The 5 Biggest Lessons from My First 30 Days of Direct Advertising (with Data!)
Since I started managing Meta ads for authors full time, I’ve managed millions of dollars in ad spend on Amazon-targeted Traffic campaigns. But I’d never managed a direct sales campaign for an author until last month, when Lee asked me to take over ads for Midnight Romance.
I was incredibly excited to get the opportunity to work direct – after all, there’s so much more you can do with your ads and your marketing in general when you control your own funnel. But while they both may run on the same platform, Facebook Sales campaigns are a different beast than Traffic campaigns. Suffice to say, the last 30 days have been a learning experience. Here are my biggest takeaways.
1. VALIDATE YOUR CONVERSIONS API AND DATA BEFORE YOU START SCALING UP.
The Sales objective is an amazing unlock for any author – but only if your data is accurate.
Ever since the iOS 14.1 update, Meta’s ability to track off-platform sales has been hamstrung. To compensate, Meta offers a Conversions API integration with sites like Shopify that will help match ad clicks to site visits to more accurately report sales. Which is great – if it’s set up and working correctly.
I found this out the hard way when I discovered that FB had been overreporting sales by 2x on the Midnight Romance ad account after it had already spent over $100k.
This is not good. Why is it not good? Well imagine that you spent $10k on campaign that reported 200 sales for $15k in revenue – so you theoretically made $5k in profit. Except the campaign only created 100 sales for $7500 in revenue and you actually lost $2500. But Facebook doesn’t know that, so it just keeps on spending your money and telling you everything is going great.
So yeah, this is something that you want to correct before you start pumping in money to a campaign. Luckily Shopify (which most authors use) has a Conversions API integration for Meta that is easy to set up here:
https://help.shopify.com/.../analyze.../meta-data-sharing
And you can validate your data by checking your Shopify Marketing tab in your admin panel and confirming that the orders and sales coming from your FB campaigns match what FB is reporting on the advertising dashboard.
2. DON’T LET YOUR PIXEL OPTIMIZE FOR FREEBIES.
After we got the data issue resolved I finally started my first Direct Sales campaign in earnest. When I checked in on it a few days later, I was surprised to find that while it was reporting sales, the average order value of each sale was much lower than the product being advertised. Curious, I dove into Shopify’s order history and was surprised to find that many of the orders coming from my ads were worth $0.00.
As it turns out, there was a free copy of Alpha's Moon still available on the Shopify site from an old promo. It wasn’t the product I was advertising, but since you had to press “Check Out” to download the free book, Facebook was counting it as a purchase. And since there are tons of people out there who will click an ad and then happily download a free book –the campaign was beginning to optimize itself to serve ads to the freebie vultures and not the people who, you know, actually spent money in the store.
If you’re going to make a book free while you’re spending money on FB ads, don’t just set the price to $0.00.
Keep it at list price on your site, and then offer a coupon code that people can redeem to make it free at checkout instead. This will prevent the pixel from optimizing for the wrong audience.
3. LET THE AI COOK.
I always like to start campaigns with an audience test. For traffic campaigns, something like the Big Six audience that I shared previously almost always outperforms the complete-control Advantage+ audience FB pushes. But, surprisingly – or maybe unsurprisingly – that wasn’t the case with a direct campaign. Here’s what happened when I tested a targeted audience against an Advantage+ audience targeting all women over 21 in the US for a large $50 box set that includes the entire Bad Boy Alphas series:
Targeted Audience: $237.68 spent. 2,809 impressions. 102 Unique Outbound Clicks. 2 Purchases. $2.33 Cost-Per-Click. $118.84 Cost Per-Purchase.
Advantage+ Audience: $243.11 spent. 3,244 impressions. 130 Unique Outbound Clicks. 6 Purchases. $1.87 Cost-Per-Click. $40.52 Cost-Per-Purchase.
That’s a huge difference – literally the difference between being profitable and losing money.
4. OPTIMIZE YOUR AD CREATIVES.
So the data suggests that we should trust FB’s AI with our audience when selling direct. But what about the ads themselves? Should we just let the AI enable all the creative optimizations that we ignore in Traffic campaigns? I tested that too. For the $50 box set, I ran a large group of ads with only a select few optimizations enabled against a smaller group with every Advantage+ optimization enabled EXCEPT “Catalog” in the same set with the same placements and here’s what I found.
Ads with All Optimizations Enabled: $4,972 spent. 4,823 clicks. $1.03 CPC. 255 Purchases. $7,686 in revenue. $2,714 in profit. $10.64 Profit-Per-Sale.
Ads with only Filter, Aspect Ratio, Touch-Ups Enabled: $40,165 Spent. 39,673 clicks. $1.01 CPC. $47,733 in revenue. $7,568 in profit. $4.20 Profit-Per-Sale.
While there’s still more testing to be done, the data from 30 days in here strongly suggests that letting the AI optimize your ad creatives will be much more profitable in the long run.
5. AMAZON LIFT STILL HAPPENS.
An interesting benefit to direct advertising, other than the fact that it unlocks the Sales pixel and the true power of Meta’s AI, is that sending people directly to your store still creates lift for you on Amazon (if your books are on Amazon). For example, in April Midnight Romance spent $3k in direct sales ads for their Ultimate Bad Boy Alphas Box Set. When I took over ad management in May, we ramped that up to $8500 for the same product. Here’s what the numbers look like:
April: $1300 Direct Ad Spend. $2624 Direct Sales Revenue. 1312 Amazon Series Sales for $4352 in Royalties.
May: $6000 Direct Spend. $8657 Direct Sales Revenue. 1627 Amazon Series Sales for $5207 in Royalties.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, my first 30 days of managing Direct Sales campaigns on Meta have been eye-opening. From the importance of validating your data to the surprising power of letting the AI take the reins, I've learned a lot about what makes these campaigns tick. And while there's still plenty more to discover, one thing is clear: when set up and managed correctly, Direct Sales campaigns have the potential to be incredibly profitable for authors. Just remember to double-check your data, keep an eye on those freebies, and trust in the power of the algorithm. Happy selling!