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Facebook Testing

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Okay, so I am running a $50 test set of ads at three Author targets—GRRM, Sanderson, and Rothfuss—and ran into something peculiar. First, a minute to set this story up.

I haven't encountered this in a long time, maybe because FB changed its practice or maybe because I haven't toyed around with new things for a while. BUT, back in the day at least, I always got warnings for "too much text- Your ad may not run". And FB backed this up by making the CPM (cost per thousand) higher on text-laden ads.

So there I am this evening looking at my ads, and I made one specifically Without Text except for what's on the book covers, and they are just not running at all... I didn't set a rule on them to force money spent, figuring I'd let FB's system play around. Except for one targeting GRRM. And on top of that oddity, it was with my "Text #2" which hasn't been running as well as "Text #1". What gives? It turns out that I accidentally stuck in the exact same ad creative EXCEPT it had this blurb right on the photo... "Epic Fantasy from Award-Winning Author L. James Rice". So, not only was FB choosing to not run the ones without that text in the visual creative, it turns out this one was getting one of my highest CTRs. The latter is with the caveat that FB still isn't running this ad as often as my more traditional blowing snow video ads. So, now I get to run all those ads tomorrow with the revised creative and see what happens, not just for CTR, but how FB handles the change for impressions.

I also have the one ad running at Sanderson with a 10% CTR and Fb seems to refuse to feed that one, so I'm gonna have to try and force their hand.

Advertising is a mysterious universe.
 

Ned Marcus

Maester
I haven't encountered this in a long time, maybe because FB changed its practice or maybe because I haven't toyed around with new things for a while. BUT, back in the day at least, I always got warnings for "too much text- Your ad may not run".

It's been a long time since I've advertised on FB, but I read somewhere (David Gaughran, perhaps) that they no longer have a no text on ads policy.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
It was never a policy, at least since I know, it was just that they favored minimal text. I would still wager that a text laden ad creative will still run at a higher CPM.

Facebook went totally batty this weekend, BTW. I discovered that one of my ads lost its Headline and Main Text... it was basically a picture with generic text pulled from my website for the headline... Yikes.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Okay, so... FB went bat guano crazy and I pulled the no-no of messing with an ad doing well to throw Bull-S onto the Bat-S, heh heh. That appears to have taken just over a week to recover. Mostly. FB seems to be in an odd phase of fluctuating CPC days.

In the meantime, I've been knocking around with turning audiobook ads on and off on FB, figuring it's tricky to tell what's driving what. Well, I've done this enough times now that I think I can say the FB ads for Audio are doing well. They tend to cost more! Guessing because of narrowing the audience to the audiobook fan. This makes a person nervous, in particular, because Audio sales report much slower than traditional books—it might take 2 days—so you wonder if you aren't wasting money. So, I used the ad GIF I posted in the Bookbub thread and ran it in the US, Uk, and Australia targeting my usual broad audience but narrowed by Audiobooks. There's no way to tell about actual sales yet, but the US rankings spiked enough to indicate 2 probable sales of EoS on a $5 budget. From past experience, rankings in the UK and Australia might lag just a little more. We'll see.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
FB had a freakout one day where people were paying $5/click and whatnot because... who knows why. My only guess is they were fiddling with their code or rolled in some changes.

What was bat guano crazy?

and thanks for updating.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
The ad I was running and doing well, running at about 0.20 per click and moving solid sales, then that day, for $20 I got like 3 or 4 clicks, 0 sales, the next day there was a freaky pop in sales, then for about a week the ad ran funky but decent, but drove few sales. I think things are beginning to push sales again, but it's a wait-and-see if it stays consistent. FB is making targeting changes for legal reasons and trying to overcome the Apple privacy stuff... so. Who knows.

Okay. Im not paying $5 to click on someones ad. Bet that stopped quick.
 
This got me thinking. Facebook is making big changes where they have to separate their European users and their data from the US ones (GDPR stuff, they're no longer allowed to store EU data in the US). That might very well completely be messing up some targeting stuff everywhere.

Actual question: How big do you try to make your target audience?
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
I tend to target GRRM often, so my audience tends larger, anywhere from 200k to 2 million+. While it makes sense to drill down into small groups, when I've done that, things tend to get crazy-expensive and results didn't impress. So, I tend to stick to a wide net and let FB narrow the targets.

Retargets are another issue, those would be tighter.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Facebook ads and Audio Sales: More evidence rolls in... I killed all but my baseline FB ad as I'm focusing on eliminating as much data noise as possible around the Amazon Ads, AND audiobook sales dumped. Only sales this month have been "listen through", and I think (tricky to say with precision, due to the heavy delay in reporting) that approximately 3 EoS sales in February (out of 20) happened with the ad turned off. The peculiar part is that the $5 spend appeared to function just as well as several days I jumped to $10 spend, but this could be pure chance.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Lots of Facebook griping going on. Major frustration with targeting changes. people are seeing CPC double and triple. Me? Even today with an ad hitting about 10% click conversion I'm paying $0.26 per click, and a CPM of 2-3 times a month ago.
 

ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
I have not clicked on an Eve of Snows add in a while. I suppose I could, though.

I see a great many Facebook adds for novels of all stripes. Most appear only once.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
I'm prepping to go ballistic on Amazon ads and turn off FB for a while to get a cleaner read of their ads, but if you see the EoS ad in the future and are bored, let me know, LOL. The question is whether I'm psychologically able to turn off so many clicks from FB, LMAO. I'm collecting my biggest list of trad authors and books and yadda yadda. My goal? I want to see how close I can get to 100k impressions in a day on Amazon ads, heh heh. I'm going to run at least 8 ad sets, Trad authors, Trad books, KU auhtors, and KU books with one sponsored product ad and one sponsored brand ad for each. I figure on hitting 50k impressions per day minimum but I'm curious to see how hard 100k in a day would be without bidding stupid high.

I have not clicked on an Eve of Snows add in a while. I suppose I could, though.

I see a great many Facebook adds for novels of all stripes. Most appear only once.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Facebook might have returned more to normal... not that FB is ever normal... but CPM dropped over the weekend from $25-35 down to $11 this morning. It was a slow grind getting there. Conversions are still slower than they used to be (best I can gather from reading tea leaves) but getting the CPM and therefore CPC down are a good first step in righting that ship.
 
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