So last week I ran ads on 2 platforms to gain subscribers for my newsletter.
Here are the results -
Twitter ads -
Swapstack PPC campaign
Some quick lessons -
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
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.
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 -
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?
Thanks for sharing the stats
Cheers!
How do you choose the newsletters for your ads? Is there a catalog?
Yea, there's a huge catalog from various niches and sizes
Never heard of Swapstack, will look into. Thank you for mentioning in your post!
Cheers!
Thanks for sharing! This is super interesting, as I also want to try some ads for my newsletter about startups: https://exponentialfounder.substack.com/
One question – why didn't you try Facebook ads? Or do you think your audience is not there?
Yea, most of audience so far has been from Twitter and other newsletters. So that's what I wanted to try out first. Definitely planning to try out FB as well in the future.
Interesting post, thanks for sharing!
Were you able to do any audience targeting or were the people that got shown the tweet and the newsletters with your link completely random?
Yes on Twitter, you can set the accounts you want to target, so the ad gets shown to followers of those accounts.
On Swapstack, you get to invite the newsletter who promote you. It's not random
Interesting....
Cheers man, let me know if you have any questions.
Upscribe+ FBads is golden for newsletter growth. You should definitely try it out.
Yea, will do thanks
Something like this? https://twitter.com/louisnicholls_/status/1619020810043408389
Exactly!!