A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown - 1,339 or eight?

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I thought finding homes for 50 books was unlikely. But 106 copies of the limited edition have been taken already, through my newsletter, social media posts and word of mouth.

I wanted to see if paid ads could help spread the word, and decided to try advertising the book on Meta. Specifically: Facebook (which I never visit) and Instagram.

I built two ad sets. One pointed at people who’d engaged with my Instagram in the last year – a so-called warm audience of 2,400 people. The other pointed at a “lookalike” of the same group, which is Meta’s algorithm guessing who else might respond.

Both ads showed a five-card carousel of photos, with a link to a page on my website, made from opening pictures in the book itself, which in turn linked to the sales page. The middle step existed mainly to give cold strangers a reason to click before being asked for £45.

One ad went live two days before the other one, because I made a mistake somewhere. I had planned to spend £10 a day on each ad for a week – £140 in total. But after spending £48.30, I paused it. The numbers didn’t add up.

The Meta ads dashboard told me 1,339 people who saw the ad viewed my landing page. That’s a lot more than I expected. The cost per view was £0.04 – very cheap, apparently. In the same period, I had one sale of the book. Which is great, but it’s a bit worrying if 1,338 others visited and decided they didn’t want the book.

Whether that buyer came to my site from the ad is impossible to confirm because I have virtually no tracking on my website. I won’t use Meta’s “pixel” because I don’t want to be complicit in the company’s surveillance by sending back to Meta details about the people who visit my site.

So I rely on a thing called Awstats, which logs my own server and sees which pages get traffic without telling me who the visitors are.

According to Awstats, only eight visitors came to my site from Facebook domains over the same period.

That’s quite a difference: 1,339 visitors (according to Meta) or just eight (my server logs).

Meta’s reported numbers are very generous to Meta. My gut has been telling me for years that Meta is run by bandits, though I’m willing to be persuaded I overstate the case.

Rightly or wrongly, I put no email capture form on the landing page. So every click I paid for, real or imagined, was gone. The page caught nobody. Perhaps I should have built something different. (UPDATE: I’ve now added an email form.)

Sending paid traffic to a page that can’t catch it – and I hate that we call it catching traffic when these are real people I want to share something personal with – is the marketing equivalent of pouring water into a sieve and being surprised by what you have left.

So yes, I paused the campaign. Total cost of this education: £48.30 minus one possible book sale. Cheaper than most courses on the same subject.

But there’s also the time I spent inside Meta’s ghastly ad dashboard: about eight hours. I hope it wasn’t entirely wasted.

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Just 144 copies of the limited edition hardback remain available.
Who else might like one? Please pass this on.

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👉 If you or someone you know is struggling, please call a crisis line (in the UK, Samaritans on 116 123), and / or take a look at Reasons To Stay.

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