Only have 45 minutes. I thought I had 45 minutes and 15 minutes for questions. So you guys get the lightning.
I mean, you always get the lightning round with me. So, you know, that's the way it is. Oh my God, it's me. So this is analyzing Facebook ads.
What my whole purpose for this class is, is to make you feel comfortable starting Facebook ads because you're going to have an idea of knowing whether they're working or not, knowing whether or not you're burning your money. So we'll dive into, come on you. Start the slides. There we go. Oh, you can't see it.
You can see me, but it'll be there eventually, I'm sure. So the Writing Wives experience, I really believe in making sure that people, like whoever you work with, whoever you do business with, you should know, you know, are they successful and have they done work in that field? And so we have, my wife Jill and I have been running Facebook ads for people or helping people run Facebook ads since, kind of started just ad hoc helping people in late 2016 and then spoke at the very first.
20 books in 2017 and it's sort of been going on from there and we now help and work with about 25 to 35 authors a week helping them with their ads and have helped well over two or three thousand people at this point get their ads going and you know and get people moving from you know Just hobby money to I get to go on vacation money to I get to like you know buy a new house money in many Cases which is you know one of our favorite things to do to help people out like that so We should also get some of the important things out of the way. Yes, it's a rubber dress that I'm wearing. No, it doesn't breathe. Yes, I will shower to take it off later because that's necessary. Because people are always like, are you wearing leather?
I'm like, do not besmirch this and call it leather. It's far more evolved a fabric than that. And I'm also channeling my Beverly Crusher vibe today too because she's amazing and she's a science.
Well, of course she's a science officer, but also blue is the science in medical color. So I'm like, okay, I'm a data nerd. so science officer is the way to go today. And so if you've run Facebook ads, you know there's a lot of data. It's showing you a lot of numbers, and you're like, I don't know what these numbers mean.
Theoretically, in some fashion, these numbers are going to connect to money in my KDP account, but I don't know for sure if that's happening, and I don't know which ads are actually doing that. And that's what we're going to talk about today, how to be sure about that. This is awesome being the class after lunch. It's like everybody's just strolling in. They're all like, oh, my God.
It's okay. We forgive you. you. So, you know, we have stuff like this, all this information here, and then there's like, you know, and you're like, oh, I recognize those things, reach, impression, results, cost per results. Like, yeah, but then there's all these ones too.
You can enable like 40 columns of data for your ads. And then, you know, that wasn't bad enough. Now we have attribution links that are in the mix too. And people are like, okay, it's another graph.
How do I interpret this information? What is it telling me? Is it right?
Is it any good? So we're going to help with all that today. And there are three pillars of.
knowing if your ads are working. The first one is going to be the ad health and performance. This is the information you can find out on Facebook by looking at the ad there. And if your ad is performing well on Facebook, hopefully that means it's converting and selling books. And if it's not performing well on Facebook, it's probably definitely not.
Probably definitely not. Somewhere in that neighborhood, selling books. And then, of course, conversion is one of the ones we care about the most, is when I send people to Amazon or my Shopify store or Apple or what have you, or...
are they actually buying books? And the last one is, is it profitable, right? Like, am I actually selling enough books? Are my cost per clicks low enough to actually turn a profit? And without all three of these things working, your ads are possibly just burning more of your money than you want them to, or all of your money, which you definitely don't want.
So before we talk a bit about how to analyze ads, I want to talk a bit about how ads work. It was neat, and I was talking with someone just the other day, actually just yesterday, and I can't remember their name. because that's what happens to all of us here, right? And she was saying that her husband actually works on the team at Facebook that manages parts of the algorithm for what shows and what doesn't show.
And apparently he saw my presentation and said, that looks really cool, and it's good to know how it actually works. So he works in the back end. He was a data nerd in the back end. But he also didn't say, like, my God, everything she said is wrong.
So that makes me feel pretty good too. And now he always says to his wife, he says, you know, what does Mal say? You know, so I'm like, oh, God.
That's going to be annoying. I'm really sorry about that. But anyway, campaign objectives. When you first make a campaign or you make ads in Facebook, the first thing you're doing is creating a campaign because at some point advertisers decided their jobs weren't cool enough so they had to make it seem like they're going to war. That's the only reason why I can imagine why they're called campaigns.
And I didn't make that connection. At first, I've been in marketing. ...adjacent marketing or marketing adjacent tech for years now and I was always like, why are they called a campaign? I'm like, oh we're just trying to like feel better about what we're doing.
