March was the high-water mark for boosted posts — 23 individually-boosted Instagram posts drove £7.8k of spend and almost all the link-click volume. S1 BAU held its own steady £1.3k baseline.
Meta
£10.1k spent · 2.39M impressions · 437k ThruPlays
Spend +332% MoM, driven by boosted posts. CPM at £4.22 (+39%) reflects shift toward the boosted-posts tier. Account CTR jumped to 7.8% — almost entirely from the boost wave. S1 BAU held steady; S2 activity stepped up modestly.
YouTube
90.3k views · 58.5k watch minutes
Four8TV views +126% MoM. Net subscribers +37. Shorts continued as the largest traffic source. External-URL traffic share at 28% — the highest since launch, plausibly a trace of Meta → YouTube flow.
Meta performance
MARCH 2026 vs FEB 2026
Month-on-month headlines
Account-level totals across all activity. Deltas coloured green where the direction is favourable.
SpotLink clicks up 19× (9.6k → 185.6k) while spend only rose 4.3× — efficiency came from the boosted-posts channel, which carries a c.10% CTR vs 0.2% on video-views S1. Account CTR jumped from 1.3% to 7.8%.
WatchCPTP doubled to £0.023 (+102% MoM). The shift from pure S1 video-views (which sits at £0.011) to a mix dominated by boosted posts (£0.030) is the mechanical cause — not a drop in creative efficiency.
Performance by stage
Retrospective labelling of existing March campaigns against the proposed 3-tier funnel (not yet deployed): S1 BAU (upper) → S2 Traffic (mid/lower) → Boosted posts (testing/reactive). Campaigns classified by naming convention (S1/S2/Instagram post).
MixBoosted spend (£7.8k) = 2.7× S1 + S2 combined (£2.3k) — but Boosted's CPTP at £0.030 is 2.7× S1's £0.011. Scale at a price. S1 BAU held steady MoM (£1.77k vs £1.76k in Feb); Boosted is entirely net-new activity (+£7.5k MoM).
S2S2 Traffic hit a 8.8% CTR in March — 40× higher than S1's 0.23%, exactly as designed. The IG Profile Visits test inside S2 is the main driver here.
Campaign performance
All campaigns with impressions in March 2026. Click column headers to sort.
Campaign
Stage
Spend (£)
Impressions
CPM (£)
Link clicks
CTR
CPC (£)
ThruPlays
CPTP (£)
Reactions
Shape23 of 26 campaigns are boosted Instagram posts — the "long tail" of boosted-post spend (£7.8k split across 23) shows a wide-net approach. The top 3 boosted posts alone absorb £4.0k (52% of boosted spend). Roundtable 3.0 drove almost all S2 activity via a structured EP4 → EP5 → EP6 ad-set sequence.
Which ads are working?
Daily impressions over the month, stacked. Toggle between a by-stage view, by-ad-set view, or by top-ad view. Respects the campaign filter above.
Hover to see daily values. Click legend items to show/hide series.
PeakBoosted impressions peaked on 18–20 March (c.330k/day) as the Mar 10 wave of boosts ramped up. S1 BAU holds a steady c.16k/day baseline — exactly the always-on shape you'd expect from video-views objective. S2 Traffic has a mid-month pulse (EP4 wind-down, EP5/EP6 launch).
Cross"Walk In A Bar" appears in both S1 BAU (299k imp, top S1 ad set) and S2 Test (62k imp) — the same creative running against two different objectives. Handy for A/B on objective choice; messy for attribution unless UTMs are distinct.
Top ads
By spend in March 2026.
Rank
Ad name
Ad set
Campaign
Stage
Spend (£)
Impressions
Link clicks
CPC (£)
ThruPlays
CPTP (£)
Star@esther.durin boosted post — highest single-ad spend (£1.7k), delivered 336k impressions and 34.6k link clicks (11.3% CTR). Paired with Namesbliss and "I remember when I got married", the three alone produced 815k impressions — nearly half of all boosted reach.
