2nd EDITION NOTE: This section is largely unchanged from the first edition (barring some edits for clarity).
At the end, there is information on using the same ad in more than one ad set without duplicating the ad in order to retain Social Proof.
After you’ve done all the hard work getting that ad tuned and performing well, you want it to keep on chugging, and maybe even get better and better, right?
Right?
I thought so. Sure, you can keep a little ad trickling along at $5/day and help keep a series afloat. I’ve run some ads for folks with that spend, and they can keep a series with a $0.99 first book at about the 30,000 – 50,000 rank range with ease.
Now that’s not too bad. If your series is five books long, and you have good read-through, that rank-range means you’re probably making $20-$40 a day (if you’re in KU). Even if only $10 a day of that is coming from ads, you’re doubling your money every day.
Very few investments will yield returns like that.
But let’s see if we can turn that knob up to 11, shall we?
You’ve diligently run your ad at $5/day to get that nice relevancy/engagement score, some shares and comments, and to settle into a good CPC. Now it’s time to bump that spend up and get some magic happening!
Not so fast!
Here’s the thing you need to consider: the audience you picked is only so big. At a higher spend rate, your ad may saturate that audience, and Facebook may start charging you a lot more per click because people start hiding your ad, or ignoring it.
You can see this as the frequency score on your ad. Close to 1 is good; if you’re over 1.5, you’re starting to saturate the audience.
NOTE: You should look at a one to two-week range when gauging your frequency. All of the numbers shown when you’re looking at an ad are based on the date range selected in the upper right of the page.
Because of this, it’s best to up your ad spend by a few dollars every couple of days, as you fish out the sweet spot. I’ve found that with a lot of ads, you hit a point where you’ll start to see that CPC begin to climb. It’s often around $30-50 per day.
“Why does this happen?”
Even if an audience is listed as being in the millions, not all of those users are on Facebook at once. Some might only log in once every week or so.
Others may have the interests you’ve selected, but other interests as well, such as computers and cars, and ads for those products command a higher CPC and earn Facebook more money. This is why your ads may start to see their frequency climb when you haven’t come close to showing them to the entire audience.
However, if you up your spend sufficiently, Facebook will start showing it to people who cost more to put ads in front of, and that is why your CPC will start to climb.
In a nutshell, with a higher daily budget, you chew through the low-hanging fruit faster.
When you get to that point with an ad, it’s time to start a new one and start warming it up, so that when your current heavyweight ad begins to lose effectiveness, you can boost the new ad up.
I often have situations where one ad is on the way up, and another ad is on the way down, in terms of spend.
Also, if you read the end of Part 5, then you even know what time of day you should be doing that nice little incremental bump in spend.
The Internet is awash with algorithms that try to determine whether or not humans will like a given thing. However, none of them are as good as actual humans for deciding what humans like.
To that end, Facebook still wants to know if actual people like a post. This is your “social proof”.
Social proof on Facebook consists of likes, shares, and comments. The more likes, shares, and comments a post or ad has, the more social proof it has. Higher social proof means more relevancy, and FB will show it more, and charge you less for clicks.
In case you missed it before, Facebook does not do an all-out bidding war based on what you’re willing to pay. There are people who will bid more for placement (or have more budget), but lose to you if you have a lower bid, but more social proof on your ad.
You can look at a long-running ad and see cost per click go down when you get comments and shares on your ad (likes affect this as well, to a lesser extent).
Part of why I bring this up is to temper excessive duplication of ads. While I encourage it so that you can hit specific groups of people with more targeted content, be sure that you don’t spread your social proof too thin.
Keep this in mind as you build out more ads, especially on a limited budget when you’re running multiple ads in an Ad Set.
As I’ve mentioned before, you can change the audience on an ad and not remove the likes, shares, or comments on that ad. This means an audience change doesn’t lose your social proof.
Something I often do with ads is run them for the first few days targeted at my fans, and friends of my fans. Then, once I get good relevancy/engagement scores, some comments, likes, and shares, I alter my audience to exclude my fans.
Previously, in one of the locations where I spoke about social proof, I mentioned that Facebook (by and large) considers all comments to be good comments. A healthy debate between two people (even if there is negativity and disagreement) is good business when your product is the discourse.
