Quick Tips to Fix Your FB Ad Problem
Hello friends new and old! An Author group I’m in put up a couple of posts last week asking what everyone's biggest pain point is currently and what tasks you would offload (if you could), and I noticed in the comments that a lot of authors here seem to be having trouble running and scaling their own ad campaigns.
As it so happens, I run a lot of ads for authors on Facebook, and I thought you guys might be interested in a few quick tips that can make the advertising experience much more tolerable (and profitable).
1. AMAZON ATTRIBUTION LINKS WORK. USE THEM.
This is the Prime Rule (heh) for advertising any Amazon book on Facebook. Always use attribution links for every – yes, EVERY – single ad you run on Facebook. Not only do the attribution links report with 95% accuracy by the time their 14-day page-read window closes, they are literally the only way to tell which ads in a campaign are working and which are not.
Why? Because whenever you run a Traffic campaign on Facebook, that campaign is going to optimize itself to feed the majority of your budget to whatever ad gets the cheapest clicks. Very frequently, this is NOT the ad that converts the best when it comes to generating sales and reads – but Facebook doesn't know any better. The attribution links are your source of truth. They'll tell you what is really going on with your ads and allow you to cut the ads that don't convert.
Yes, they are a pain to make. Yes, Amazon's attribution UI is laggy and outdated. But using attribution links is the single most impactful change you can make to improve your ad campaign performance.
As a side note: Attribution reporting can be laggy and can spike and slump at times. Some initial testing on my end suggests that it takes 3 days from when an ad is turned on for the attribution data reported by Amazon to be accurate enough to be useful, and by the time the data is 14 days old for a given date, it is 95% accurate. It's not a perfect system, but it is the best we have, and there's no good reason not to use it.
2. CLICK-THROUGH RATE DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING.
Take a deep breath, relax your shoulders, clear your mind, and repeat these words: "Click-through rate doesn't matter."
Seriously though – the Click-Through Rate of an ad just measures the ratio of how many clicks that ad gets per impression. I have no idea why people get so hung up on it, especially considering that you only pay Facebook for clicks in a traffic campaign – not impressions. This is not a useful indication of performance for an ad. For example, let's take a look at some data from two real ads that I've run in the same campaign for the same book:
Ad 1:
Amount spent: $125
Impressions: 4,792
Unique outbound clicks: 746
Click-Through Rate: 19.68%
Cost Per-Click: $0.17
Ad 2:
Amount Spent: $606.97
Impressions: 72,918
Unique Outbound Clicks: 2,135
Click-Through Rate: 3.72%
Cost Per-Click: $0.28
From the looks of it, Ad 1 with a 19.68% CTR should be outperforming Ad 2 with a 3.72% CTR, right? Well, let's take a look at the conversion numbers:
Ad 1:
Sales: 1
Borrows: 14
Conversion: 1.8%
Cost-Per-Acquisition: $8.79
Ad 2:
Sales: 11
Borrows: 74
Conversion: 4%
Cost-Per-Acquisition: $7.14
As we can see, despite an abysmal click-through rate, Ad 2 converts twice as well as Ad 1 and costs me $1.65 less per conversion (which I define as a sale or a complete borrow if a book is in KU). CTR doesn't tell you what is actually happening with an ad. It is much more important to focus on metrics like cost-per-click and actual conversion rate (the number of sales/borrows an ad has created divided by the number of clicks it receives, which you track USING ATTRIBUTION LINKS). You increase your profitability by lowering your cost-per-click or increasing your conversion rate.
