Ads experiment - $120 to get 46 newsletter subs. Here's what I learned -

So last week I ran ads on 2 platforms to gain subscribers for my newsletter.

Here are the results -

Twitter ads -

• Spend - $60
• Traffic - 117
• CPC - $0.49
• Subs - 17
• Cost/sub - $3.52

Swapstack PPC campaign

• Spend - $60
• Traffic - 64
• CPC - $1
• Subs - 29
• Cost/Sub - $2.06

Some quick lessons -

1. Twitter ads were to cold traffic

Clearly I need to improve the landing page for cold traffic conversion

The Cost per link click was alright, but it's useless if the quality of traffic is low or the LP doesn't convert

Need to experiment more on the creative and the landing page

2. Swapstack lets you setup pay per click campaigns.

Where other newsletters get paid a fixed amount for every click they bring in.

$1 a click is standard, anything less than that isn't enticing enough to other NLs

And anything more than that won't be worth it.

Now I'm experimenting with it for my other projects well.

3. The quality of the traffic is better from other NLs

Better audience probably

So even if I pay $1 per click, I know I will convert 50% of all visitors

So effectively the cost per sub is way better

Now, my next goal is to figure out the quality of sub from each source.

And I plan to recoup this investment in 3 ways -

• Upsell my products
• Run ads in my newsletter
• PPC and affiliate campaigns in my newsletter

Let's see how it goes in the long term.

You can checkout the NL from this link.

FWIW, this is the ad I ran on Twitter.

Tried to go with the "meme as the creative" strategy used by big players like MorningBrew and The Hustle.

The ads on Swapstack were just single line text with a link click.

Hope you found this useful, do you run ads for your newsletter? Which platforms perform the best?