Library | sixtysteps.co

A batch of principle-based ad hooks (one asking 'should I fire my technical co-founder?') hit 13.73% CTR on A$157.57 spend, with zero recorded purchases.

10.73% CTR, zero sales: a contrarian ad angle on cold traffic

A contrarian 'anti-positioning' ad angle hit 10.73% CTR and A$564 spend on cold traffic for a $27 offer, with zero recorded purchases.

Testing 4 price points on two low-ticket offers: zero sales

Price-point tests on two low-ticket digital products ($9/$17/$29 Dev Kit, $4.95 Weekend CTO) spent A$153.24 combined with no recorded purchases.

A$2,135 across 4 Nexlytics ad tests on cold traffic: zero sales

4 separate Facebook ad tests for a $9 audit offer (language, objective, copy, audience segment) spent A$2,135 combined with no recorded purchases.

6 page patterns, 3 prices, same $27 offer: zero sales either way

Testing 6 landing page patterns (quiz, long-form, call-first, reddit-style, founder-letter) and 3 price points on one offer spent A$250 with no purchases.

12 book covers, one $0.03 field guide, one sale

A 12-cover Facebook ad test for a tech field guide spent A$357.61 and produced 1 purchase at A$357.61 CPA; the top-CTR cover sold nothing.

A$5,908 and 122 sales: how a book ad pool stayed honest

A real book-funnel Facebook ad test: 225 ads scored red/yellow/green, winners scaled to CBO, A$48.43 cost per purchase across 122 sales.

Problem, solution or product: which angle gets clicked first

Three framing angles (problem-first, solution-first, product-first) tested on native-style creative spent A$73.00 with no recorded purchases.

5 small tests on one book funnel, only one produced sales

5 separate facebook ad tests on the same book funnel spent A$1,424 combined; only the hook-pool test produced sales, at A$139.77 CPA on 6 purchases.

A 4-dimension ad matrix: 8%+ CTR on several cells, zero sales

A hook x angle x identity x length ad-copy matrix ran 133 ads for A$197.86, hitting CTRs over 8% in several cells, with zero recorded purchases.

The page that read better sold fewer books.

A landing page rebuild got 16 points more readers past the hero and still sold worse. The settled sales, not the engagement score, decided the result.

A 10.7% click-through rate. Zero sales.

A Facebook ad pulled four times the normal click-through rate and sold nothing. Here is the exact spend, the exact result, and why click rate lied.

The old cover ran on the website for weeks after the redesign.

A book cover was updated correctly on the retail listing and the digital edition. The website kept the old one live for weeks.

30% of our traffic wasn't people.

In one split test, about 30% of raw sessions were prefetchers, scanners and bots registering a session and leaving without ever drawing a page.

An ad set scored 0.06. The bank said 1.55.

A three-day-old ad set read as 6 cents back per dollar on the platform and 1.55 back per dollar once the bank settled. Both reports used the same money.

Meta reported 28 sales. The ledger had 22.

A platform sales count ran 27% ahead of settled bank money over one seven-day window, because three tracking integrations double-fired.

66% of visitors never scrolled a quarter down the page.

Across 5,965 recorded events over two weeks, two in three visitors never reached a quarter down the page, past the main proof point.

Seven broken sentences reached print. 4 passes missed them

A retrofit spliced seven sentences in half mid-paragraph, and four separate scoring passes in a row all missed it before the book reached print.

0.07 inches of spine cost us a print run.

A cover wrap built for one printer was reused on another printer stock. The spine was 0.07 inches short, and the text ran off-centre.

A ~$1,000 product found zero buyers, for months.

A priced-at-around-$1,000 rung sat with zero sales and survived on the excuse that traffic wasn't warm enough yet. It never was. It got deleted.

The funnel lost money until the third repricing.

Even after the real problem was found, it took three separate price moves, months apart, before the same funnel stopped losing money.

Two of five buyer types went unaddressed for months.

Crossing five awareness stages against four or five buyer types makes a grid. Two cells sat empty for months, unnoticed.

Two months fixing traffic when the problem was price.

An average order of $16.57 sat under a $20 to $40 break-even floor for two months of testing traffic, when the real fix was the price.

A competitor's ad library shows you longevity, never performance

You cannot see a competitor click-through rate or conversion number in a public ad library. Days still running is the only real signal.