I got that. And there's multiple types of campaign objectives. There's, and you, on your, some of the...
One thing to note is that your Facebook ad manager may not look like this because Facebook is constantly testing out new ways of doing things. So, you know, I'll log into someone else's account and everything's in different places. So don't worry if your things are in different places.
Hopefully they're somewhere near. by and you'll find them. Sometimes you'll see this one in reverse order where sales are the top. But in this case, it's going from most humans to fewest humans. That's how the campaign actually starts out.
Awareness ads will basically show to anybody with a pulse. I can't even say eyeballs because you can actually use Facebook if you're blind. So you just have to have a pulse basically and you're going to get served awareness ads in some fashion.
Traffic ads are the ones that we run most of the time as authors. We're trying to drive traffic to a retailer. And then engagement ads are ones we will never run as authors because that's where we're actually asking people to talk to us.
And who wants, like, everybody messaging you on Facebook? I mean, it's kind of nice a little bit, but, you know, we definitely would not want that a lot. And then leads, of course, are getting people to fill out a form of some sort, hopefully give you their email address and their names. You can start spamming them with your newsletter every day or, you know, week or whatever. Apparently, actually, you can do it up to every day and be okay.
And the app promotion won't really matter. matter to most of us because none of us are building and selling apps, or most of us are probably not building and selling apps. And then lastly is sales.
And sales, of course, are ads that are intended to go somewhere where you can track whether or not the sale actually happened. So a lot of people will try to run sales ads for Facebook ads for sending people to Amazon and it won't work because we can't track whether or not a sale actually happens on Amazon or not. But if you're running Shopify ads, for example, you absolutely want to use sales because you'll get the Shopify pixel set up. That is so funny seeing the Kraken in the back corner there.
Just sort of like, it's like your tentacles are all sticking up. That's just hilarious. All right. I feel judged by the Kraken.
But yeah, so you only use sales if you're going somewhere where you can install the Facebook Pixel or the Facebook Conversion API, which is their new version of it, and then track whether or not the sale happened. But as a side note, by the way, if you are sending someone to BookFunnel or your own website or StoryOrigin to give them your reader magnet or some sort of thing, for free in exchange for their email address, you actually want to use leads types of campaigns because all those different pieces of software provided they're configured properly will actually report back to Facebook when someone did the thing that you want them to do. And each one of these different campaign objectives, Facebook says, Facebook has an objective as one would expect.
And if that objective is met, they're going to try to find more people like the people who did the thing. So if your goal is awareness, which basically they actually just measure like, did they your ad long enough to remember you. And they find people that do that, then they'll try to find more people that do that.
And if your ad is set for traffic and people click, they're going to find more people like the people that clicked. That's sort of how the whole system works. And that's why if you have a Shopify website and you try to run traffic ads to it, it won't work as well because Facebook basically with a traffic ad, their obligation ends when the link is clicked. Whereas with a sales ad or a lead ad, their obligation ends when the actual conversion event happened. So you want to...
to use the right type of campaign for what you're doing. So that's a very brief dive into how that works. But if you have more questions about that, I would love to help with that because I know a lot of people are starting to run Shopify stores and direct sales, and you're probably all doing things with BookFunnels.
So if you want to be running ads for those things, some of those things should be something other than traffic. So audiences. I want to talk briefly about audiences. Facebook made a change very recently where, and pretty much everybody has it now, and it's horrible. where when you go to make an audience, it has these two separate sections.
It has audience controls. And in there, you can choose, if you do show more options, you'll see age, and you'll see country. And then down below is where you put the other things like gender and interests and stuff like that.
Facebook ignores the second section and only pays attention to the first section. They tell you that they will try that suggested stuff first, but they don't. And I know an unfortunately large number of romance authors, for example, who came to me and they're like, why are men seeing my ad? ad, and it's all men and they've consumed all my money. And I'm like, did you use this?
And they're like, yeah. I'm like, yeah, it ignores that. Because the gender is in the second section.
So that does sort of put a little bit of a wrinkle in the whole Facebook knows what they're doing kind of angle. Because it's like, yeah, they're really good at looking at your audiences and figuring stuff out. But yet then you get 100% men being shown and clicking on your romance ad. Now that can depend too, because if you put a super hot dude on there, a lot of Manchester going on, you're going to get like gay men.
clicking on your romance ad. And probably not a lot of straight guys, well some. You probably would get some because they're like, that's badass.
