Yes, boring, but necessary. I want to get a few of these terms defined and out of the way, so that when we get into the meat, you’ll know what they mean.
This one is simple. It is the rate at which someone who lands on a page, or sees an ad, performs the desired action.
If it’s an ad, then the conversion action is the click-through. If it’s your book’s page on Amazon, then it’s the user clicking the glorious orange “Buy” button.
The CPC of an ad is how much (on average) you pay for a viewer to click the CTA on your ad.
This is the cost per thousand (not million) impressions on your ad. I recommend that you pay per click, not by CPM, making this a metric you can view on your ad, but not one that has much meaning here.
A call to action is the thing that says “Hey, Click Here”, or “Yo! Do This Thing!” on your ad or page. It’s the “Learn more” or “Like” button on an ad, or the “Buy” button on a page.
Any good promotion (even a flyer you get handed to you) will have a call to action; something that the person handing it to you hopes that you will do.
When the CTA is clicked or followed or taken, that is success.
Any time there are sales, there is a sales funnel. This is the number of steps it takes to get a customer (in our case, a reader) from first awareness of us as authors, down to the final sale.
Ideally, your funnel should have as few steps as you can get away with. More complex products require longer funnels, but that shouldn’t apply to books.
When I use this term, I am applying it to the full read conversion of a book in KU. That is to say, if the book has 100 KENP, and you get 100 KENP pages read, we assume that is a full read.
Could it be two people reading 50 pages? Certainly; but when we’re looking at read-through across multiple books, it’s safe to assume that someone who read book 3 read all of books 2 and 1, so the math works out the same.
Impressions are, quite simply, human eyeballs looking at a page or ad.
Though I speak mostly about Amazon, this applies to all the vendors. The product page is the sell page for your book; if there is a button that starts the process of taking someone’s money in exchange for your book, that’s the Product Page. For most of us, this will be our book’s listing page on Amazon.
The percentage of people who read-through one book and go on to the next, or read-through your entire series.
This refers specifically to the people who read-through from the first book to a given book in your series (or to the end, if it’s used without specifying the book they read-through to).
The read-through from one specific book in your series to another.
This stands for Return on Investment. Ads are investments, and you want a good return on them. Your ROI is the dollar amount, or percentage, that you make back after spending money on ads.
On the internet, “Traffic” is typically synonymous with people’s eyeballs looking at a page. In the context of Facebook ads, it means the act of using an ad to drive traffic to a page somewhere on the web (typically, your Amazon product page).
A book being “wide” means that it is being sold more places than just Amazon, as in a wide number of distribution channels.