3. YOU CAN SCALE ADS BY MORE THAN 25% IN A DAY WITHOUT IMPACTING PERFORMANCE.
This is another myth I see perpetuated frequently around FB author groups. You can scale a high-performing campaign up beyond 25% in a day without negatively impacting performance. This is especially true for campaigns spending under $50/day. On February 22nd, I created a campaign at $15/day. On the 27th, I noticed the ads were doing well, so I increased the budget to $50/day – more than 3x the budget. I didn't make any new ads for the campaign or make any other changes to it. Here's how the data looks:
Feb 22 – Feb 26: Budget: $15/day. 466 clicks, $0.08 CPC, 1.6% CV, and $4.83 CPA
Feb 27 – March 18: $50/day: 8303 clicks, $0.15 CPC, 3.5% CV, and $4.39 CPA
So while the budget increased, it has been able to hold that budget splendidly, and I could probably increase the spend to $100/day overnight without significantly degrading the performance.
4. YOU HAVE TO TEST TO BE THE BEST.
There's no magic lever you can pull to create a successful ad campaign. Trust me, if there were, I'd be writing this post from a yacht in the Mediterranean instead of my office in Texas. Every book and every series is unique, and so too are the ads that work best for them. The only way to discover what works for you and your books is to test, record your results, and test more.
For one romance series I worked with, I was able to get a picture of a cute cow to convert as well as the cover-on-cover ad because the cow worked as a pattern-interrupt (and was relevant to the plot). For another romance series, stock photos of generic handsome guys performed better than any pattern-interrupt image I tested. For a third series, the best ads were generic hot stock photo guys with a banner saying FREE IN KU and the book cover added. But adding the banner and book cover to the generic guys in Campaign 2 didn't help lift the ads at all.
There have been times when I have tried over 100 different combinations of images, copy, and headlines before I was able to find an ad that worked for a particular series. Suffice to say, you won't know what works best for YOU and YOUR BRAND unless you test different ads and angles and keep testing. For example, here are a few different types of images you can try:
Cover on Cover
Cover on Stock
Cover on Stock with Text
Stock – Person
Stock – Landscape
Stock – Object
Stock – with Added Text
Text Only – Teaser
Text Only – Review
Text Only – Excerpt
Text Only – Promo Callout
Slideshow – Carousel (Instagram only)
5. STICK TO THE FEEDS.
I've done a fair amount of placement testing, and every single time I do a placement test, the results never change – feeds (FB feed, FB profile feed, Instagram Feed, Instagram Profile Feed) convert better than any other placement on FB. Facebook is almost always better than Instagram, but I think you can run both successfully if you break your Instagram campaign off with a smaller budget instead of combining them in a single campaign.
Facebook likes to offer helpful AI-powered placement packages under the guise of "Advantage+ Placements." While it's tempting to chase the lower costs-per-click that the additional placements offer, in reality, straying from the primary feeds will almost always result in you burning more budget for poorer performance.
For example, I A/B tested placements for identical ads for a single book. In one audience, I selected only the FB feed placement. In the other audience, I allowed Advantage+ to have full control of the campaign to place the ads wherever it wanted. Here are the results:
Feed-Only: $82 in spend, 302 clicks, $0.27 CPC, 4.5% Conversion, $6.05 CPA.
Advantage+ Placements: $67.91 Spend, 347 Clicks, $0.20 CPC, 1% Conversion, $20.23 CPA.
The difference is massive. Clearly, the clicks were cheaper with Advantage Placements on, but every other metric was significantly worse. This isn't Facebook's fault. A Traffic campaign by default is designed to get cheap clicks. That's what the algorithm thinks we want, so that's what it finds for us. But even though the clicks are cheaper with these additional placements, the quality of these clicks is much worse.
Do yourself a favor and don't fall into the FB ad platform's mousetrap of "try this new feature to improve your ads." Stick to the feeds and focus on getting the highest quality clicks that you can.
CONCLUSIONS:
Running successful Facebook ad campaigns for books requires a strategic approach and continuous testing. By utilizing Amazon Attribution links religiously, focusing on metrics that truly matter like conversion rate and cost per acquisition, scaling campaigns gradually based on performance data, and persistently testing different ad creative and targeting, you can maximize your advertising ROI. While there's no magic formula that works for everyone, following these fundamental principles and best practices can make the journey of advertising on Facebook much smoother and more profitable.