Dollar a Day in action: Proven strategies to boost engagement and sales

I clicked on one meal delivery service ad on Facebook.

Then, I immediately started seeing ads not just from that company but from its competitors in the same category.

Yes, Facebook is using your ad performance data to help your competitors.

Try it yourself if you don’t believe me.

The key is that you have to spend at least a couple of minutes on the landing page or take actions of an interested buyer.

But before you get mad at Facebook, consider that Google is even worse (or better, depending on how you look at it) when it comes to using your data for the benefit of others.

If you’re the little guy in your industry, your Dollar a Day ads on Facebook and YouTube that drive strong engagement and buying signals will perform even better. You’re benefiting more from your competitors than they are from learning from your data.

We have a webinar coming up on how to grow your influence and build your brand for just $1 a day. For less than the cost of a coffee, you’ll learn how to use Facebook Lead Ads to increase your influence, grow your email list, and establish your name.

If you have a unique product or service (especially B2B), you don’t have much to worry about when it comes to networks learning from your data. However, it’s much harder to win since you need to gather enough data yourself for the system to learn.

We want Facebook, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn to notice that your customers overlap with those of your partners. Once they do, they’ll start sending you similar audiences—both organically and through paid options—essentially creating lookalikes.

Short-sighted marketers will be upset that these networks are getting smarter and sneakier with their data usage in an increasingly pay-to-play system.

Smart marketers, however, know how to align their interests with the networks by generating high engagement signals through genuinely interesting content. This content gets boosted using the Dollar a Day testing strategy, turning small budgets into thousands of dollars a day on the content that works.

If you’re already making clients happy and have been gathering proof, check out my Dollar a Day course and our 6-week done-for-you program.

Want to know how smart marketers are adapting to AI-powered ad systems?

You can use Dollar a Day for anything at all

For example, my buddy AJ Cartas used the Dollar a Day strategy to turn a $1 ad into a game-changing opportunity.

AJ had his sights set on a job at Yelp, and instead of relying on cold calls and endless resumes, he ran a simple Facebook ad, targeting Yelp employees.

With just $1 per day, AJ shared his story, skills, and passion directly with the people who mattered most. And it worked – AJ landed the job, proving that the right message, delivered to the right audience, can create incredible results.

AJ Cartas got a job at Yelp by using Dollar a Day.

This is what Dollar a Day is all about: amplifying trust and reaching the right people, not just the most people. It’s about connecting with your ideal audience and showing them why they should care about what you have to offer, whether that’s a product, a service, or your own personal brand.

Dollar a Day has not just helped AJ; it has also been a game-changer for countless others. From folks looking for jobs to entrepreneurs and beyond, this strategy has proven time and again that even a small budget can drive meaningful results.

Some more real-life examples of Dollar a Day in action

Let’s explore more success stories from people who’ve used Dollar a Day to connect with their ideal audiences and achieve their goals.

1. 28X ROI with Facebook ads Dollar-a-Day

Jeff Lambert is a savvy business owner who recently experienced a significant boost in his online sponsorship course sales – all thanks to the power of the Dollar-a-Day strategy and Facebook ads.

Jeff’s course, priced at $100, was doing well, but he wanted to take it to the next level. That’s when he stumbled upon my Dollar a Day program, a game-changer in Facebook advertising.

Jeff decided to give it a shot, investing a mere $7 in targeted Facebook ads. The result? A fantastic one to two sales per ad! Imagine the return on investment here – the kind of math that excites every entrepreneur.

Jeff Lambert Dollar a Day results

2. From 12 followers to 18,000 using the Dollar a Day strategy

I used the Dollar-a-Day strategy to boost Gavin Lira’s best tweets. I boosted any tweet I felt had a lot of value for his core audience for $1 a day just to generate engagement.

He was in Pakistan speaking at a conference, so I boosted his video to attendees. On Twitter, people follow what’s popular. So, I shared crowds following him plus shots with well-known people.

Gavin Lira in Pakistan

When you start going viral, you can rely on organic growth. But to get the initial conversations going, I had to spend $70 to boost 10 tweets for $7 each over a week. I boosted 10 tweets because I wanted to let the algorithm tell me which ones are winners since we are always wrong as humans.

3. Dollar a Day to get money back from a car dealership

My friend Bryce Clark got a used car, but it wasn’t ready. The general manager agreed to pay for a rental car until Bryce’s car was ready but later refused, leaving Bryce, an 18-year-old, with the bill. 

I advised Bryce to post a screenshot of the manager’s promise. He created a blog and posted his story. Of course, he asked the manager again to reimburse us before we started a Dollar a Day campaign against the blog story, but he ignored it.

We then started a Dollar a Day campaign targeting Earnhardt Chevrolet employees, who started to engage on our post.  What do you think happened? We had a 23% engagement rate.

The funny thing was, right before we launched our ad, the company’s general manager claimed, 

“I don’t care what you say on Yelp, Google, or social media because you can’t threaten me, and you can’t get anything.” 