A never-tested close rate builds a business that works on paper

Using a hopeful, never-tested close rate instead of what your last twenty calls actually produced justifies whatever acquisition spend you already wanted.

A referral who also bought gets wrongly credited to the funnel

When a referred buyer also bought your front-end asset, tracking credits the asset, flattering the funnel at the referral channel expense.

Filling every cell of your awareness grid is its own failure mode

Completing every cell of a buyer-awareness grid produces twenty-five mediocre angles instead of a few sharp ones. The sharper failure is stage collision.

Your front end never pays for itself: the back end closes slower

When the real payoff closes over quarters rather than weeks, plotting return on ad spend hides the truth. Plot cumulative cash instead.

One average order value hid three different pricing eras

A single headline order-value figure sits close to the cheaper, longer era, because a blended average weights the longer period more.

Why a sale can't be traced back to the ad that caused it

A campaign tag has to survive five separate failure points before it reaches the payment record. Here are the five, ranked by frequency.

Two ways 'collecting buyer language' stops being buyer language

Paraphrasing while collecting quotes turns a buyer own words back into yours unnoticed. Stopping at sixty quotes is not the same as understanding.

A bigger raw purchase count can still be the worse audience

Broad targeting beat an interest audience nine purchases to one by raw count, and lost roughly two to one on cost per purchase.

Three ways digital delivery quietly loses a paying customer

Triggering delivery from a browser instead of the payment webhook, emailing the file as an attachment, both lose a real paying buyer.

A deep test queue feels efficient and tests nothing

Running a test queue five deep, or launching fifty creatives against one budget, feels productive and answers nothing real.

Three ways your break-even floor is quietly wrong

Comparing order value to headline price instead of acquisition cost, never rechecking the floor, and using ten sales: three errors.

A follow-up sequence kept firing two days after the buyer replied

A sequence that only tracks sent or not-sent will keep emailing a buyer who already replied. A real reply should stop every message queued behind it.

Forcing an account before checkout drives cart abandonment

Unexpected costs, a forced account requirement, and no visible running total are the top cited reasons buyers abandon a cart before paying.

Four ways a kill-rule system quietly stops working

An age floor on the whole campaign, killing on noise, a learning reset mistaken for fatigue, and a lifetime-value threshold: four faults.

Three ways running more than one front door goes wrong

A retail exclusivity breach lands on the whole account. A free door can cannibalise a paid one. Pooling referral and paid hides both.

Three legal exposures a content business skips until too late

Fabricated reviews have drawn regulatory penalties in the tens of thousands per violation. An unsourced claim has no defence either.

A declined off-session charge is often routing, not a failure

A saved-card charge with nobody present mostly succeeds silently. A minority need the bank to confirm first, which is routing, not failure.

A one-click charge that reads as unauthorised at a higher price

A buyer who agreed to a small one-click amount did not agree to a large one. Matching consent to price needs a written threshold.

Checking test results daily raises your false-positive rate

Peeking at a running test every day and stopping the moment it crosses a threshold raises the real false-positive rate from 5% to about 26%.

A permanent download link gets shared until your product is free

A delivery link with no expiry gets forwarded until a paid digital product is free with extra steps. A signed expiry window fixes it.

How to tell a bot session from a real one without deleting people

No single signal proves a session is a bot. Four signals together, source, country, engagement rate and pages per session, are close to certain.

The price on your page and your server can quietly disagree

A price written into the page and left to drift from the server file is the commonest checkout failure, caught by one automated test.

Machine-written prose has a measurable sentence-opener rate

AI-revised prose measured 0.464 machine-favoured sentence openers per thousand words, against 0.000 for two human-written books and 0.075 for Hormozi.

Your event tracker is dropping events and not telling you

An event added to a page but not the collector accepted list gets dropped silently, and a free analytics suite can withhold rows too.

Three ways 'moving a winning ad to scale' quietly fails

Rebuilding a winning ad instead of graduating its post ID throws away its social proof. Here are the three specific mistakes that undo a proven creative.

Two ad sets aimed at the same audience bid against each other

Rising cost and falling delivery on both ad sets while total results stay flat is the signature of two sets competing for the same audience.

Two products at two prices doing the same job cannibalise

A $27 product and a $97 product both produced a plan. The cheaper one always won, until the expensive rung's job was changed to stop overlapping.

Your daily ad budget can't clear its own learning phase

At a $25 target cost per purchase, the platform needs about A$179 a day to leave learning. Underfunding it is not a third option.

