- [[The Sales-Funnel Has Already Started]] So that happened.  I ran an exciting marketing experiment over the past 7 days that resulted in me being stunted for reasons I didn’t expect.  I had a blind-spot and - by nature - didn’t know that my experiment could fail for a reason unknown prior.  In concrete terms, I ran an ad on Facebook that linked to a sales letter that, in turn linked to a check-out page and further sales pages. You can see it in the graphic below.  Going from left to right, you can see here the steps that the user takes through the funnel. Nothing crazy or exciting. My ad itself is pretty vanilla. It’s about running better meetings and offering my “better meetings” book for a good price on the sales page. In fact, this experiment was going to be yet another one and my focus was going to be the transition between "sales letter" and "checkout email.”  I totally assumed that the ad would be delivered to users and that at least some would click. Just as it had worked before. I didn’t even question that once before I launched the campaign.  Well, once I launched the ad last Monday, I was excited. I was going to measure the conversions and learn and improve that part of the funnel.  Little did I know that Facebook – for reasons unknown – would heavily throttle my ad delivery. (I’m currently investigating what happened.) The ad was barely put before users. Up until this experiment it was easy for me to launch and ad, with say, a budget of $20 and have that spent every day until I had enough data.  With this totally vanilla “Hey, here’s how you can make meetings better” ad, I couldn’t even spend $10 over the course of a week!  I tried a bunch of things to get the ad delivered more often but in the end, I couldn’t. It turns out that there was an assumption I made which turned out to be false:  “I assume that my ad will run on the network” I had a blind-spot for the rules and risks of the ad network (Facebook) – As you can see below, as a result, my field of vision just expanded to the left.   I find this note-worthy because it reminds me how easy it is to get caught up and prepare for all the things we can “see.” In more abstract terms, I had a list of “risks” (in red) that could affect my experiment for which I prepared. See below:  What I find so fascinating about blind-spot risks is that it’s things that are obviously there if I had focused on them. It is my belief that those blind-spot risks are the biggest and most dangerous ones. Because they catch us off-guard. So just as the Ad Network wasn’t on my inner “radar” as a risk – I just assumed it would work–. When it didn’t, it blind-sided me. Here is a visualization of those (yellow) hidden risks that sort of "live between" the obvious red ones:   So, what can we do to avoid falling into blind-spot traps? I’m not sure yet. I think one part is to open the mind on the more fundamental things that could go wrong.  I believe that if I had spent a few more minutes thinking about my experiment beforehand, I would have identified the question “Will Facebook deliver this ad as it has with all the others?” – With that question I could have devised a much simpler experiment than spending time building a deep funnel.  I still am happy to have had the learning and I will from now be more careful about my assumptions on ad delivery.  In fact, my next experiment is only about finding the source of this problem so that it won’t ever happen again.