16 October 2026 · Tasch Turner
Six sales against one: what a three-day test told us
The campaign looked professional. Polished carousel ads, a broad audience, a respectable budget. It was spending heavily and selling very little, and everyone involved had a different theory about why.
The client was Hey Sister!, a listed medicine brand for periods, perimenopause and menopause. I've worked with them for three years, the last two as their fractional marketing lead. Instead of arguing about theories, we ran a test.
Three changes, three days
We ran a small test alongside the agency's ads, in the same advertising account, with the same product, for three days. We changed three things.
The creative. Instead of a product shot, a face-to-camera education video with ambassador Jade Walker, answering the questions women actually ask about period pain. A real person talking, not a pack shot.
The audience in the copy. We wrote for one reader, women around 25, so the ad itself told you who it was for. Broad copy for a broad audience tends to speak to nobody in particular.
The landing page. Clicks went straight to the product page, not the homepage. Every extra click between interest and purchase is a chance to lose someone.
What came back
The education video drew 126 clicks. 9.5% of those people added the product to their cart, 4.8% bought, and it made six sales.
The agency's carousel, shown to a broad audience, drew 788 clicks and made one sale. A second version aimed at a period-pain audience made none.
Six sales against one is a small sample, and we said so at the time. A three-day test doesn't prove anything on its own. What it does is tell you what's worth scaling, cheaply, before you commit real money.
Then we scaled it
Scaled up, the approach produced 110 purchases at a cost per purchase 66% below the account average. It was the second-best of 71 ads in the account with 20 or more sales. 5.6% of clicks turned into purchases, more than double the account average of 2.65%, and its return on ad spend was 2.1 times the account's.
Jade's original video went on to run for three years across 45 ad sets, converting at 1.8 times the account average.
What I'd take from it
Test small before you argue big. A three-day test settled a disagreement that meetings never would have, and it cost a fraction of what the campaign was spending.
Education sells, when it's genuinely useful. People buying a health product want to understand it. A real person explaining things clearly will often beat a beautiful pack shot, because it earns trust before it asks for anything.
The data decides, not the ego. I didn't know the video would win. Nobody does until the numbers come back. That's the point of testing.
The agency now briefs face-to-camera education and sends clicks to product pages. That's the best outcome a test can have: it changed how the work gets done.
If your advertising is spending more than it's earning and nobody can say why, a small, honest test is usually the cheapest place to start.