ValueWalk In A Bar EP1 cutdown — £530 spend → 196k impressions at CPM £2.71 (the cheapest of any top-spend ad). Low CTR (0.5%) is expected for a video-views objective; CPTP data missing but ThruPlay share should be dominant.
Gap"I remember when I got married" has the highest CTR of any top-10 ad (22.3%) — nearly double the next boosted post. Format to study: short hook, direct quote, controversial framing. Consider cutting this for a dedicated S2 Traffic campaign.
Insights & next steps
Editable — click to modify. This section is where the strategic narrative goes.
What worked
Boosted Instagram posts delivered scale — £7.8k across 23 posts, 1.66M impressions at £4.68 CPM, 172k link clicks.
S1 BAU remained the most efficient ThruPlay driver at £0.008 per ThruPlay (c.6× cheaper than boosted).
S2 activity (Roundtable 3.0 traffic + IG Profile Visits test) stepped up to £1.0k spend, CTR holding at 5.4% across the stage.
Focus areas
3-tier S1/S2/Boosted strategy is not yet deployed — once it is, the naming convention already applied makes classification automatic.
Boosted CPTP at £0.03 is c.4× the S1 rate — expected given the testing role, but flag which boosted posts would earn progression into BAU.
"S2: Test - AY - BAU - IG Profile Visits" is currently a test; decide whether to retire, fold into S1, or keep as a distinct S2 branch.
UTM tagging on all ads to close the loop on YouTube attribution.
YouTube organic
MARCH 2026 · FOUR8TV + FOUR8FILM
Channel headlines
Organic views and subscriber movement, March 2026 vs February 2026.
Views & watch time — 12-month trend
Apr 2025 through Mar 2026. Toggle channel visibility in the legend.
Content type:
ReboundFour8TV views +126% MoM (39.8k → 89.9k) — the strongest month since Dec's 156k (Walk In A Bar launch wave). Watch time up +21% to 57.9k min, suggesting reach grew faster than depth (avg view duration softened slightly).
ChannelsFour8Film's 359 views in March is 1/250th of Four8TV's. Pattern has held every month for the last year — worth revisiting whether standalone film distribution earns its place.
Traffic sources — March 2026
Where YouTube viewers came from. Combined across both channels.
DepthShorts drove 59% of views but only 8% of watch time. Subscribers delivered just 3.5% of views but 15% of watch time — most engaged cohort by a long way. External URLs (28% of views) is a plausible trace of Meta → YouTube flow.
Subscriber movement
Gained vs lost per month, combined across both channels.
ChurnNet subs −59 in March (216 gained, 275 lost). Channel has churned every month since Dec's +1,042 spike. Worth splitting Gained/Lost by source — are we losing Dec's Walk In A Bar joiners?
Top videos (March 2026)
By video views in-month.
#
Video
Views
Watch time (min)
Avg view duration
Subs gained
DepthEGO, HYPE & MATERIALISM isn't top by views (3.3k) but leads on watch time (2.55k min, 46s avg) and subs gained (+15) — this is the title pulling committed audience, not just discovery traffic. Worth replicating the pacing/format.
Insights & next steps
What's working
Four8TV views rebounded sharply (+126% MoM to 89.9k) — Shorts drove 60% of views.
External traffic source is 2nd largest, suggesting paid Meta traffic is flowing through to YouTube.
Positive net subs (+37) on Four8TV; Subscriber watch time remains the highest per-capita source (avg ~4 mins/view).
Focus areas
Four8Film continues to lag heavily (359 views) — consider whether to continue distributing there or consolidate under Four8TV.
Shorts dominate views but deliver low watch time/view — push more long-form content into Shorts discovery.
Revisit "Walk In A Bar" cadence — the Dec uplift suggests this format remains the strongest growth engine.
Meta × YouTube
QUALITY OF META-DRIVEN YOUTUBE TRAFFIC · APR 2025 – MAR 2026
How this page joins Meta to YouTube
Every Meta ad clicks through with UTM parameters, so on YouTube these views land in the
"External" traffic-source bucket. We use that bucket as the proxy for Meta-driven YT traffic.
