🤯 Hinky Math with Beehiiv Ads (Update)

A little over a week ago, I shared the fuzzy math I was seeing across my Beehiiv newsletters and their ad reports.

It was obvious that SOMETHING was going on.

Some of you messaged me saying you’d noticed the same fuckery.

Today, I’ve got an update.

It’s Accidentally On Purpose. Confirmed.

As someone who has been using Beehiiv for 9 months, I honestly wasn’t sure if the shady shit I was seeing in my ad reports was accidental from a bug (they have a LOT of bugs on the regular) or something they were doing on purpose.

A little voice in the back of my head piped up with the reminder of February’s Beehiiv Boosts promo where they were doubling earnings for people. They’d have to pay for that somehow…

One of the people who reached out to me uses Beehiiv with a custom domain. *This is important to know because I do not and we got two different answers for the same problem.

His support ticket reply was “they blamed my server and email deliverability.”

But for me? Totally different -

I know that’s hard to read on mobile, so here’s what it says:

Okay, so this just leaves me with more wtf? questions. Like the “clicks that otherwise result in a user bouncing immediately from the landing page” bit - how the fuck can they track that?

And why are they? This isn’t how ads normally work.

Facebook and Google still make me pay for ads if someone clicks the back button to leave my page.

And why did they completely ignore my first question of “What's up with the ad reports # of verified clicks not matching up with the individual email performance reports # of verified clicks?” All they answered was why verified clicks are down and why some users were only sometimes a verified click.

Then there’s the whole other issue of me getting told a different reason for the same problem as someone who is using a custom domain.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have multiple newsletters on Beehiiv and this isn’t an isolated incident for me.

For the month of February, total Beehiiv ads revenue across my newsletters is down 79%.

That’s a huge fucking number.

I’m already looking for options of where to move my newsletters to. Cause I don’t like to do business with shady asswipes.

And here’s the thing - Beehiiv ads were never intended to be the main monetization for any of my newsletters. But for some people, they are. And those people just had the rug pulled out from under ‘em.

Coming up…

More on what I’m working on and how it’s going.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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