Documentary (TVOD on Prime Video): 55,050 clicks-through at $0.12 with no pixel and no tracking

The task

A distributor was releasing a documentary about a comic-book industry legend on TVOD (paid viewing on Prime Video). Release on August 11, a $10,000 budget, US only, Meta as the only channel (Facebook + Instagram).

The core constraint: no landing page — every ad links straight to the film’s Prime Video page. It’s a third-party platform: no pixel, no visible purchases, no conversion signal for the algorithm to learn from. So we optimize for the deepest available event — clicks and page views — and squeeze their cost to the minimum.

What we did

• A front-loaded flight: heavier spend in the first days after release to spin up the algorithm quickly and catch the premiere-interest peak.
• Audiences from comp titles: comic and graphic-novel fans — interest and lookalike segments built from iconic comic franchises, their screen adaptations and genre directors. A 50/50 gender split at launch, then optimization by data.
• Click optimization with traffic quality controlled by the cost per Landing Page View — the only “depth” metric available with a direct link to streaming.
• No paid support for the pre-order — the entire budget went into the post-release window.

The result

Insights

• No pixel is not a dead end. When conversions are invisible, the honest setup is click optimization plus cost-per-Landing-Page-View control: a click-through to the purchase page at $0.12 with an $8.59 CPM.
• Comp titles beat audience guesswork. Interests and lookalikes built from same-genre franchises hand you a ready core of fans — no need to invent a viewer portrait.
• Front-load around the release. Organic interest peaks in the first days; concentrating budget into that window lowers costs by riding the natural demand.
• A frequency of 1.57 across 500K+ reach — the budget went into breadth, not into hammering one audience.