To that end, even “This book sucks poo poo” is a comment that boosts social proof for your ad. That being said, you really don’t want that on your ad, do you?
What I do to comments like that is hide them, and let them live in their little echo chamber. Sometimes I hide them but still respond (if the comment isn’t too antagonistic).
However, just like you need a few 1-3-star reviews on your book, some lemon comments don’t really hurt you much, either. In fact, they may help.
Right now, I’m running a challenge ad where I ask, “Is M. D. Cooper the next Larry Niven?” (for non-SF nerds, Larry Niven has been a Science Fiction titan since the early 70s).
That’s a pretty tall order. I don’t think I’m as good as Larry Niven, even on my best day. However, it has sparked some fun comments.
Some I’ve hidden, but others I’ve engaged with, and we’ve discussed the merits of his books and mine. Some comments had people saying that his stuff sucked and mine was great.
That being said, don’t run challenge ads under your own Facebook author page. Those need to live under one of your fan/genre pages so that you can address the comments with your marketing/publicist hat on.
Also, just like 1-star reviews (yes, I respond to many of those), if that comment has burned your cookies, give it a day and see if it still bugs you enough to reply to it.
Whatever you do, don’t get antagonistic with folks. Your readers are seeing your ads too, and they won’t be happy if you come off like an ass.
This is just a final little note that may help your product page convert just a bit better.
You’re bound to have a particular ad that is your main ad at any given time. It may be character, plot, or even deal related. You want that ad to have a good flow into your product page so that the reader feels continuity.
To that end, what I recommend is for you to add a bit of text at the top of your blurb that connects your ad to the rest of your blurb.
For example, my book blurbs on my product pages are almost always character-based (talking about my main character and her challenges), but my best performing ad was plot-based, and the first paragraph of the blurb bore little resemblance to the ad.
To remedy this, I added in a bold paragraph that was a good grab line, and also connected to the ad.
This one change boosted my ad’s conversion rate by 20%.
All good ads go to heaven, so it’s OK to kill that ad when its relevancy/engagement wanes, its CPC starts to climb, or its result rate diminishes.
I suspect you won’t have too much trouble killing off dead ads, since they hit you in the wallet. However, those ads that ran long and did well can have a second life.
Take a look at the demographics you selected (be it gender, country, or age), and see if you can tweak the ad and give it new life by hitting a new demographic.
I recently had an ad that ran from November to May, and was finally getting to the end of its life. However, I looked at it and saw that I had made a silly mistake that caused it to have never shown in the UK.
The mistake: I used a lookalike audience that was US-only as the foundation of the Ad Set audience.
Well, well, well, I thought to myself, as I rubbed my hands together and quickly duplicated that ad with a UK-only target. Sure enough, there was this massive group of people across the pond that loved my ad.
That book has since moved from an average ranking of 12,000 to about 2500 in the UK store as a result. This book had been as high as 400 in the US store, but even then, its UK peak was 2400.
UK Sales Rank over the month. Down a bit now, which means I need to look at my audience saturation, but it’s quite the jump!
That one little glance at a dying ad put a 5-year-old book into the top 2000 in the UK store.
Another option (which I also undertook) was to take the ad and retool its copy to be more character-based. Previously, that ad had bombed with women; but with this retooling, it did well (not amazing, but well), and has probably sold about 400 books at this point.
While the standard creation process has you make new ads to put in ad sets, you can also take existing ads and put them into a second ad set.
What this means is you can have a single ad that you show to men, women, USA, and UK, but rather than lumping all those demographics into one audience, you can make multiple ad sets to capture those audiences with different budgets while serving them the same ad.
This is a great way to take an ad that’s working well and has has good Social Proof, and leverage it further.
To do this, choose the “Use Existing Post” option when creating an ad.
Then click “Select Post” and pick the ad, or even post on your page the one you wish to use.
Once you pick an existing ad, the existing creative (image, text, etc…) will be used, along with the social proof.
Remember, in this case, it’s not a new ad, it’s two ad sets using the same ad, so if you do change something on the original, it will edit what is shown on the other ad set as well.