Facebook Ads or Boost Post

The facebook ad was a NO SALE!
Although I did have a few click throughs they went to nowhere-land.
Money invested $10.
Ad length of ad one week.
Books sold? Zero

Experiment over.
Did my ad suck and no one wanted to look? Was it not engaging enough? Was my audience too narrow? Is $10 not enough to take a fb ad anywhere? Or is facebook just not a great place to sell books? Anyone out there have any luck with facebook ads?

My next try will probably be something like Pixels of Ink or one of the book blasters. A blog tour? I have to do some research on this subject. Set a budget and do another round of something that's not Facebook. Until then I'm back to the writer's cave and my  WIP and maybe the NANO and will get the fun part of this author thing done.

Strangely, after I decided to give up on the NANO I got this great idea of where to take the story. :)

Google: Facebook Ads for Indie Authors

If you put "Facebook ads for Indie Authors" into a search you get a lot of hits. Everyone has advice on how to promote your book on Facebook and I think I'm going to have to save this research for Saturday morning and coffee. I know I'm going to want to take notes.

Right now my facebook report says I've reached 453. However my page views for my author fb page says 671. I'm guessing this sudden page view phenomenon is connected somehow to the ad.  So I guess I should go write something witty and awesome on that page to keep them coming back.
Bottom line; No Sales. :(

Impulsive Facebook Ad

Yesterday I posted a link on facebook to a blog post I did from my website about why I wrote Soul Mates and how the idea came from the dogs I've helped to rescue. (I work as a foster family and foster homeless dogs until a good family can be found.) It was kind of a sloppy post. All I did was put the link on fb and the photo popped in with the title of the blog post. No big deal.

Then this morning a little thing popped up on FB that said, "Boost your Post."

I checked my paypal account and found 12 bucks. So I flipped back to the FB tab and hit the button. I figured its kind of like a lottery ticket. Sometime you win, but probably not. Either way I haven't done any promoting in a few months so what the heck. I was planning on waiting till after the holidays to create a budget and make a plan. (Hopefully, my current WIP, -not the NANO one-  but Threshold of Midnight, will be up by then)

I clicked all the buttons to set up the FB ad; one week for $10. Yeah! I'm a big spender! Unlike last time when I made the book free,  Soul Mates, is up for its regular prices. Kindle $1.99 and Paperback $6.99.
So since this morning I've got a big 3 click-throughs and no sales.
Unfortunately, since this blog was set up on a free Wix site I have no analytics to see if anyone actually went to the site. I should go to google to see if I can add it.

I'll post the results every couple days. This is from Facebook;

Facebook Ad Fail

The Facebook ad for No Apologies was a bust.

I set the ad to run midweek to midweek encompassing one weekend. I figured this would give me a wide view of how it did on what days. I also got to choose a target audience by age, gender, interests, etc.  For my budget of $60 I spent $59.81 total for 164 click through to website. I put the click through right to the Amazon page to buy the book. As you can see from my Amazon sales chart, out of the 164 that clicked through to see the book, 11 books sold. Bah!

So was it my fault this ad tanked or Facebook's?

Above you see the ad. One of the issues I have with the Facebook ad rules is the amount of space words can take up. I think it was like 22%, so I had to keep shrinking my book cover to get it under the 22%. This was a detriment to the ad in general because the title is part of the grab in selling a book along with the cover art. So I don't think the visual of the ad was that good. Facebook fail for stupid word rules.
Next I look at the words I put with the picture on top and below the ad. Did I not grab the reader's attention? Too tame? Too common? This would be my fail.
What about the where i wanted the ad to go? I chose all ages over 18. Although there's no actual graphic sex scenes in the book there are some sexually suggestive scenes so I thought it was better not to target the younger market.
Here you see the demographics of who actually clicked through the website. I also included men in the party, which could have been wrong. A very small amount of men actually clicked through. I did include the UK and Australia because they are English speaking countries. Should I have made this wider? I don't know.

Here's the Facebook and Amazon reports. There was a slight spike in click throughs and sales on Friday.

In conclusion? I don't think Facebook ads are that great for books. Or I did it wrong. I think I need a better photo for the ad. The book was too small and I doubted it caught any attention by the cover. The reports also showed the ad did better on the news feed than on the side bar. Which is where it would show bigger. If I can't get that cover bigger then maybe I should have just ran it on the news feed and taken it off the sidebar.

I finance my book ads with my Fiverr editing. When I get gigs on Fiverr the money there goes to book promotion. Sometimes I have more money to do it with, sometimes less. I want to save for a BookBub ad which is expensive, but I hear it's worth it. I've done a free book on Pixels of Ink and that gave away 80 books. Would that have generated more sales than Facebook if it wasn't free? Maybe I'll try and see what happens. Pixels of Ink wasn't that expensive. Gotta go check my Fiverr account to see what I go for next.

Figuring Out Facebook Ads

Experimenting with book ads and studying the results. I'm running a facebook ad for No Apologies and watching my Amazon rank fluctuate. 

An 12 day ad with a daily click through up to $5. giving me a total cost of $60. The book is not on sale, I left the prices the same as always. 

First day my rank dropped dramatically. From 923,485 to 32,291. The next day its up to the 300,000's. (I only checked it once that day, not realizing it was going to be changing that much) The following morning it dropped again into the 30,000. Yesterday, Friday, at 7 a.m. it was back up to the 300,000's. (Wish I charted these exact numbers, but i can only give you the approximations.) Friday afternoon I'm back in the 30,000's. This drop happened about 4 p.m. which I think was when everyone at work decided they had worked hard enough all week and jumped on facebook. ;)  It held there until about 9 p.m. when everyone probably broke open the wine and started ignoring facebook. (52,000's)

This morning we jumped back up to #110,761. Will this change when people start waking up? Break for lunch? Go back to facebook after dinner? I'm curious to see if weekends are better than weekdays. 


From what I've read on Booktrakker Amazon updates hourly. 

I'm wondering if some of this is the result of setting the ad to $5.00 a day for click throughs? I hit the $5. in click throughs and the ad stops running for the day? 

Are click throughs equaling sales? So far, not much. :( but we'll see what happens by day twelve. I'll let you know. 

Anyone else have luck with ads? Any hints or tips?