Why your smallest-sounding test needs the most traffic

Halving the effect size you want to detect quadruples the sample needed. At a 2% rate, a 20% lift takes about 19,600 visitors per arm.

Killing a winning ad at eighteen hours throws away its history

A kill rule applied too early can delete a creative that was about to win, and it can't be relaunched with the engagement history it already earned.

4 ad angles, all over 4% CTR, all zero sales

A 4-angle cold-traffic test ran A$186 in combined spend across angles that each cleared 4-10% CTR, with no purchases recorded.

Curiosity framing beat problem framing on cold-traffic CTR

An 'identity' ad-copy dimension test: curiosity framing hit 8.92% CTR vs 7.65% for problem framing, zero purchases either way.

Short ad copy slightly beat medium-length copy on CTR

Short-copy ads hit 8.39% CTR vs 8.04% for medium-length copy in a cold-traffic test; zero purchases recorded in either group.

A children's-book-style AI image hit 12.87% CTR on one ad

4 AI-generated image styles tested on cold traffic ranged from 4.33% to 12.87% CTR; none produced a single recorded purchase.

7 audience segments, one book offer: which one bought cheapest

One avatar converted at A$41.65 a sale against A$93.44 and A$84.55 for others, in a 7-segment Facebook ad test on a real book funnel.

Which awareness stage got the cheapest book sale on Facebook

Product-aware buyers cost A$63.53 a sale, problem-aware A$69.74, in a 5-stage awareness ladder test on a real book funnel.

A cover shot on a desk got more clicks, but fewer sales

Desk-variant book cover photos drew 3.51% CTR vs 1.58% for the plain cover shot, but the plain shot produced the only sale.

The book cover with the most clicks produced zero sales

A 12-cover Facebook ad test: the top-CTR cover drew 10,908 impressions and 219 landing page views with zero recorded purchases.

Ugly ads beat memes on cost per sale, in this book test

Deliberately rough 'ugly' creative hit A$38.67 per purchase against A$59.95 for meme-format ads, in a book funnel creative-format test.

Two ad hooks hit over 8% CTR each and sold nothing

Two cold-traffic ad hooks ('stuck' and 'failed') drew 8%+ CTR on real spend, with zero purchases recorded against either.

A$1,758 across 3 creative-code axes, 7%+ CTR, zero sales

Three overlapping ad-coding axes (hook-level, outcome, offer) each cleared 5-7.61% CTR on real spend, with zero purchases recorded against any of them.

Two blind graders disagree: real problem, or a strict grader

Two panels scored 11 drafts 220 times each. One passed 9 of 11, one passed 0. The score-transition table shows which gap was real.

A funnel bandit that rewards scroll-depth, not just purchases

A simulated bandit that scores each step on whether it earns the next step, not the sale, converged on the true winner in far fewer visitors.

A 6-dimension scorecard for an ad pool before you spend

Score every ad 1-5 on 6 dimensions before launch. Below 12, start over. Above 25, launch at a higher budget straight away.

Check an ad frame against 100+ real customer quotes first

A frame falsification test: find 5+ verbatim quotes proving real people use this language, or kill the frame before it becomes an ad.

Testing 6 different landing page patterns, not just hero copy

Why we ran a quiz, a long-form essay, a call-first page, a Reddit-style post, a founder letter and a control, instead of A/B testing headlines on one page.

The 'before you approve the invoice' ad-copy pattern

A reusable ad-copy mechanic for any product where the buyer reviews work they didn't do, before a real, dated, recurring moment of personal accountability.

Thompson sampling, not a fixed A/B split, for a landing page hero

How a Thompson-sampling bandit picks which hero a visitor sees, learns per traffic source, and avoids wasting half your traffic on the loser.

A week of bandit-tested landing pages, zero sales: what it proves

800+ page views, 91% scroll depth, 8-9% ad CTR, and zero purchases on a $19-$47 guide. The page wasn't the problem. Here's how we knew.

A day 3/7/14 decision tree for a running ad test

Fixed CTR and CPM thresholds at day 3, day 7 and day 14 that decide kill, continue, promote or pivot, agreed before the test starts.

Why one advertising test at a time beats five queued up

A five-deep test queue sounded efficient. It avoided the harder question of what to learn next. The seven-field brief that forces the question first.

