ad results for November 2023

We’re rolling into the final month of 2023, so let’s look back and see how my ads performed for November 2023.

We’ll have three categories this month – Facebook, Amazon, and Bookbub Ads. Let’s start with Facebook ads.

For Facebook, I advertised THE GHOSTS, CLOAK GAMES/MAGE, MALISON/DRAGONTIARNA, and SILENT ORDER on Facebook, and here’s what I got back for every $1 spent.

THE GHOSTS: $6.10 for every dollar spent, with about 12% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.

CLOAK GAMES/MAGE: $7.68 for every dollar spent with about 5.8% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Of course, CLOAK OF EMBERS skews that a bit, but even without CLOAK OF EMBERS the total would be $3.05 with 13.9% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Finally CLOAK MAGE OMNIBUS ONE and TWO in audio bundles really helped move the needle for the audio.

MALISON/DRAGONTIARNA: $2.17 for every dollar spent.

SILENT ORDER: $2.51 for every dollar spent.

Next up is Amazon Ads. I tried a couple of different things with Amazon Ads this month, so let’s see how they did.

DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE: $2.29 for every dollar spent, with 11.2% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.

Since I want the sequel to SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION to come out in the first quarter of 2023 if all goes well, so I shifted CREATION to Kindle Unlimited and started running ads on it.

SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION: $4.20 for every dollar spent.

This is a very promising sign for the sequel, and makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have just put CREATION in Kindle Unlimited from the beginning.

Finally, as an experiment we tried Amazon Ads for CLOAK GAMES: OMNIBUS ONE. That brought in $2.23 for every dollar spent, with 31% of the profit coming from the audiobook.

It’s obviously easier to advertise a KU book on Amazon Ads, but as it turns out, a wide book (like SWORD OF THE SQUIRE and CLOAK GAMES: OMNIBUS ONE) can also work very well if you have an audiobook, because then you can advertise on the Audible categories which generally cost less.

Finally, on to Bookbub ads. I’m concerned about the long-term direction of Facebook ads, which is why I’m trying to diversify more to Bookbub and Amazon ads. So for this month I tried FROSTBORN on Bookbub ads. Let’s see how we did.

FROSTBORN: $5.09 for every $1, with a surprising 35% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.

This, obviously, is a very strong result for Bookbub ads, especially since FROSTBORN has been finished for like six years at this point. I wasn’t expecting the audiobooks to do so robustly well from the Bookbub ads, but obviously I am not complaining.

So what conclusions can we draw from this?

1.) Amazon ads are a bit complicated to use, but in many ways they’re the safest. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily blow a ton of money on Facebook or Bookbub ads and get jack squat in return. The nice thing about Amazon ads is that if they don’t work, they don’t spend money. It’s much harder to accidentally lose a bunch of money on Amazon ads than it is with Facebook or Bookbub.

2.) Amazon ads and Bookbub ads offer far more granular targeting options than Facebook. The problem with Facebook ad targeting is that you can only really target big name tradpub authors like George R.R. Martin or Brandon Sanderson, or broad categories like “epic fantasy”. Like, there’s not a single LitRPG author in Facebook’s audience targeting. (Maybe Ernest Kline?) By contrast, you can get super-granular with Amazon and Bookbub targeting.

3.) If you have a finished audiobook series, it is bonus profit when you advertise the ebooks. Apparently for Bookbub, it’s a LOT of bonus profit.

4.) For Bookbub and Facebook ads, you really need to rotate the ad image a lot to avoid creative fatigue (which is Internet ad-speak for people seeing the same ad image over and over). So you need to change it out pretty frequently, like once a week. Unless you don’t – sometimes you get lucky and get an ad which keeps firing and firing. But that is the exception and not the rule.

And, as always, thanks for reading! Given how consistently terrible the economy has been the last several years, I am very grateful for all of you who have bought the ebooks and the audiobooks. I hope to have new books to read soon.

-JM