$140 to Find Out If Facebook Ads Work for Pitch In

Free channels first, until they can’t answer the question

For the first few weeks of Pitch In, my budget for finding families was zero dollars and a lot of hours. That was on purpose. At $10 a month per household, acquisition has to cost close to nothing, and paying for attention before the product was ready would have been paying to show people something I would have changed a week later.

Two things changed. The brand settled: a new mark, a real type system, a homepage I’m proud of. And the free channels, posts and listings and telling people, started to tell me something I couldn’t act on: they can’t say whether paying for attention works at all. The only way to find that out is to pay for a little of it, on purpose, and measure it honestly.

So I wrote down a small test before spending anything: $140, two weeks, one goal.

One goal: free households

Not clicks. Not likes. Not “brand awareness.” The only number I care about is households created on the free plan, and then, two weeks later, how many of those households are still actually using it.

That second part matters more than the first. A sign-up that never comes back cost me money and taught me nothing. A household that is still ticking off chores in week two is the whole point.

The test passes if a household that sticks around costs about $10 or less. I expect two to five of them.

That is not a growth plan. It is a single question, asked cheaply: is this channel worth anything for this product?

Measuring without a tracking pixel

Here’s the constraint that shaped everything else. Pitch In’s privacy policy says, in plain words, that there are no analytics, no tracking pixels, and no third-party scripts on the site. That’s a promise to families putting their money and their kids into an app, and I’m not going to quietly break it for an ad test.

Meta would very much like you to install its pixel. Without it, Meta can’t optimize for sign-ups directly, so instead I told it to optimize for landing page views: people who tap through and actually load the page.

The counting happens on my side. Every ad links to the sign-up page with a short tag on the end, like ?from=fb1-parents-c1. When someone creates a household, Pitch In counts that tag anonymously: just the tag and the day, never tied to a name, an email, or a household. It’s the same way it already counts the answer to “how did you hear about us?”

Building the ads turned up a bug, too. The sign-up page was redirecting before the browser ever saw the tag, so every ad sign-up would have arrived untagged. That’s a one-line fix, and exactly the kind of thing you want to find before spending the first dollar.

Two audiences, one question

I almost made a mistake here. The first draft of the plan targeted a 25-mile radius around my town. When I asked myself why, the honest answer was “because it’s home.” Nothing about Pitch In is local. A small radius just shrinks the pool Meta can find people in, and usually makes each click more expensive.

So the test runs across the whole US, ages 28 to 55, split two ways:

Same ad, same budget, $5 a day each. The only difference is who Meta is allowed to show it to. If “broad” wins, that tells me my ad copy is doing more targeting than any checkbox, which is a useful thing to know cheaply.

The creative: the real app, and no money on screen

I made two still images as well, for a later round:

Everything Meta tried to turn back on

The most surprising part of the setup was how hard the tool works to undo the choices you make. Almost every screen arrived with something switched on by default, and every “off” came with a little dialog explaining what I’d be missing:

• Advantage+ audience, which treats your targeting as a suggestion. Leave it on and “parents” and “broad” quietly become the same audience, and the test means nothing.
• AI-written text “tailored to personas.” It looks like targeting, but the fine print says personas are not targeting at all. It just rewrites your copy into versions like “Ready to bring harmony home? Try it now!” and rotates them.
• AI-generated images, polished versions of my own video with taglines nobody at Pitch In wrote and buttons drawn into the picture that look tappable but aren’t.
• Flex media, which let Meta put the wide video into phone feeds, where it cropped the phone in half.
• Translation into Spanish, for an app that is English-only. A click that lands on a page you can’t read is a wasted click.

All of those might help an advertiser with a big budget and no opinions. For a test, every one of them adds a second thing changing at once, and then the result can’t tell you anything. I turned them all off.

A couple of things also didn’t save the way the screens suggested. When I went to duplicate the parents ad set into the broad one, I found the parents one had quietly lost its age range and parent targeting, so both audiences would have been the entire country. The headline and the “Sign up” button I’d set in the creative wizard didn’t stick either. I only caught both by going back through every setting before publishing. Lesson noted: check, don’t trust.

How I’ll know

The stop rule is written down so I can’t talk myself out of it:

• Days 1 to 3: change nothing, whatever the numbers say.
• Day 7: fewer than two tagged households? Stop. A week of data is enough to know it isn’t working.
• Day 14: count sign-ups per tag on my side and spend per audience on Meta’s.
• Two weeks after that: how many of those households are still using Pitch In.

The ads went live today. I’ll write the follow-up when the numbers are in, including if the answer is “no.” A clear no for $140 is a good deal. It means the hours go somewhere else.

Want to skip the ad?

If you’re a parent in a house where everyone is supposed to pitch in, and especially if some of them are teenagers, you don’t have to wait to see one. Create your household, free, no card. Or try the demo first.