More Pagevisits, No Buyers. Time to Tweak the Offer

Today's post is going to be a short one. It's late already, and I'm in on semi-vacation with my girlfriend. But my goal is 100 consecutive posts, and I won't back out.

The past few days weren't productive with regards to AlbumCoverAI. There'll be a large feature release in my day job, so I had to work extra hours to ensure it will run smoothly. That is fine. I'll "take back" those hours if a large release is due for one of my apps.

Let's talk business.

The Facebook/Instagram ad is picking up speed. Meta apparently takes a few days to fine-tune their algorithm to your most relevant prospects. You can select a few target groups to which your ad should be displayed, but these niches are fairly broad. With a sufficient sample size, however, Meta will do its magic and find those people within your target groups who are most interested in your product.

So, if you're running your own Meta ads, know this: Let them run for at least a week, budget a minimum of $10 per day, and choose a group with few variables (in my case, I started with too many selected countries; this increases the necessary sample size for Meta since now the language/country/culture variables are in the mix).

Now, after a week and after changing my target group to Europe only, I can see the algorithm improving in real-time. Every day, my click-through rate increases. We're currently at roughly 3% CTR, which is not great but better than average.

To have better analytics, I also integrated Plausible into my app. It's a simple metrics app that is quickly setup and relatively cheap ($9 monthly to track 50 websites). Its biggest advantage over Google Analytics is that it doesn't require a cookie banner.

But, despite rising page views, nobody (except my single first client) has bought so far.

This confirms my previous theory. There is interest, but the offer isn't good enough. This is great news: I can tweak the offer, but not the interests of my customers.

I'll change the app so new users can play with it, try it out, and generate some images. The risk should be on my side, not on the side of the customers. For my next goal, I want people to use my app, not merely visit it. Then, once I have users, I can worry about converting them to customers of my app.

I won't get around to this until Monday, but it should be doable with a few lines of code, though not cleanly.