StoriePro — Monthly Performance Report

Executive Summary

September cost per lead came in at $60.82 on $973.05 of spend — the highest in the five-month series. Rather than swap creative again and hope, we ran a full diagnostic against the account's own data. That work ruled out five candidate explanations and found two structural problems that account for the entire trend since May. Both have concrete fixes, and the larger one is cheap.

The finding: Feed placements are costing roughly twice what Stories costs, and have been for three straight months. In September, Feed took $326.01 and returned zero leads. Across July–September, Feed consumed $1,180.95 for 17 leads ($69.47 each) while Stories delivered 40 leads at $35.21. This is a consistent three-month pattern on meaningful volume, not a one-month anomaly — and it has been quietly absorbing about a third of the budget.

Two things genuinely improved. Click-through rate rose to 2.27%, the best since May, and 93.2% of clicks reached the landing page — the best figure in the series. The creative is earning attention and the page is loading. The constraint is downstream of both: where the budget goes, and whether Meta has enough conversion volume to optimise at all.

We also acted during the month. The long-running top ad was paused on 24 September after its cost per lead doubled over five months, four non-performing ads were retired alongside it, and three new creatives went live on 21 September. Those three have had $112 and three weeks of partial delivery between them — not yet a verdict either way.

September at a Glance

Spend

$973.05

98% of the $990 monthly plan · $32.44/day avg

Leads

16

Down from 24 in August

Cost / Lead

$60.82

August $42.66 · highest of the five months

Link CTR

2.27%

Best since May · 292 link clicks

Click → Page

93.2%

272 landing page views · best in series

Frequency

2.31

5,576 people reached · no over-exposure

Five-Month Trend

Month	Spend	Link CTR	Page Views	Leads	Lead / Page View	CPM	CPL
May	$870.33	2.38%	242	23	9.5%	$69.85	$37.84
June	$822.21	2.13%	260	24	9.2%	$59.25	$34.26
July	$1,114.97	2.23%	370	29	7.8%	$57.08	$38.45
August	$1,023.77	2.09%	307	24	7.8%	$58.81	$42.66
September	$973.05	2.27%	272	16	5.9%	$75.59	$60.82

Read the two right-hand columns together. Click-through held up all year and actually improved in September — the ads are not losing their appeal. What has moved is the share of page visitors who fill in the form, down from 9.5% to 5.9%, alongside a 29% rise in what Meta charges per thousand impressions. Those two together are the whole story of the cost increase.

The Main Finding: Where the Budget Goes

Feed placements have cost roughly double Stories for three consecutive months. In September they produced no leads at all. This is the clearest, cheapest improvement available in the account and it requires no new creative, no new audience and no extra budget.

Placement	July	August	September	3-Month Spend	3-Month Leads	3-Month CPL
Stories	$448.79 · 14	$482.12 · 14	$477.67 · 12	$1,408.58	40	$35.21
Reels	$207.36 · 6	$137.34 · 2	$164.47 · 4	$509.17	12	$42.43
Feed	$453.63 · 9	$401.31 · 8	$326.01 · 0	$1,180.95	17	$69.47

Spend · leads per month. Figures exclude Marketplace, in-stream and unclassified placements, which together took $3.88 in September.

The best single placement in September was Facebook Stories at $19.83 per lead, followed by Instagram Reels at $37.17 and Instagram Stories at $43.80. Instagram Feed took $222.67 and Facebook Feed $103.35, and between them they produced nothing.

If September's $326.01 of Feed spend had instead delivered at the Stories rate, it would have been worth roughly eight additional leads — about 24 leads for the month at approximately $40 per lead, which would have been an improvement on August rather than a decline. We are not claiming that redirection is perfectly efficient; Stories costs will rise somewhat as they absorb more budget. But the direction is unambiguous and the evidence spans three months.

