By Ryan Richardson · Published 8 October 2026
Which of 12 candidate book-cover designs gets the most attention and, ideally, the most sales, before committing further ad budget to any single one?
36 ads ran across the 12 cover variants, 22 Oct 2025 to 7 Oct 2026, for the Accidental CTO (Non-Technical CTO) field guide offer.
Per-cover detail (5 of the 12 variants had enough spend/impressions to read): cover 36 led on both CTR (3.96%) and landing page views (219) and produced zero purchases; the lone purchase landed on cover 39, a mid-engagement variant at 2.45% CTR. Full per-cover table on the related finding page.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Ads | 36 |
| Spend | A$357.61 |
| Impressions | 45,197 |
| Link clicks | 634 |
| CTR | 2.31% |
| Landing page views | 589 |
| Purchases | 1 |
| Cost per purchase (CPA) | A$357.61 |
| Recorded revenue | A$20.22 |
1 purchase across 36 ads and 12 cover variants cannot identify a winning cover on sales; A$357.61 CPA is a single data point. What the test does show clearly is a mismatch between engagement and conversion: the highest-CTR, highest-landing-page-view cover (cover 36) sold nothing, while a lower-engagement cover (cover 39) produced the only sale. That's a reason to not greenlight a cover purely on CTR data from a screening test like this one.
No documented follow-on cover decision for this test was found in the pulled sources.
Run cover variants as a cheap screening pass on CTR and landing-page-view rate first, but don't greenlight a design for full budget purely on that data; this test needed many more purchases than 1 to separate a genuinely better-converting cover from noise, and it didn't get there at this spend level.
| Claim | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Ads | 36 | Sixty Steps ad account, Meta Ads data |
| Spend | A$357.61 | Sixty Steps ad account, Meta Ads data |
| Impressions | 45,197 | Sixty Steps ad account, Meta Ads data |
| Link clicks | 634 | Sixty Steps ad account, Meta Ads data |
| CTR | 2.31% | Sixty Steps ad account, Meta Ads data |
| Landing page views | 589 | Sixty Steps ad account, Meta Ads data |
| Purchases | 1 | Sixty Steps ad account, Meta Ads data |
| Cost per purchase | A$357.61 | Sixty Steps ad account, Meta Ads data |
| Recorded revenue | A$20.22 | Sixty Steps ad account, Meta Ads data |
| Cover 36 CTR / landing page views / purchases | 3.96% / 219 / 0 | Sixty Steps ad account, Meta Ads data |
| Cover 39 CTR / purchases | 2.45% / 1 | Sixty Steps ad account, Meta Ads data |