What a ten-minute check caught that the ad review didn't

A blind check before launch once caught a word that had come apart into characters that weren't letters, and links that had dropped tracking.

One optional manual build step will eventually get skipped

One command rebuilds the whole asset with no human decision in the middle. The test: a stranger who's never seen it gets byte-identical output.

Collect the market's own words before writing a single line

A quota, a harvest list, and a 15% misfit threshold for building a verbatim buyer-language corpus before drafting any copy for an advertisement.

Most businesses fill 3 cells of their awareness grid, no more

Five awareness stages, times four or five buyer types, makes a grid. Two of five buyer types can go unaddressed for months before anyone notices.

Build the hero as if it's the only screen anyone reads

66% of visitors never got a quarter of the way down one page. Build the first screen, and the proof under it, assuming most never scroll past it.

A short writing sample gives AI a confident, wrong voice

A small writing sample doesn't give a model less of the picture, it gives a confident, wrong one. Collect tens of thousands of words first.

Why can't I tell which ad paid for a sale, with UTMs on

Writing campaign tags onto the checkout session isn't enough; that metadata never reaches the payment record. The one-line fix most businesses miss.

A win carries almost no information. Collect the failures first

Every receipt needs five fields: the number, the denominator and window, the context, what changed, and the era. Four fields and it's an anecdote.

Generate thirty names before building a method around one

A name has to survive being repeated badly by a stranger six months later. Thirty candidates, three filter tests, one trademark search.

What should happen after a buyer, before you sell them more

A buyer who never opens what they bought won't book a call. Three follow-up chains depend on whether they opened it, plus the rule overriding all three.

Design a price ladder where every rung removes effort

A price ladder with four rungs, real dated prices, and a rule: stop at two paid steps past the entry point, or refunds eat the gain.

Revenue dropped. Is it the creative, the algorithm, or what

The instinct is to name a cause fast. Work the chain in order instead: instrument, traffic, page, checkout, order value, delivery. Stop at the link moved.

A disciplined writing process defaults to forgettable order

Nothing self-disrupts. Schedule where a chapter is allowed to break its own shape at the outline stage, or every chapter defaults to the same safe pattern.

A word quota forces a decision a hard deadline doesn't

Draft one chapter at a time to a word count, not an hour count, then freeze it before reading back. Parallel drafts cost nothing if the brief matches.

How do I set a kill threshold for an underperforming ad

A static cost-per-purchase threshold goes stale the moment order value moves. The weekly-recomputed formula, and what changed when the target moved.

A rung selling to nobody is usually duplicated, not mispriced

A $97 product sold to zero buyers next to a $27 product that worked. The price was fine. The job was the same job twice.

A self-score from a sample overstated every line, one direction

An editor scored its own sample at 9.0/9.5/6.5. Six blind readers scoring the whole manuscript came back at 8.5/7.5/4.0. The gap ran one way, every time.

Why do my analytics show sessions that were never a real person

About 30% of raw sessions in one test were never a person: prefetchers, scanners, bots. Filter at read time, never collection, with a four-signal check.

A sentence nobody argues with isn't a point of view, it's a fact

An industry-irritating sentence needs a real opponent to be worth building a book around. Here's how to pressure-test whether yours is one.

Do I need my own event log if I already have a pixel

A platform's pixel grades its own work and gets blocked by browsers. The twelve-event, four-event-to-start log that answers questions a pixel can't.

Generate a dozen offers, score your favourite against a rubric

Score a dozen candidate offers blind against a fifteen-dimension rubric dated before you looked. Your favourite scoring a six is the finding.

Does rewording a sales page actually sell more books

A clearer landing page sold fewer books in one real test. The maths behind why, and the sample size a page test actually needs.

Why does the platform say I made money when my bank says I didn't

An ad set scored 0.06 return on platform reporting. The bank's ledger showed 1.55, A$263.94 across 7 settled sales on A$120.70 spend, before a wrong kill.

A 10.7% click-through rate and zero sales: why clicks lied

15,368 impressions, 1,649 clicks, A$564 spent, zero purchases. The click rate was roughly four times normal and meant nothing without a purchase count.

A retail listing can breach an exclusivity clause you forgot

Paid, free, direct outreach and retail each cost differently and need reading differently. Retail also needs its own exclusivity check before it goes live.

Measure the voice with numbers, then test it by covering the name

'Direct but warm' isn't a usable voice spec because nobody can check it. 'Median sentence length seventeen words' is, and here's the test that confirms it.

