I tested a $500/month retargeting platform against a basic Facebook pixel setup for a client's e-commerce launch.

The pixel setup drove a 22% higher conversion rate in the first month, mostly because the audience was so small and new. The fancy platform's algorithms just couldn't find enough lookalikes to beat simple, direct retargeting. Has anyone else found that complex tools underperform on fresh campaigns?

3 comments

3 Comments

jana_scott1mo ago

Sounds like the fancy tech needed more data to even get started. My own over-engineered spreadsheets have definitely lost to a simple napkin sketch before. Starting simple just works better sometimes.

umar591mo agoTop Commenter

Last year I spent three weeks building this super complex budget tracker in Google Sheets. It had like twenty tabs and all these formulas linking everything together. My friend @jana_scott is totally right, because I ended up just using a sticky note on my monitor to track my actual spending. The simple thing just worked without any fuss. I mean, all that time setting up colors and drop-down menus was basically wasted. Sometimes you just need the napkin sketch version to actually get moving.

abbyg601mo ago

Totally been there with the overthinking.