Advertising Results December 2024

I haven’t done a monthly ad result roundup for a while, and a few people mentioned they found the roundups helpful, so I thought I would do one for December.

December, of course, is something of an odd month because Christmas spending distorts all the metrics and ad clicks consequently go up in price. That said, we had some pretty good results this month.

First, let’s look at Facebook ads:

GHOSTS: $3.79 back for every $1 spent, with 13% of the profit coming from audiobooks.

CLOAK MAGE: $4.64 back for every $1 spent, with 7% of the profit coming from audiobooks.

I will say this for Facebook ads – they handled the 2024 presidential election cycle waaaaaay better than 2020. In summer 2020, the Facebook ad system went berserk and started banning people right and left for no discernable reason. Like, I once went to adjust the daily budget for an ad and got immediately banned. This happened to a lot of people and organizations that didn’t have anything to do with the election and didn’t post any political content. I know of a documented case where a publishing company that regularly spent upwards of $1 million a year on Facebook ads got banned for exactly the same reason in 2020. If a business is dropping customers who spend a MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR on your product because your platform is glitching, there are seriously big problems!

But I didn’t have anything like that happen in 2024, and I didn’t hear any reports of widespread random bans, either. I suspect Facebook taking a massive financial hit from the failure of the Metaverse in 2021-2023 really inspired the company to protect the bottom line better, and as I said above, banning customers who yearly spend a million dollars on your product is suicidally stupid even by the (admittedly low) standards of American technology companies.

That said, Facebook ads have been decreasing in utility for one big reason: artificial intelligence. Facebook has been larding up its ad platform with AI targeting options and making them the “recommended” setting, and the AI targeting options aren’t as good as the manual ones, especially for books. Like, the AI-augmented ads will get you more clicks, which is good, but those clicks are much, much less likely to convert into sales because the AI is casting a broader net than it would if the ad was narrowly targeted. If the clicks don’t convert into sales, that defeats the entire point of the exercise.

If Facebook continues to force AI stuff into its ads, I expect they will become increasingly useless, so I will use more Amazon/Bookbub ads in 2025.

With that in mind, let’s look at some of my Amazon ad campaigns. Remember that for an ad campaign to be effective in Amazon ads, it needs to deliver a sale/complete KU readthrough for every 6-8 clicks. I run quite a few Amazon ad campaigns, but the two biggest ones should be illustrative:

HALF-ELVEN THIEF: 1.04 sales for every click, and $3.50 back for every $1 spent.

STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: CREATION: 1 sale for every 14.88 clicks, and a loss of $4.17 for every $1 spent.

So you can see that the “one sale for every 6-8” clicks is a good rule of thumb. The SSO:CREATION ads definitely lost money in December, but I had a specific ad that was generating a lot of clicks that simply didn’t convert into sales. So I shut it down and things smoothed out a bit for the rest of the month. On the plus side, the ads for HALF-ELVEN THIEF were very successful.

It also shows why it is a good idea to keep an eye on your ads. I didn’t lose all that much money on the SSO:CREATION ads, but it would have been more if I hadn’t been paying attention.

Amazon ads are also useful for trickle campaigns when you turn a profit on a smaller budget. I had a campaign running on DRAGONSKULL OMNIBUS ONE that did well.

DRAGONSKULL OMNIBUS ONE: 1 sale for every 5.5 clicks, $22 back for every $1 spent, with 87% of the profit coming from the audiobook.

Note that 87% of the profit came from the audiobook. It makes sense to advertise DRAGONSKULL OMNIBUS ONE not just for the ebook, but because the audiobook is very profitable.

I’ve also been experimenting more with Bookbub Ads. I’ve found the juice not to be worth the squeeze when it comes to advertising Amazon books on Bookbub – the cost of a click is so high that it’s extraordinarily difficult to turn a profit. However, there are numerous other bookstores than Amazon, and I’ve found that you can get excellent results by advertising permafree books from the non-Amazon platforms on Bookbub.  Which makes sense, doesn’t it? Use Amazon ads for Amazon books, and Bookbub ads for everything else.

In December I advertised CHILD OF THE GHOSTS for Apple Books on Bookbub. Here’s how we did:

THE GHOSTS: $6.89 for every $1 spent, with a 19.1% conversion rate from CHILD OF THE GHOSTS to GHOST IN THE FLAMES.

That’s a good result, and the 19.1% conversion rate from CHILD OF THE GHOSTS to GHOST IN THE FLAMES is amazing. Like, on Amazon in December, I had about a 5% conversion rate from FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT to FROSTBORN: THE EIGHTFOLD KNIFE, which means that for every 100 people who downloaded a free copy of THE GRAY KNIGHT, five of them went on to buy a copy of THE EIGHTFOLD KNIFE and hopefully got into the rest of the series. Five percent is about average for this kind of thing, so 19.1% is really excellent. I think Bookbub has a strong presence among iPhone/iPad users in the US and the UK, so I will definitely continue advertising there.

So that is how my ads did in December 2024.

Later this month, depending on how some things go, I’ll start advertising either FROSTBORN or DRAGONSKULL pretty heavily.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

-JM