Advertising Is LIVE - Ready to Checkout?

I took a deep breath and pressed PUBLISH.

Developing a business is like building a house. There's unlimited ways to design it, but there are better and worse ways to construct it. Launching ads feels like I've paid for everyone's Lyft to come over and see my new house, and I'm turned on the water for the first time as they arrive. "Thanks for coming, please show me where there are leaks!"

Beyond the logistics, this is a milestone to celebrate. I believe in myself and my work so much so that I'm paying for people to stop scrolling and discover me. As an artist, as a marketer, as a business owner, I'm putting myself to the test.

After a week, the initial results are optimistic... but I have an interesting, unexpected metric: abandoned carts. My ads have an amazing 3.36% CTR. They are very effective at driving traffic, but with 18 abandoned carts and no sales, there's something up. Are they bots? How are my prices? Is my website broken? Is my work not compelling enough to follow through with the sale?

Cracking this nut will be next week's job. I feel like I spent enough to justify optimizations, and I'll play with different targeting and landing page destinations to get these carts to checkout!