TL;DR
- Halfsies ads on Meta: $90.07 spent since 11 October, 7,751 ad views, 258 link clicks, $0.35 a click and a 3.33% click rate.
- Day one's cheapest clicks were accidental taps in other apps. Turning off Audience Network fixed it.
- Two videos Meta wouldn't play came back after a plain re-encode.
- The audience is now gamers aged 18 to 50 in six English-speaking countries, built from 20 gaming interests.
- Keep a backup payment method. A failed charge froze our edits for a day.
Halfsies has a small test budget: $20 a day, $200 in total, on one Meta app install campaign. Claude builds the ads and reads the numbers, and I sign off on anything that spends money. The first Jeje Studios ad diary has the day-by-day story. These are the choices that made the clicks cheap and real.
| Measure | Since 11 October |
|---|---|
| Spent | $90.07 |
| Ad views | 7,751 |
| Link clicks | 258 |
| Cost per click | $0.35 |
| Click rate | 3.33% |
Those totals include day one, and day one taught the biggest lesson.
Kill the junk clicks first
Day one looked great: 164 link clicks at 12 cents each. Then we checked where they came from. 133 came from Meta's Audience Network, which shows ads inside other apps, where a lot of taps are accidents.
We turned Audience Network off for the whole ad account on 12 October. Clicks dropped to about 30 a day at 64 to 74 cents each, and those were people choosing to tap. If your first day looks too cheap, check the placements before you celebrate.
Let Meta pick the winning ad
We made six ads in a cowboy voice: a sheriff's warning, an infomercial, a countdown called Is this half?, a courtroom, a list of things a cowboy cut and a still poster. Meta put 46% of the money behind Is this half?, which held a steady 68 cents a click. Things I cut cost $1.27 a click, and Meta gave it only $2.54.
Two of the videos kept failing with a message that the video couldn't be displayed, though they played everywhere else. A plain re-encode fixed both: H.264 Main profile, no B-frames, a keyframe every 2 seconds and 44.1 kHz AAC audio. Re-encode before you rebuild the ad.
Point it at gamers
We started on Meta's broad targeting: United States, any adult. That let Meta find cheap clicks while we learned which ads worked. Then we narrowed it to people who already play games.
- Six countries: the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland.
- Ages 18 to 50, as a hard limit.
- 20 gaming interests, including video, mobile, casual, puzzle and strategy games. Gambling and poker are left out.
Meta's Video games interest alone covers 790 to 930 million people. Stacking the countries, ages and game types lands at about 128 to 150 million. Still huge, and every one of them plays something. In an Advantage+ app campaign Meta treats interests as hints, but countries and ages are hard rules.
The gamer audience went live on 16 October, and the third Jeje Studios diary has the switch. A big change like this restarts Meta's learning, so I'm leaving it alone for several days before I judge it.
The boring one: billing
A charge failed on 14 October. Until the balance was paid, Meta wouldn't publish any edits, so the new audience sat in drafts for a day. Keep a backup payment method on the account.
The ads all point at one place: Halfsies, free on iPhone. Next up is a look at how the update itself was built.