2nd EDITION NOTE: This section is entirely new!
In the audience-building section, I introduced you to a two-layer audience. We put our interests in one section and then used the “Narrow Audience” option to focus in on people who read books.
Now it’s time to take this a step further, once we talk about whether or not low CPC is really the best metric by which to gauge ads.
This is not a cut and dried topic, because tracking conversions on Amazon is very difficult. However, let’s assume we are using affiliate links, and that they are a good barometer of conversions.
I’ve done experiments where I have gotten the CPC for an ad down as low as 1 cent per click. I did it by creating super-generic audiences and ad copy that would appeal broadly. This particular ad averaged closer to 3c, but it did dip down to 1c every so often for a day or so.
It converted terribly.
Let’s face it, if you made an ad that said, “Click here for a free pony,” people would click that thing all day long. But will they buy your book when that’s the Amazon product page they land on?
Probably not. So it’s fair to say that low CPC isn’t everything.
Let’s do a little bit of math to prove this out. I’m sorry, it’ll be quick.
Let’s say that we have a CPC of $0.10 (10 cents), and a conversion of 1 in 50. That means it costs $5.00 to make a sale.
$0.10 x 50
= $5.00
Now, what if we had a $0.25 (25 cents) cost per click and a conversion of 1 in 20?
$0.25 x 20
= $5.00
Well now, that’s the same cost to sell the book you’re advertising! Which means that with a total read-through value of $25 (from our 5-book sample series at the beginning of the book), we make the same profit.
Now, what if we have an ad that costs a bit more, but converts at a rate of 1 in 10?
$0.30 x 10
= $3.00
Now we’re spending $2.00 less to make a sale, and that’s going to add up. What if those people were more likely to be superfans? If so, they’ll have higher readthrough than average, and you’ll turn an even higher profit.
When you write a book, there are people out there for whom it is the exact sort of story they want to read. You nail their demographic and interests perfectly, and they’ll gobble up everything you have.
Of course, the real question is how to find them.
Let’s take a hypothetical example. Let’s say that I have written an adventure thriller that I know Clive Cussler’s readers will love. I hit all the tropes, my writing is tight but easy to read, and I have a fun and witty style.
If I were to make an ad targeting people who like Clive Cussler and a bunch of other thriller authors, I might just get people who watched the movie Sahara and then picked up a single Clive Cussler book. They’re not guaranteed to be huge readers, and they might never buy a book for which they didn’t first see a movie version.
They might be potential superfans, they might not.
We see here that I have an audience of about 3.3 million people. With a $20/day spend, I can reach quite a few of them.
Now, let me add in my audience-narrowing e-book interests.
Here we have an audience of 3.2 million, pretty much the same as before. Looks like this demographic (at least the ones on Facebook) read a lot digitally.
The low-end of the link click estimate of 116 clicks (at a $20/day spend) means it would cost $0.17 per click, which is a decent number. I’d have to have a CPC of around $0.06 per click to get 336 a day, and I doubt that would happen—though it’s nice that Facebook thinks that highly of my skills.
The thing is, this audience contains everyone who likes just one of those authors/characters and happens to read books. But what happens if we layer that audience and look for superfans?
Alas, it’s not layer cake, but it’s easier than layer cake, and might make you a lot more money, and then you can buy a lot of cake.
OK, I have no idea where I was going with that, but hopefully it was worth a laugh.
Let’s take that group of authors and characters and split it in three.
These are the same authors with the same e-book/fiction interests in the mix. We’ll see that we went from 3.2 million people down to 62,000. However, we know that these people have picked up more than just one author’s books, and that means there’s a better chance that they’ll pick up mine.
Let’s take that low-ball number of 49 clicks for my $20 daily spend. That comes out to $0.40 cents per click. That’s some serious scratch per click.
If we say we want a baseline of no more than $5 to sell book 1, then we need to have an ad that converts at about 12.5 to 1. That’s not impossible, and if it gets you a superfan that gobbles up all your books, it will pay for itself in spades.
But let’s see if we can sweeten the pot a bit by adding more authors.
Interestingly, in this case adding more authors actually lowered my estimates, but not by any meaningful amount. I did, however, double my pool of readers. So long as these authors all still align well with what I’ve written—so that I can deliver on the promise I’m making to my readers—I should be able to draw them in well.
Of note, when I do target expansion, I can roughly double this number, and that might yield good results, but it also might reduce the number of superfans I attract.
Another option that does not see you slaving over keywords, trying to find interests that are actually on Facebook, is to use interest-generating software.
There are a number of them out there; alas, none are cheap. Usually in the $200-$500 price range, often including subscriptions as well. I’ve tried a few, and my experience has been that they aren’t much better than I could manage myself with about 10-15 minutes of effort.
Essentially, I was underwhelmed.
On top of that, I know my market very well, and building audiences isn’t something I do very often. The cost benefit analysis tells me that I’m better off doing it myself.
I suspect that if you run a business doing ads, software like Connectio would be worth the cost, but otherwise, not so much.