Two things happened since Monday. The campaigns were relaunched on 13 August, and three more self-created orders were placed for hired UGC creators. Both change the document.
| Campaign | Spend | CPM | Out. CTR | Visitors | ATC | Sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Video CBO $50/day | $61.41 | $262.44 | 7.69% | 16 | 1 | 0 |
| Image CBO $50/day | $51.81 | $181.15 | 10.84% | 26 | 1 | 0 |
| Combined | $113.22 | $217.73 | 9.04% | 42 | 2 | 0 |
This is one day and $113 across eleven ads — roughly $10 each. Nothing at ad level can be read from it yet. Anyone naming a best or worst ad right now is reading noise.
What can be read is the setup, because that was fixed the moment it launched. Three settings are wrong, and they are the same three from the last two rebuilds. → section 05.
Orders #1006, #1007 and #1008 landed on 13 August — Hooper UT, Nampa ID, Davenport FL. All $69, all marked PAID. They are not customers. They are seeding orders for hired UGC creators. This matters far more than it looks → section 03.
The guarantee is now 60 days everywhere — home, product page and reviews page all agree. It used to say 90 on the hero, 60 on the product page and 30 in the cart. That was item 4 on the week-1 list. Done.
| Campaign | Status | Spend | CPM | Out. CTR | Visitors | ATC | Sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27 Jul — ABO $100/5 | paused | $299.03 | $37.50 | 2.06% | 80 | 6 | 0 |
| 03 Aug — ABO $25×4 | paused | $564.36 | $149.82 | 5.47% | 159 | 9 | 0 |
| 13 Aug — video CBO | live | $61.41 | $262.44 | 7.69% | 16 | 1 | 0 |
| 13 Aug — image CBO | live | $51.81 | $181.15 | 10.84% | 26 | 1 | 0 |
| Sales total | $976.61 | $79.65 | — | 281 | 17 | 0 |
Plus $89.60 on engagement campaigns. Account lifetime: $1,066.21 spent, zero customers. Since Monday: $116.75 more spent, 42 more visitors, 2 more add to carts, still zero sales.
Forget CPM for a second. The only cost that matters is what one website visitor costs — and underneath it, the two things that set it.
Website visitors produced by every 1,000 views:
Eight times better than July. The US supplement click-through benchmark is 1.01%; this account runs 9%. Whatever Jia Yi is doing to the creative is working, and it has now improved three times running.
Six times worse than July. Meanwhile the page-like campaign in the same account, on the same Facebook page, ran at $15.23 yesterday. The $150–260 CPM is a setting, not a market price.
| Scenario | Per visitor |
|---|---|
| July — cheap delivery, weak creative | $3.74 |
| August — good creative, bad delivery | $3.55 |
| 13 Aug — great creative, worst delivery | $2.70 |
| Never tried — today’s creative at July’s $37.50 CPM | $0.46 |
That last line is not a hope. It is yesterday’s measured click-through rate multiplied by a CPM this account has already achieved on a sales campaign. A 5.8× improvement, and it has still never been tested.
Shopify now shows 8 orders. Anyone opening the dashboard sees a store that appears to be converting, with three orders landing the same day the new campaigns went live.
| Order | Date | Source | Payment | Sessions | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1001 | 27 Jul | web | PayPal | support@nexedge.store | 12 |
| #1002 | 31 Jul | draft order | manual | none | 0 |
| #1003–#1005 | 31 Jul | draft order | manual | none | 0 |
| #1006–#1008 | 13 Aug | draft order | manual | none | 0 |
Zero of the eight are customers. Seven are seeding orders for UGC creators.
One is an internal test paid from the store’s own support address. Every field agrees:
source shopify_draft_order, payment manual, no customer email, and a
customer journey of zero sessions — nobody browsed the site.
Those manual orders fire real Purchase events into the Meta pixel. The pixel received two Purchase events in the 01:00 hour and one in the 06:00 hour (Pacific) on 13 August. Shopify logged #1006 at 01:37, #1007 at 01:50 and #1008 at 06:17. Count matches, hour matches, and no other order exists that could have produced them.
The detail that settles it: in the 01:00 hour those two Purchases were the only events on the entire pixel — no page views, no product views. Nobody was on the site. A real buyer always leaves browsing activity around a purchase. A purchase arriving on its own is a server-side event with no human behind it, and server-side events are switched on (last server fire 13 Aug, 17:09).
