2nd EDITION NOTE: This section is largely unchanged from the first edition (barring some edits for clarity).
Gah! “Advertising Campaigns”. Doesn’t that just sound awful? It’s so formal and marketing-y. I should say that I happen to like marketing—especially when I believe in the product. So I hope you understand that I’m not bashing marketers, honest.
Nevertheless, the term just feels so dry!
NOTE: Make sure you set up a Facebook business account before proceeding. This way if your account gets blocked for some reason (such as an ad that violates the rules), it is usually just the business part that is restricted, not your personal account.
Visit https://business.facebook.com to create your account.
(If you’re in a huge rush and want to skip part 2)
Go to the Facebook Ad Manager (https://www.facebook.com/adsmanager)
and click “Create Ad”.
Pick “Traffic” from the list of campaign types, enter a name other than “Traffic” in the box that appears below (usually your book title), and click “Continue”.
Then move on to The Right Audience (Part 3).
OK, that little aside out of the way, let’s get into what a marketing campaign in Facebook is, and what it means to you.
A campaign typically encompasses all your efforts to move a particular product down a particular funnel.
In our case, that’s usually the first book in a series, and the funnel is three steps:
Or, if you’re advertising for leads (email addresses), which I strenuously advise you not to, then your funnel is five steps:
Typically, the shorter the funnel, the better it converts.
However, some products (like cars, televisions, computers, expensive enterprise business products) have long funnels because the seller has a lot of explaining, and convincing, to do.
We all know that the full extent of your convincing needs to be cover, blurb, price, and “look inside” snippet. That can all happen on the Amazon product page, so get them there as quickly as possible.
Note: There is a chapter below that spells out exactly why I think that advertising for leads (emails) is bad juju.
And now, as quickly as I can manage, here’s the breakdown of the Campaign types we care about, and what they mean.
When you go into Facebook’s Ad Manager interface and click that “Create Ad” button, you’re faced with three types of campaigns you can create.
(https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager/account/campaigns)
The first pair are in the “Awareness” bucket. These types of ads are for getting likes on a page, or making people aware of your brand. They are aimed more at products sold in brick and mortar stores; things like laundry detergent work well here. Those folks just want to remind people that “Tide Rocks!” so the next time a person is out picking up some detergent, that’s the brand they buy. These awareness ads are not terribly effective for us, but they can be used to build up fan pages, which I’ll get into later.
The three methods on the right are “Conversion”. Now, conversion is really what we want. We want to drive ads to a sell page, and have that bad boy convert. Alas, most of us do not sell our books on our own sites, and these ad types are really geared toward a scenario where you control the shopping experience, and can directly tie an ad click to a confirmed sale and an email address.
Oh, that would be glorious; alas, it is not yet to be for us.
We live in the center column, under “Consideration”. In here, there is really just one thing that relates to our goals: Traffic.
What we want to do is drive traffic to our Amazon product page. That page (if you have a good blurb, cover, price, and look inside) should already be a fine-tuned selling machine. If it’s not, your conversion rate of ad clicks to sales (once this is all done) will tell you.
The fewer steps there are between the user and that page, the better.
Now I hear you all the way over here. “I’ve got this sweet landing page I’ve made on my website, and it is a thing of beauty!”
I don’t doubt you, but no matter how good you are at making a landing page, Amazon’s product page has decades of science behind it. It’s built to sell. Not only that, but it’s familiar to your visitors, and probably more trusted. They like that page. It’s where they buy everything, from car parts, to shoes, to groceries. Leverage that.
Also, you have three clicks before users start to get all “meh” about buying anything on the internet. Your ad and the Buy button on Amazon are two of those clicks. If they had to open up the book, or dig into reviews, you’ve used up another one or two. Do you really want to insert your page on your site in the middle of that?
However, don’t take my word for it. When you get your ad built later, do an A/B test, with one ad going to your page first, and another going right to Amazon. Put different affiliate codes on each, and see which way works better.
I’ll be right most of the time, but I may be wrong in your case, and I am fully prepared to celebrate your success with you.
Often, people decide to advertise on Facebook for leads. This is a bad idea. The next chapter explains why you really shouldn’t do that.
(AKA ADVERTISING FOR EMAIL ADDRESSES)
(aka don’t do it)
Let’s face it: our books don’t really cost that much. We’re not selling high-value items here.
This means that the value of an unknown email address is the dollar amount we calculated that a sale of book 1 generates, divided by a rough estimate of how well your Amazon product page converts.
Let’s dig into that.
First, you don’t get a sale and a KU read from someone you’re doing targeting marketing at (“targeted marketing” being you have their email, and you are sending them an email directly). You just get one. So take the $5.94 we got for the value of a sale, and the $5.44 for a KU read-through, and average them; that gives us $5.69.
What this means is that if someone whose email address we have takes action on our Amazon product page, and buys or borrows, then we can expect to see $5.69 (again, this is taking drop-off in read-through into account).
There we have it: regarding our single 5-book series, the maximum value of a buying email address is $5.69. And not everyone buys (as you probably know).
Let’s stick with a safe average: one in thirty email addresses buys your book. You may see better than one sale for thirty email addresses, or you may see much, much worse, depending on how you attained those email addresses. So, $5.69 divided by our 3% (1 in 30) product page conversion rate is 17 cents.
There it is. The value of an email address for this series is $0.17. That’s it.
Again, I know what you’re thinking; I can hear it from here. “But, Michael, I can get less than 17 cents per click on a Facebook ad for an email address because I tie it to a freebie, and people click like mad!”
You probably can, yes; I bet I could get the CPC on an offer like that as low as 1 cent per click, if I worked at it.
NOTE: Between writing the first edition of this book and now, I tested this theory and found I actually could get clicks down as low as 1c on offers—and they barely converted.
But here’s the rub: your lead generation page (where you send them to get the offer, and where they give you their email address) certainly won’t have a 100% conversion rate.
Let’s say it has a 25% conversion rate. That means that every four times you pay $0.17 for the Facebook ad click, one person fills out the form to give you their email and redeems your offer. Now that lead just cost you $0.68. And we know, based on our conversion rate of email addresses to people actually buying books (a baseline of 1 in 30), that $0.68 per lead isn’t profitable.
Here’s the math on that.
Remember we guesstimated our conversion rate on our sales to people when targeting them with a newsletter or other mailing to be one sale per thirty email addresses (again, you can get a real number by using affiliate codes—and you can get authorization from Amazon affiliates to use codes in email). This means that we have to pay $0.68 thirty times over just to make $5.69.
Hint: it’s not going to be profitable.
Cost of sale: $0.68 x 30 = $20.40
Value of sale: $5.69
Using ads for leads is not a great use of your money.
You’ll find that if you do cross-author promotions (like giveaways, StoryOrigin, or Bookfunnel bundles), you will pay something like $0.01 to $0.03 cents an email. In that scenario, your cost per sale is only $0.90. That turns into a 632% ROI.
SCORE!
This was a very long way of saying that you generally shouldn’t use Facebook ads for lead generation.
In the “Retargeting” section of this book I will teach you about one way to do this as a part of a wider strategy that does end up making it a more profitable tactic.
Now, I bet there are people out there who have had amazing success doing just what I said not to do, and have built up a list of readers who devour their books. That is great, and I don’t want to denigrate it, or throw that success into doubt.
What I do want to do is give you the tools to know if your investment (advertising for leads is an investment) will have a positive return.
Remember, this whole book came out of me being greatly dismayed as I watched authors throw good money after bad at ads and lead generation activities, without getting returns that were worthwhile.
I want you to know what sort of returns to expect on your investments, so that you know what “success” means for every activity you perform.