.

Hope that helps.

Hey David,

On the one hand, it's great to see that the fundamentals are working, in the sense that you are getting a good CTR and a great conversion rate. Your sales conversion rate is only a little low. You're at about 3% instead of the 4 - 6% that I like to see. Your upsell rate is right on the money at about 30%. 

There are a couple of week areas...

With only 60% of your subs even opening the download email, something is pretty off there. Ideally that would be up over 80% or even in the 90s. But numbers like yours are not uncommon for some campaigns when confirmed opt in is off. So you could start by trying a new campaign with that turned on. My guess is that you are just getting too many subscribers that are plugging in fake emails to see if they can get the track without giving the info. If you got that number up to close to 100% then your sales conversion rate would be right where it should be (assuming things continue to perform the same way they are).

Your numbers also send a bit low on earnings. With a $10 album and a $30 box set you should have brought in about $60. Double that conversion rate buy improving the quality of the leads then you would be able to spend up to $1.20 per lead, which is totally doable.

I am also surprised that you are paying as much per lead given the positive metrics. A few questions there...

How many days has this been running?

What is your relevance score?

What number are you seeing when you look at "landing page visits" rather than clicks?

Have you tried other audiences? If so, how many?

Hmmm, a relevancy score of 7 is not that great. It's not bad, but most of my winning campaigns have a relevancy score of 8 or higher. Usually 9 or 10. So this is an indication that there is room for improvement with the ads, and it's consistent with why you are paying a bit ore than is ideal. 

Is your ad activity relatively new? It seems to me that a lot of newer advertisers start off a bit high until they establish a bit of a track record.

Have you run a report to see what age, sex, location are performing best?

It may be that a segment of your audience is doing really well, while another segment is doing really poorly. You might try narrowing down your options and creating a brand new campaign, using the same interest targeting, and see if things improve. You might also try turning on confirmed opt in for this campaign.

I can't say for sure that changing to a double opt in would fix it. But in my experience it will help it considerably. Only issue is that it can also lower your opt in rate. Normally it doesn't, but it can.

Just be sure to reset your stats on the email. You typically need to do this by copying the old email to your drafts, then deleting the email in your follow up series, then adding the draft back as a fresh email.

I would start by turning opt in on, rather than tweaking the headline, and see what effect that has.

And yeah, a 5% CTR is really good. I'm really surprised that your relevancy score is not higher. I'm not really sure why it's not, to be honest.

I wouldn't think that having a few friends share the ad would have any kind of a lasting effect. If anything, it might just give FB's algorithm a faulty impression of who to target. I could be wrong though.

I would not. That non-confirmation rate is way too high.

By chance did you keep the old ad going? If so, you may have trained the algorithm to look for people that tend to enter bad email addresses, or emails they don't monitor, which is why you got such a low open rate. But once the algorithm learns to look for people that match that profile, it tends to just keep seeking them out. I would try a brand new campaign from scratch. This way Facebook's algorithm will start seeking out people most likely to engage from the start.

Make sense?