Changes Made in September

Sep 2Three new creatives built and uploaded as paused drafts — nine assets across three concepts and three formats (square, portrait and full-screen vertical), featuring real client sites for Grace Frederick Design and Cronk Duch Architecture. All Advantage+ enhancements opted out, per the standing account rule.
Sep 21The three new ads activated. They took 24% of that day's spend, rising to 48% on the 22nd before the campaign's budget optimisation reverted to the long-running incumbent at 7–10%.
Sep 24Dark Coffee Theme paused after five months as the account's primary ad. Its cost per lead had risen from $23.40 in May to $51.29, and it was absorbing 63% of monthly spend, leaving the new creative unable to gather enough delivery to prove itself.
Sep 24Four non-performing ads retired in the same pass: arch-interior-dark ($52.10 in September, no leads), Designers Dark Theme, Mock up, and designer-interior-dark.
Sep 29Full funnel and placement diagnostic completed, including verification that both landing pages are live, rendering and tracking correctly.
All monthDaily budget held at $33.00. No pacing interventions were needed — the month landed at 98% of plan.

Accountability: Recommendations from the August Report

August recommendation	Status	What actually happened
Upload the staged creative wave — on new ABO ad sets, not CBO	Half done	The creative shipped, but into the existing shared-budget campaign rather than onto dedicated ad sets. The August report predicted exactly what followed: the incumbent won the internal auction and the new ads were starved. The dedicated-budget half was the half that mattered.
Force delivery to Emily Kate Testimonial	Not done as specified	No dedicated ad set was created. It did receive more budget after the 24 September pause, and its September cost per lead came in at $62.16 — well above the $20.07 figure the August recommendation was built on. That earlier number rested on four leads; it did not hold at larger volume. Worth stating plainly rather than quietly dropping.
Open the Stories and Reels placement	Premise was wrong	The August report described the account as Feed-only. It was not. Stories had already taken $482 in August and produced 14 of that month's 24 leads. No change was needed and none was made. We are correcting this because it matters: Stories was already the strongest placement, and the real opportunity was the opposite of what we wrote — cutting Feed, not adding Stories.
Formal pause on the non-delivering ads	Done	Completed 24 September, together with the incumbent pause.
Watch Dark Coffee Theme for fatigue	Done & acted on	Tracked through the month and paused on 24 September at $51.29 per lead, in line with the threshold the August report set out.

Audience Performance

Ad set	Spend	Share	Link CTR	Page Views	Leads	CPL
Architects — 2% Lookalike + Interest	$729.66	75.0%	2.28%	227	13	$56.13
Interior Designers — 1% Lookalike + Interest	$243.39	25.0%	2.24%	45	3	$81.13
Total	$973.05	100%	2.27%	272	16	$60.82

The Interior Designers split improved from 9% of spend in August to 25% in September — a direction we had asked for — but its cost per lead rose to $81.13 on only three leads. At that sample size the figure carries very little confidence either way, which is precisely the problem described in the next section: neither audience generates enough conversions for the numbers to settle.

Ad-Level Performance

Ad	Status	Spend	Share	Page Views	Leads	CPL
Architects — Dark Coffee Theme	Paused Sep 24	$615.53	63.3%	193	12	$51.29
Emily Kate Testimonial	Active	$186.47	19.2%	32	3	$62.16
Architects — Let the Work Speak New	Active	$57.12	5.9%	17	1	$57.12
Architects — arch-interior-dark	Paused Sep 24	$52.10	5.4%	16	0	—
Designers — Every Screen (Grace Frederick) New	Active	$50.31	5.2%	11	0	—
Architects — Every Screen (Cronk Duch) New	Active	$4.91	0.5%	1	0	—
Mock up · Designers Dark Theme · designer-interior-dark	Paused Sep 24	$6.61	0.7%	2	0	—

The three new ads carry $112.34 of combined spend and 29 page views since going live on 21 September. That is not enough delivery to judge them on, in either direction.

What We Ruled Out

Before recommending anything, we tested the obvious explanations against the account's data and eliminated them. Each of these was a plausible theory that the numbers did not support.

Theory	Verdict	Evidence
Tracking or CRM failure	Ruled out	Both audiences share one pixel and one form backend. One declined while the other held, which a tracking fault could not produce. Both landing pages were loaded and confirmed working.
Audience exhausted	Ruled out	The Architects audience contains 1.5–1.7 million people. Since the July rebuild the ads have reached 10,927 of them — 0.68% — at an average of 2.89 impressions each.
Audience over-exposed to the ads	Ruled out	Frequency fell from 2.48 in August to 2.31 in September while cost rose. Over-exposure moves the opposite way.
Landing pages broken or slow	Ruled out	Both return healthy responses and render their forms correctly. 93.2% of clicks reached the page, the best rate in the five months.
The July campaign rebuild caused it	Ruled out	The decline runs continuously through the rebuild without a break, so the restructure is not the cause.