Just for fun, we also targeted the executives at General Motors in Detroit. Within two days, GM executives involved with Chevrolet were asking, 

“What’s going on with Earnhardt Chevrolet?” 

Three days later, the general manager called Bryce, overwhelmed by calls from corporate, and quickly reimbursed Bryce. 

4. More Visibility and Sales for Jeremy’s $997 Course via Dollar a Day

Jeremy implemented the Dollar a Day strategy, which boosted his business’s visibility and led to a $997 sale for his online course within the first two days.

5. Shane Johnston’s Dollar a Day case study

Shane Johnston of Bolder Future Marketing did a case study on the Dollar a Day strategy. He’s a member of the AdSkills community run by Liana Ling, one of our good friends. Here are some of Shane’s results while testing the Dollar a Day strategy:

Cost breakdown for testing with the Dollar a Day strategy

$126 – that’s how much you need to test using the Dollar a Day strategy.

How does that number break down? First, you have a funnel with three stages: top, middle, and bottom, also known as awareness, consideration, and conversion. If you have three videos for each stage, that totals nine videos.

Each video becomes a post, and you spend a dollar a day on each post for one week. Nine posts at $7 each equals $63.

So, for $63, you can test nine posts, each with a one-minute video, for one week on Facebook. Then, you choose another platform—whether it’s YouTube, Amazon, Twitter, or LinkedIn – whichever works best for your audience. For two channels, that’s $63 each, bringing the total to $126 to test one round of Dollar a Day across two platforms in just one week.

After that week, you’ll identify a few winners. Some posts will perform better than others. That’s what we call the Standards of Excellence, which is another video and mini course. When something performs well, you increase the budget to $5, $10, or whatever amount drives sales, leads, or engagement.

Of the content you put out, one of those posts – just for some reason you couldn’t have predicted – will perform better than the others. And that’s the beauty of Dollar a Day: it’s a testing strategy. It’s not a fad or gimmick, and it’s not limited to Facebook, Google, or TikTok. It allows you to test multiple pieces of content, angles, stories, price points and offers to find that winning combination.

Once you find what works, let it run forever. In some cases, I’ve spent up to a million dollars a day on certain ads. For you, that might mean spending $100 a day, depending on your market, competitors, price point, and budget. But either way, you can start with $126 and find out what works.

How long does it take to test Dollar a Day ads

The short answer is one week, but it depends on your audience and objective. If you’re running an engagement post to raise awareness, you might see results within an hour or two based on the organic post alone. With a dollar a day targeting a specific audience, you could know the outcome in just a few hours if you get over 10% engagement.

Rather than asking how long it takes, it’s better to ask how much money needs to be spent to gather enough traffic. Ultimately, it’s about learning what works and letting the system identify the winning content.

For a dollar a day, we usually let ads run for a week because performance varies between weekdays and weekends. If you’re aiming for conversions, especially high-ticket items, you’ll need more data. Networks like Google, TikTok, or Facebook typically need 20+ conversions in a week to learn which audiences are converting and how to find similar people.

It’s not about getting you to spend more but about gathering enough data for accurate targeting. If you’ve set up conversion tracking and are feeding data into the system (e.g., via a pixel or custom audiences), the system can learn a lot faster – especially on TikTok, which currently has one of the smartest algorithms.

In general, if you’re testing variations of a proven product or service, $7 (a dollar a day for 7 days) is usually enough to decide whether to invest more in further testing.

To determine the true cost per acquisition CPA, you need to run 20 or more conversions per week, but you can identify non-performing ads early. If a video ad lacks a compelling hook or has a weak headline or image, people will scroll past it.

It’s easier to quickly knock out ads that aren’t working rather than spending thousands on each ad to figure out the actual cost per conversion.

The further down the funnel, the more expensive the ad becomes. This is due to the higher cost of traffic and the larger amount of traffic needed to hit revenue goals. For example, if you’re aiming for a 5x return on ad spend (ROAS), every dollar needs to bring in five dollars. If you’re selling a $100 product versus a $1,000 product, you’ll have to generate $500 for the former and $5,000 for the latter, which involves different calculations.

Additionally, more expensive products usually have lower conversion rates, which means you’ll need more data and face higher CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Networks often charge significantly more for conversions—up to 10 times higher for the same thousand impressions.

All these factors come into play, so there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for how long it will take to see results. Generally, if you’re not seeing promising outcomes within a week, or if you’re not reaching one-third to half of your target performance, it’s unlikely you’ll get there.

From spending over a billion dollars on ads and talking to others who’ve invested heavily in advertising, we’ve found that your initial batch of ads might convert at around 2%. Through lots and lots of testing, you can usually improve that performance by up to three times – not always, but generally.

With testing, you learn when to kill an ad versus when to tune it, which can help you improve your ads’ performance by up to 3x compared to their initial results.

Ready to take your advertising results to the next level? The Dollar a Day strategy is a simple, proven way to get real results, even with a small budget.