advertising results for August 2022
Yesterday was the last day of the month, so I thought it would be informative to take a look at my advertising results for August.
This first group is for Facebook ads. For Facebook ads, I typically advertise the free first-in-series book, and then calculate the return based on how many of the rest of the series sells. The chart below shows how much I got back for every $1 I spent on advertising.
CLOAK GAMES/MAGE – $7.19
FROSTBORN – $3.21
GHOSTS – $3.80
SEVENFOLD SWORD – $4.47
SILENT ORDER – $7.77
So it was a good month for advertising! CLOAK GAMES/MAGE was going strong from CLOAK OF SPEARS yet. SILENT ORDER was also the highest it’s ever been. That was because of SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND, but even if you take RUST HAND out of the equation, SILENT ORDER still did $3.19 for every $1, which is still the best the series has ever done with ads. Clearly, the combination of 1.) releasing a new book, and 2.) changing out the covers had positive results.
Additionally, this month I also pushed to do more with Amazon Ads.
The reason is that an election is coming up in the US, and a Certain Major Social Media Platform previously mentioned in this post tends to lose its mind and start randomly banning ad accounts right and left in the runup. My ad account got randomly banned several times in 2020 and 2021, so it’s good to have backup plans already in place.
That said, Amazon Ads work very differently than Facebook Ads. For Facebook, it’s best to have a single well-targeted campaign for a book. For Amazon Ads, it’s often better to have dozens of campaigns running for a single book. Additionally, you don’t need an image, and the targeting works completely differently. The mindset shift is profound. It’s not like switching from English to Spanish – thanks to Latin and a few centuries of cross-linguistic pollination, Spanish and English do have quite a bit in common. No, it’s more like shifting from English to a language from a completely different civilizational tree, like Mandarin Chinese, where all the rules are totally different.
I do think Amazon Ads is better for beginners. Like, with Facebook, it’s possible to accidentally spend $100 in a day and get nothing in return if you don’t know what you’re doing. With Amazon Ads, it’s much harder to accidentally burn through a giant pile of money. Indeed, sometimes it’s hard to get Amazon to spend any money on the ads at all!
The methodology for Amazon Ads I use (and the one I recommend for beginners) is the one in Bryan Cohen’s book SELF-PUBLISHING WITH AMAZON ADS. It’s a good cautious approach to gradually building up the ads, and the two metrics for ad success I use are 1.) is it turning a profit? 2.) am I getting a sale for at least every six ad clicks? I’ve also found that Amazon Ads don’t work really well with free books or omnibus editions, but instead perform best with full-price first books in the series. The chart below shows how much I got back for every $1 I spent on Amazon Ads, and the average number of clicks it took to get a sale.
CLOAK OF DRAGONS – $2.51, 2.32
DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE – $2.20, 2.8
AVENGING FIRE – $1.54, 2.56
So it was a pretty good month for Amazon Ads.
But as we saw above what really moves the needle is publishing a new book, so back to working on DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS!
-JM