The Structural Constraint

Meta's delivery system needs roughly 50 conversions per ad set per week to optimise reliably. Below that threshold it is still learning, and its targeting decisions stay unstable.

Ad set	Leads / week	% of threshold	Page views / week
Architects	3.0	6%	53
Interior Designers	0.7	1.4%	10

At a $33 daily budget and a cost per lead in the $40–60 range, there is no setting inside the current monthly budget that reaches 50 leads a week. Both ad sets have operated below the threshold for their entire lives. This is the honest explanation for why results swing month to month, why the shared budget keeps collapsing onto whichever single ad has the longest history, and why individual ad comparisons on two or three leads cannot be trusted.

One route out is visible in the right-hand column. The Architects ad set already generates 53 landing page views a week, which clears the same threshold. Optimising that ad set toward page views instead of form submissions would let Meta's system stabilise. The trade-off is real and we will not pretend otherwise: page views are a weaker signal than leads, so Meta would begin seeking people likely to visit rather than people likely to enquire. It is a genuine test with a genuine risk, which is why we would run it on one audience and not both.

Recommendations for October

One action needed from you before we can make changes. Meta is currently refusing all ad set edits on the account with the message “Custom audience terms not accepted.” Both audiences are built from the customer list uploaded in February, and Meta requires the customer-list audience terms to be accepted before an ad set using one can be edited. Our access level on the account cannot accept them — it needs an account admin. The link is facebook.com/ads/manage/customaudiences/tos.php?act=689351862843035. It takes about a minute. Until then, placements, budgets and optimisation settings are frozen; pausing and resuming individual ads still works.

1. Stop running on Feed placements. This is the highest-confidence change available and it costs nothing to make. Feed took $326.01 in September for no leads, and $1,180.95 across three months at $69.47 per lead against Stories at $35.21. Moving that budget to Stories and Reels should bring the blended cost per lead into the low-to-mid $40s on current performance, before any other change takes effect.
2. Keep the budget consolidated — do not split it into fixed per-audience amounts. This reverses what we recommended in the August report, and the reason is worth stating. The intent there was to stop the budget collecting on one ad. But at $33 a day, dividing the spend across more separately-optimised groups gives each one even less data to learn from — around two leads a week per group against the fifty Meta wants, and fewer still if we divide further. September also gave us a live test of the idea: Interior Designers’ share of spend rose from 9% to 25%, exactly the reallocation August asked for, and its cost per lead moved from $24.36 to $81.13. Forcing budget toward the apparently cheaper audience did not hold up. For an account at this budget level the better direction is fewer, better-fed groups rather than more.
3. Test page-view optimisation on the Architects audience. The only available route to getting Meta's delivery system out of permanent learning at this budget. Run it on Architects alone, keep Interior Designers as the control, and judge it on cost per lead after three weeks — not on page-view volume, which will obviously rise.
4. Let the new creative run a full month. $112 and 29 page views across three ads is not a result. With Feed excluded and a budget floor in place, October is the first month they get a real read. If they are still flat at month end on meaningful delivery, the answer is audience or offer rather than another creative round.
5. Pass campaign tracking through to the CRM. The enquiry forms are embedded from the CRM provider and currently receive no campaign parameters, so records cannot be traced back to the ad that produced them. Fixing this is what makes it possible to confirm Meta's reported lead counts against actual enquiries received — useful in its own right, and the prerequisite for any serious attribution work.
6. Install the Conversions API. A server-side connection alongside the browser pixel, which makes conversion reporting resilient to browser privacy restrictions. Worth doing once the items above are in place.

Budget Summary

Planned

$990.00

$33.00/day × 30 days

Actual

$973.05

$32.44/day average · 98% of plan

Variance

−$16.95

Within normal delivery variance; no pacing action required