Facebook Testing

[Demesnedenoir]

Cool, just kicked in a little more promo on FB, so the reach might be re-expanding. FB appears fairly stable, but has not returned to its former glory as of yet. One of these I'll have a chat with my FB advertising dude and see what he suggests, and probably ignore him, heh heh. All right, I'll at least test their theories.

 

[ThinkerX]

And there goes the 'Eve of Snows' add again. Same one from last time.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Ike doke, a minor update… been a while. Quick synopsis is holidays and first couple of months of 22 good, summer bad. I did get FB running waaaay more efficiently but conversions stunk it up so it inspired me to finally shut down FB and see what I can do with Amazon alone. For this test I also carried my books into Kindle Select figuring to maximize dollars spent.

Quick interpretation, Amazon sells more paperback and sales of digital are up a little bit with the same budget… short test period. I reckoned it would be an interesting and gradual climb with a total marketing flip, but so far not terrible. Actually improved compared to FB which is a first in my experience.

 

[ThinkerX]

My FB adds probably resulted in about two dozen sales, maybe a few more. I suspect most of my more recent sales came from ordinary posts to various FB book groups.

Other advertising methods/sites I tried pretty much flopped altogether. The 'Books Butterfly' promo package flopped, but they did include tracking widgets that claimed thousands of clicks around the globe, though mostly in the US.

And baffling enough, the vast majority of my sales have been for $14-15 print books, not the $3.99 eBooks. Weirdly, book 2 sold better than double the copies of book 1.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Sounds peculiar. Ebooks tend to outsell print in the neighborhood of 12 to 1 outside of hot print months around the holidays for me. Bookbub is the obvious promo king, book barbarian was my second favorite but I haven’t any of those for a long time to keep my data less cluttered.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I've seen multiple authors report wild swings in their sales this past year. Even my meagre sales have fluctuated heavily, though my summer was great, since a slow Amazon ad suddenly kicked to life (I'm guessing fewer people bid on the target, making my bid higher, relatively speaking).

I do have a Geektastic newsletter promo coming up. Curious to see if it does anything.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

A small # of sales is cracking top 100 in categories right now, which is surprising. Not sure what is up.

 

[ThinkerX]

The old Eve of Snows ad just marched across my Facebook feed...

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Got a $0.99 promo going, so kicked the ad back to life for a week, LOL.

 

[Prince of Spires]

What do you use as images for your facebook ads?

 

[Demesnedenoir]

A cover variant with snow falling. I used some little app to get the snow instead of paying a stupid price like some folks want you to do, heh heh.

I experimented with all kinds of images, and in the end, the cover/banner worked best, and the added snowfall really gave the ad an extra kick.

What do you use as images for your facebook ads?

 

[Prince of Spires]

Thanks! Many suggestions I've seen for Facebook ads is to use anything but the cover, and rather go with stock images which sort of fit what you're trying to sell. Which just sounds very expensive for the budget I have...

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I found stock images to be... iffy. Some worked well enough, but when I ran cover images, things went better. I suppose this might depend on the cover art. Let's see if I can find what I will be using... These can have the advantage of making it obvious you're promoting a book.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Thanks for digging that out.

I can see how that image works for an ad. I like it and I'd be interested in finding out more, which is the image's job. Having such an example works better than the generic advice you get in most places which leaves everything up to your own imagination

 

[Demesnedenoir]

What I have not tried are the "placement" images, which puts your book into real-world situations, being read, sitting on a. shelf or table, and whatnot. Below is a low res version of the ad GIF I run that works well.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=666468541793043

Thanks for digging that out.

I can see how that image works for an ad. I like it and I'd be interested in finding out more, which is the image's job. Having such an example works better than the generic advice you get in most places which leaves everything up to your own imagination

 

[pmmg]

I found stock images to be... iffy. Some worked well enough, but when I ran cover images, things went better. I suppose this might depend on the cover art. Let's see if I can find what I will be using... These can have the advantage of making it obvious you're promoting a book.

I think this graphic is very eye-catching and should be as good as any for doing the job. I like that it is the same image only with the woman removed, add visual interest, as if we moved and are now looking from her perspective.

I would call that one a winner, as much as any one graphic can be.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Yeah, when that image came in, it was a no-brainer to keep it. I expected a basic banner, but this clicked better than expected.

I think this graphic is very eye-catching and should be as good as any for doing the job. I like that it is the same image only with the woman removed, add visual interest, as if we moved and are now looking from her perspective.

I would call that one a winner, as much as any one graphic can be.

 

[Prince of Spires]

My plan for the new year is to dip my toes into ads again to try and get the needle on book sales moving. I'm definitely taking some of the ideas here as a starting point

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I wish I could still direct people to Keyword Thingee, but it went splat. An author was trying to build something impressive, likely too impressive as I suspect the project went belly-up, but he had keyword thingee for scraping keywords off of Amazon. I used it when it came out—it was designed by him and a few other authors frothier personal use, I think—and it was really effective and time-saving. I can do the same thing now, but it's a pain in the ass, LOL.

But anyhow, I still have some of that data stored in old Amazon ads and fired one back up after about 2 years and it's running pretty decent and the costs have gone down. SO! What I would recommend if a person is ambitious and has patience is to start scraping new releases and the best sellers in categories once a month or some such to have a backlog of titles and authors to target with Amazon ads, as the click-bid prices trend down as time goes on.