And both new campaigns are optimising for Purchase.
So Meta is being told “three people bought yesterday — go find more like them.” Those three never visited the site, never clicked an ad, and have no profile. Meta is being trained on ghosts, and spending $100/day acting on it.
Somebody will look at “7 paid orders” and read it as traction. It is not. Say so out loud before anyone builds a plan on it.
| Offer | Price | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| 1 bottle | $69 | $51.23 |
| Subscription | $49/mo | $31.93 |
| 2 bottles | $109 | $80.98 |
| 3 bottles | $149 | $110.73 |
| Offer | At $1.00 / visitor | At $0.46 / visitor |
|---|---|---|
| 1 bottle | 1.95% | 0.90% |
| 2 bottles | 1.24% | 0.57% |
| 3 bottles | 0.90% | 0.42% |
A normal cold-traffic store converts 1.4–1.8%. At today’s cost per visitor nothing clears. At a normal cost per visitor, everything does — and the bundles clear it comfortably.
The product page still defaults to “One-time — $69”, the one option that loses money at a realistic CAC. Verified today: the variant order is still One-time, Bundle 2, Bundle 3. This was item 3 on the week-1 list.
Stock is not the constraint: 178 units on hand — 95 singles, 50 two-packs, 33 three-packs.
OUTCOME_SALES. The pixel has never seen a real purchase — only the seven manual ones. This is the single biggest cause of the $150–260 CPM: Meta cannot find “people who buy”, so it guesses, and guessing is expensive. Switch to Add To Cart. Checked again today — the pixel is not caught by Meta’s health-and-wellness restrictions, so Add To Cart is available.| Campaign | Ads |
|---|---|
| Image CBO 6 statics | TRT AD 1 — full-bleed lifestyle + overlay text · TRT AD 2 — stats bar + macro product · TRT AD 3 — product hero + benefit labels · WIFE NOTICED AD 1 — full-bleed lifestyle · WIFE NOTICED AD 2 — product + social proof · WIFE NOTICED AD 3 — illustration |
| Video CBO 5 UGC | Ryan E sub · Matt K sub · Matt K_1 sub 02 · Joe H sub · Matthew S sub |
Early and unreadable, but worth noting: the image campaign is beating the video campaign on every metric — 10.84% outbound CTR against 7.69%, and a $181 CPM against $262. That matches the lifetime pattern, where statics produced 13 of the first 15 add to carts. It is not yet proof. It is a reason not to shift budget to video on instinct.
Three more creators were seeded yesterday, so more videos are coming. The previous UGC video appeared to show the wrong product — a short, wide black tub, where NEXEDGE is a tall amber glass bottle. It earned a 9.66% click rate and zero add to carts off $68.95.
Confirm the bottle is correct in every new file before it runs.
The 10 August version said: pause everything, fix the store, relaunch clean. That has been overtaken — it is already relaunched. Pausing now throws away yesterday’s $113 and another week. So the plan changes shape: fix it in place, today, while it runs.
| # | Action | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Make Bundle 2 the default variant | Chris / dev |
| 2 | Merge the two campaigns into one, one ad set, $100/day | Faiz |
| 3 | Switch the objective to Add To Cart | Faiz |
| 4 | Turn off Audience Network — FB + IG feed only | Faiz |
| 5 | Future creator seeding uses a 100%-off order | Chris |
| 6 | Confirm a real credit card completes a checkout | Faiz |
Roughly $1,500 over 10–14 days. Do not touch it mid-flight. Every rebuild so far has opened at a higher CPM than the last one closed — July $37.50, August $149.82, yesterday $217.73. That is a trend, not bad luck.
Three numbers. Everything else is noise.
None of these gates can be judged while the campaign optimises for Purchase on a pixel holding seven fake purchases. Fix that first, or the test measures nothing.
Stop trying to win on the first purchase.
Benchmark supplement CPA is $45.62 against $80.98 contribution on the 2-bottle, so a first order done well roughly breaks even. The money is in months 2–12: category LTV runs $300–600, and their own subscription returns $31.93/month — $383 of contribution over twelve months from one customer.
But NEXEDGE cannot yet afford the pure LTV game: no cash cushion, zero proven retention. So the sequence is fixed:
Skipping to step 3 is how supplement brands die with a warehouse full of stock.
3204156606640319 is healthy and unrestricted. PageView, ViewContent, AddToCart and InitiateCheckout all flow. Add To Cart optimisation is available.