What our ad accounts actually did last month: $1,044, 481 conversions, 73 signups

The number I keep staring at

We spent $22 on one Google Search campaign last month and it returned 453 conversions. That is not a typo. Twenty-two dollars. Four hundred and fifty-three conversions. A 12.55% CTR at $0.02 per click.

I am writing this because I run ads for Plyto and I promised myself I would publish the real numbers, not the ones that make us look like geniuses. Some of these are great. Some of them are a little embarrassing. All of them are useful if you run a small ad budget and want to know what to copy and what to avoid.

Here is the whole picture for the last 30 days across our own accounts.

The raw numbers

Three Google Search campaigns were live:

• Plyto campaign: $0 spent, 21 impressions, 0 clicks, 0.00% CTR, 0 conversions. Effectively dormant.
• Plyto - Optimized for usage - India etc: $22 spent, 8,964 impressions, 1,125 clicks at $0.02 CPC, 12.55% CTR, 453 conversions.
• Plyto campaign - Conversions: $1,021 spent, 42,830 impressions, 707 clicks at $1.44 CPC, 1.65% CTR, 28 conversions.

Totals: $1,044 spent, 51,815 impressions, 1,832 clicks, 481 conversions, $0.57 average CPC.

Signups for the month: 73 total. 66 came from an ad click. 7 came from somewhere else.

What the landing pages did

We track three things on a landing page: visits, people who read past 15 seconds, and people who started typing (meaning they engaged with a form or input field).

• /go/chatgpt-ads: 993 visits, 749 read, 99 started typing.
• / (the homepage): 864 visits, 504 read, 112 started typing.
• /go/free-crm: 121 visits, 101 read, 14 started typing.
• /go/ai-ads: 88 visits, 56 read, 10 started typing.
• /go/switch: 64 visits, 52 read, 3 started typing.
• /go/agencies: 18 visits, 15 read, 3 started typing.

The /go/chatgpt-ads page is the workhorse. Three out of four visitors read past 15 seconds. The homepage gets slightly fewer reads proportionally but more people start typing on it, which tracks with homepage traffic being more mixed in intent.

/go/switch has a 52 out of 64 read rate, which is excellent, but only 3 people engaged. That is a page people like but do not act on. Worth a rewrite of the CTA, not the body.

Three things a small business could do tomorrow

1. Run a cheap, geo-specific campaign in parallel with your main one.

The $22 India-weighted campaign is not driving paying customers in the same way the $1,021 campaign is, and I want to be honest about that. But at $0.02 per click and a 12.55% CTR, it is giving us something valuable: a very large sample of which ad copy and keywords people actually click on. We take those learnings back into the expensive campaign.

If you are spending four figures a month on Search, a parallel low-cost campaign in a cheaper geo is a research budget disguised as an ad budget. It costs the price of a lunch.

2. Pay attention to the gap between "read" and "started typing."

Our /go/chatgpt-ads page had 749 reads and 99 starts. That is a 13% start rate from readers. The homepage had 504 reads and 112 starts, which is 22%. The homepage is converting attention into action almost twice as efficiently per reader.

The lesson is not that the homepage is better. It is that a page which earns reading time is not the same as a page which earns action. We now know we need to rework the CTA on /go/chatgpt-ads, because the content is clearly doing its job of holding attention. Look at your own pages this way. Separate the "did they stay" metric from the "did they do anything" metric.

3. Audit the campaigns that are not spending.

One of our three campaigns, "Plyto campaign," spent $0 and served 21 impressions. If you have campaigns like this sitting in your account, they are either misconfigured, out-bid, or targeting something that no longer exists. They clutter reports and make attribution harder. Either fix them or pause them. We are pausing ours this week.

The honest arithmetic on signups

66 of 73 signups came from ads. At $1,044 spent, that is roughly $15.82 per ad-sourced signup. The 481 reported conversions include lighter actions than account creation, which is why the signup number is the one I actually watch.

7 signups came from non-ad sources, which is small but not zero. Those are organic, word of mouth, or direct. For a company our size, that ratio tells us we are still ad-dependent for growth, and it tells us the content side of the house has room to do more.

Why I am publishing this

Most ad reports you read online use rounded numbers and winning case studies. This is just one month of one company's accounts. But if you are running a small marketing budget and wondering whether a $0.02 CPC is possible, or whether a 1.65% CTR on a conversion campaign is normal, or whether your landing pages should read better than they convert, now you have a real data point to compare against.

I will publish next month's numbers too, whatever they look like.