How much should I risk testing an idea before I kill it

A partner-built product demoed well and topped out at about 50% accuracy in production. It was killed on a number written down before anyone cared.

What's still running after 90 days is the signal, not today's

Every ad platform publishes what's currently live, and almost nobody checks. One $4.99 product ran live for 482 days; that longevity is the real signal.

Target the week they're having, not the job title on their badge

Job-title targeting finds people who resemble your customer. It doesn't find customers. Here's the date rule that tells the difference.

The old cover stayed live for weeks and nobody did anything wrong

A cover lives in more places than anyone would guess before counting. One canonical file, one named owner, walks the register the day anything changes.

When is a one-click upsell unauthorised, not convenient

A one-click charge is fine for a small amount and unauthorised at a few hundred dollars. The consent threshold that decides which checkout a buyer sees.

How much should an order bump cost, and who should set the price

Published order-bump take rates run 10% to 60% with no dataset behind either number. The pricing rule that matters more: who owns the price.

If a chapter can't fill one grid row, it isn't doing a job yet

Build the outline as a grid before any prose exists. A chapter drifted from its own promise gets caught by re-summarising it, not by rereading it.

Run the Conversions API with the pixel, or instead of it

Run server-side events alongside the pixel, never instead of it. The dedup window and Event Match Quality target that decide if sales double-count.

0.07 inches of spine misalignment cost an entire print run

A spine cut even slightly off centre reads as cheap before a buyer opens the book. It depends on the exact printer and stock, recalculated every change.

My average order sat below break-even. What actually fixed it

A $16.57 average order sat against a $20-40 floor for months. Three repricings later it held near A$31, and the fix wasn't traffic, it was the price.

You'll never finish an asset you can't lose on paper

Write an abandonment scene for three readers before drafting: the one you want, the one you'll get most of, and the one you don't want at all.

Three funnel additions that looked obviously right and weren't

An exit-intent offer, a fancier statistics engine, and an always-on retargeting layer were all satisfying to build. One made the funnel worse.

Done is when the measures clear, not after a set number of passes

A three-pass cap would have stopped a real revision run on its worst score, with no fourth round left. Here's the stop rule that replaced the pass count.

A script found in a second what a careful reader missed once

53 leaked internal tags across 24 lines, found by a script, after one slipped past a careful reader. Six gates, each failing the build, not just warning.

Why save a customer's card at the first sale

Order bumps and one-click upsells both depend on a saved card from sale one. Skip it and every later offer has to ask for payment details again.

An adjustable floor isn't a floor, it's a preference

Five scored lines, anchored against two real named books, floor written down before anyone reads a page. The exact rubric and why enjoyment gates lower.

Should a paid-only funnel have a free version too

A free front door ran alongside a paid one for months and produced conversations the paid door never did. What a second, free door costs to run.

Set the day-one break-even floor before you blame traffic

A funnel can run for months on the wrong fix. One real failure: two months spent fixing traffic when the problem was a $16.57 order against a $20-40 floor.

Write your never-say list before a deadline tempts the claim

A real never-say list has sixteen banned claims, settled before a word of drafting, each one tested on substantiation rather than comfort.

Do I have a spike problem or a floor problem

A spike problem wants one very large month. A floor problem wants to never have a small one. A spike machine for a floor problem stays anxious.

Is ad platform reporting always wrong in the same direction

Three distortions understate what a campaign did. One, broad targeting stealing credit, overstates it. A 663-experiment study found a 62-115 point error.

Should a download link ever expire

A permanent download link gets forwarded until a paid product is free with extra steps. The token-expiry window that stops that without annoying a buyer.

Does it matter if a customer opens what they bought

A buyer who never opens what they bought won't book a call. Completion on a low-priced book runs an estimated 20-30%, measured, never borrowed.

Should one ad campaign do all the testing and all the scaling

A campaign asked to test and scale at once does the second job badly while looking busy at the first. Splitting into two, judged separately, is the fix.

Work out what a customer, and a book buyer, is really worth

Most people price off the first invoice. Revenue per buyer uses lifetime value times close rate instead, and the close rate most people never measure.

Find the sentence you've learned not to say out loud

Most experts have one true sentence they'd never put on their website. Naming it, and finding who'd argue against it, is what gives an asset a spine.

Every page answers one question with a number only Ryan has