As I mentioned earlier I’ve finally been taking a more serious look at Facebook ads in the last few weeks. I’d dipped a toe in here or there but never really stuck with them long enough to see if I could make them work like I did with AMS ads. But I felt like maybe I should circle back to them for a few of my older titles where Amazon makes it harder to advertise them because they’re no longer new and shiny.
So, some thoughts. (And I talked about some of this a bit in Data Analysis for Self-Publishers, too, but this is specific to these two ad platforms.)
I think that Facebook ads are probably an excellent choice for someone who writes squarely in their genre and whose genre is big enough to support ongoing ads. So that would be thrillers, traditional mystery, contemporary romance, etc. (And you’ll notice that the people who run the big ad courses for FB ads meet this criteria.)
One of the issues I’ve had to struggle with when advertising my books on Facebook has been target audience and audience size. My books sell best to fans of certain authors and a lot of those authors are not available as a choice on Facebook. Or if they are available the audience size is small enough that I can’t imagine running ads to that author name for more than a limited period of time. My frequency goes up fast, especially in the foreign markets where the audience sizes are even smaller.
Compare that to Amazon where I can advertise to the most obscure name I can find if I want. (I don’t recommend doing so with just one name like that, but I could. And I can use any name or any combination of words I want.)
The other factor with FB ads is their complexity. I think this can be a benefit for some authors but is a problem for most.
On FB ads you can have any image you wantas well as a lot of text both above and below the ad image. Amazon ads on the other hand pretty much have the book cover and a few lines of text, if that. And the star rating and price.
The complexity of a FB ad is likely a benefit for more experienced authors who have a lot more bells and whistles they can use in an ad. They can include glowing review text AND a punchy little tagline AND a killer image that draws people in.
But for those who are new it’s more opportunities to get it wrong. You can have a killer book cover but if the ad image you choose is bad or the text you choose is clunky, all that choice can work against you.
Another thought about the two is that for FB ads tracking performance is trickier. Which is saying something because we all know that tracking AMS ad performance is challenging enough. But with FB ads, if you aren’t violating TOS and using your affiliate links or reducing ad performance by going to a landing page first, you really can’t tie specific clicks to specific sales.
This becomes a problem if you’re trying to run an ad that has multiple target audiences, for example.
I had an ad running with both Tamora Pierce and Anne McCaffrey as target authors at the same time. And I was getting good cost-per-click for both. Tamora Pierce was actually better at 7 cents a click, but Anne McCaffrey was good at 12 cents a click.
Here’s the problem, though. Turns out that Tamora Pierce doesn’t convert for me. People love the ad, they click on it, they go to Amazon, and then they don’t buy.
Whereas with Anne McCaffrey they do.
So if I were just looking at the data I can see on FB it looks like I’m doing really well getting low-price clicks with Tamora Pierce. But it doesn’t matter what those clicks are costing me because I’m not getting sales. And the only way to know that’s happening is to just run ads to Tamora Pierce one day and just run ads to Anne McCaffrey another.
FB itself has no way to know which of my clicks (if any) from their site actually bought the product on Amazon. (I would love for there to be a feedback system in place where i could manually tell them my estimated performance and have them incorporate that into their allocation algorithm, but that’s not going to happen.)
So it can be easy with FB to focus on the wrong metric. “Ooh, I’m getting lots of cheap clicks, woohoo!” What matters is are you making a profit. Are those clicks resulting in sales. And that takes more effort to figure out than AMS ads.
I do think if you’re in a good genre for it and have everything aligned that FB ads have probably far more potential than AMS ads. But I am also very glad that I started with AMS ads before I tried moving to FB ads. Because I would have probably lost a lot of money on FB ads early on because the books I had to sell were not packaged to sell well through FB ads.
One final thought. I’ve seen both on author boards and in the group for the class I’m taking people say, “What am I doing wrong? My cover is fantastic, my blurb is great, my reviews are wonderful, my landing page is stellar, and yet I’m not getting the sales I would expect.” And I have to say that most times when the person provides a link in those situations that’s not actually true.
I saw one where the color scheme for the cover was completely different from all other books in the genre. Another where the review quote at the top of the landing page was formatted in such a way it wasn’t clear it was a review quote. Another where the blurb text was clunkier than it needed to be.
Trust me, I don’t get this right myself half the time, so I’m not going to wade in there and tell anyone what they’re doing wrong. But if you think everything is perfect and you’re just somehow not getting sales, then everything is not perfect. There is a disconnect somewhere and you have to keep poking at it to find where that disconnect is. That’s true of AMS ads or FB ads. You either aren’t targeting the right audience or aren’t packaging your book in a way that appeals to the audience it should appeal to.
Anyway. Something to think about. (And now the dog must be fed because she’s big enough to make a meal of me if I fail to provide for her.)
M.L. Humphrey 