It's not a perfect 1:1 — small amounts of External traffic come from non-Meta referrers (publications,
Substack, direct shares with UTM-style links from any source) — but for Four8 it's the dominant signal.
Caveat
A per-domain split of External (facebook.com / instagram.com / l.facebook.com / other) would
need YouTube Studio's referrer-domain field, which Supermetrics has now retired (the legacy YT
connector is no longer available). For domain-level confirmation we'd need an ad-hoc CSV export from
YT Studio's Advanced Mode.
The Meta → YouTube funnel
Volume at each stage with month-on-month change.
March 2026 quality snapshot
How efficiently Meta spend bought YouTube views and watch time last month.
MARCH 2026
Meta clicks vs YouTube External views — 12-month trend
Bars = Meta link clicks. Line = YouTube views from External traffic source. Tracks how much click-through actually surfaces as a video play.
Step change
Mar 26 link clicks ×19 month-on-month (9.6k → 185.7k) and YT External views ×23 (1.1k → 25.8k). Conversion rate held at 13.9% — the channel is scaling without losing fidelity. December was the only other month above 4% External-share-of-YT-views, on the back of the Walk In A Bar drop.
Cost per YouTube view from Meta
Meta spend ÷ YT External views, per month. Lower is better.
Efficiency
Mar 26 cost per YT view dropped to £0.39 — best of the year, ~5× better than the trailing 6-month average (~£2.10). Meta found the cheap-view audience.
Watch quality
Cost per YT watch-minute is still £1.41 in Mar — vs £0.15 in Dec. The Mar audience taps thumbnails (Four8TV avg 0.27 min/view) but doesn't stay; Dec viewers, drawn by the Walk In A Bar drop, watched 8.6 min on average.
Watch minutes driven by Meta
YouTube External-source watch minutes, split by channel. Where total minutes consumed actually accumulate.
ConcentrationDec 25 alone delivered 30,767 watch min — 56% of the entire 12-month total (54,966 min) of Meta-driven watch time. Without Walk In A Bar drops, Meta clicks generate ~1.5k watch min/month on average.
Monthly efficiency table
Click-through to view, view-to-watch — full numbers behind the charts above.
Month
Meta spend
Link clicks
YT External views
Click→view
£ / view
Watch min
Min / view
£ / watch min
External traffic share of total YouTube views
How dependent overall YT performance is on Meta. Stacked: External (Meta-attributable) vs everything else.
Reliance
March's 28% External share is unprecedented — every previous month was under 5%. With £10k in March spend driving a quarter of the channel's views, Meta is now a primary distribution lever, not a top-up.
Reading the data
Attention bought
March's £10,094 in Meta spend bought 7,155 minutes of YouTube attention — £1.41 per watch minute, slightly cheaper than February's £1.55. Watch minutes are the metric that matters here: views are a count, minutes are the result.
On "click quality"
The instinct is to read 185.7k clicks → 25.8k views (~14%) as a poor-quality funnel. Two things to keep in mind: (1) a YouTube "view" already requires sustained engagement (~30s on long-form, less on Shorts) — so every counted view is a viewer who chose to stay, not a bounce. (2) Meta's click count includes well-known noise — UTM strip-out by the in-app browser, accidental autoplay-card taps, and clicks landing on Reels/Instagram posts that never reach YouTube — so the denominator is inflated. The click→view ratio is closer to a reach-vs-engagement ratio than a quality score.
Caveat: per-view engagement
Avg view duration dropped sharply — Feb 26's 80 sec/view fell to 17 sec in March. Feb's number was on a tiny base (1,130 views) so it's noisy, but March's 17 sec on 25.8k views is reliable: most external traffic is bouncing close to the view threshold. The likely read is that Meta is increasingly driving Shorts (where the threshold is short) rather than long-form. Confirming this needs a CSV export from YT Studio — Shorts-vs-long-form and domain-level breakdowns aren't available via Supermetrics now that the legacy YT connector is retired.
Net read
Meta is doing what it should: cheap, scalable distribution that's now a fifth of YT views and improving on £/watch min. It won't replace organic content gravity (Walk In A Bar's Dec moment), but as a paid lever it's earning its keep.