I want to be like that. So whereas if you put like a woman on your romance ad, then all the guys will click your romance ad. So the ad creative that you have can impede or help based on the audience that you picked. You know, if I ran, you know, an ad to everybody in the United States and said click here for a free pony and it goes to my book page, I'm not going to sell that many books.
And the same thing is true at a more nuanced level for basically every ad. So you got to keep that in mind as you build your audience think about who's gonna see my ad and Is there any way that my ad could be misinterpreted as being for something else? Because it will be I promise you you know people will people will do all sorts of crazy things When they see ads and think that they think that you'll I'm sure if you've run ads a lot You've seen this saying like oh, I thought this was a movie Oh, I thought this was a video game and stuff like that So you do really want to be super careful about making sure that you're getting readers and the right kinds of readers looking at Your ads otherwise Facebook will learn learn the wrong way, and then show your ad to the wrong people. So if you have done this, there's a link at the bottom that says switch to original audience options, and it actually keeps everything that you put in, and then actually listens to it instead of takes it under advisement.
So this is how you want this to look. You want to see that version of it, and I just sort of want to have that as a PSA for everybody. Underneath this section, I didn't capture it in my screenshot, there's a thing that says use advantage plus audiences, and if you click that, then it also ignores all your suggestions. So just keep that in mind.
mind that you don't want to do any of their advantage plus stuff when it comes to audiences. You want to do it yourself. So of course, that raises the question.
I'm sure people are already thinking it. They're like, Mallory, what about this whole idea of you just basically target a massive group of people? In this top example, it's women age 30 to 65 in the United States, which is an audience of 85 million to 100 million. And that's a tactic that a lot of people have been talking about lately.
Stephen Higgs, I believe, has talked about that. And there's a couple other people that talk about using it as well. I've been doing it probably since about like late 2020, but I do it very selectively because Facebook can get it really right or they can get it really wrong.
And you have to have a bit of a higher budget to sort of do the experimentation with that particular tactic. The other reason why is I'm like, okay, well we can trust Facebook to figure stuff out, right? Until I started seeing romance ads being shown to all and exclusively men.
And I'm like, oh, maybe Facebook, maybe I've been giving them too much credit all this time. But you really do want to try and put. some interests in.
If you do say like, I really want to try this though, Mal. I want to try this super broad tactic where you just like show everybody your ad and then Facebook figures it out and shows the right people. I think that's great. I think you should always experiment.
But what I don't want you to do is think that there's a silver bullet that everybody else knows that you don't and have terrible FOMO and just be like, if I just keep trying this thing that worked for this person, it's going to work for me. I have authors. I could have three contemporary romance authors and we'll make three separate ads for each one. And one target's broad, one target's broad.
by genre, so we just target contemporary romance, and then maybe another one targets by authors, and we match their esteem level and target a whole bunch of authors. For each of these three romance authors, a different audience will work for each one, because everybody's book, everybody's blurb, title, cover, reviews, they're all different. So there's not something that works for other people that will be guaranteed to work for you. There's no such thing.
So don't feel like you have to keep banging your head against the wall when something isn't working. Try something else. Try another tactic.
Ask around if people have other ways of targeting these groups that they have or what kind of creative they might show and see if that can spur you on to a new thing. I've worked with, I probably collectively, even in the last six months, I've probably watched authors blow as much as $30,000 collectively on just trying to force tactics to work for them that just aren't working for them. So be aware of that. It doesn't have to work for you. You're you're not doing something wrong, it just might not be the right mix, and that's okay.
All right, so we want to talk a little bit about the pyramid of humans that see ads. And I don't know how readable this is, but the very top of the pyramid are people who are currently in the market for a new small country. It's a very small group of people that are out there buying countries or maybe like their third island or something like that.
And then below them are people looking for a house and then maybe someone buying their second Audi, people buying higher priced audiences. appliances like their new Samsung washing machine that yells at you from across the house that it needs detergent or something. And then your iPhone, tablet TV, lower-priced things like a new Ninja, air fryer, or leggings. And then the very bottom of this pyramid is people who are currently not buying anything. And the way that Facebook works is Facebook will show your ads to sorry, it'll show you the ads for the most expensive thing you're currently shopping for.
If you're out there shopping for new buttons for a sweater, And then you go to Zillow and start looking at houses. I can promise you that the internet is going to show you very few button ads and a lot of house ads. Because all the people running ads know how much these things cost. They have a lot of really advanced algorithms and whatnot.
They spend a lot of time on this, where they know how much they can charge the people running the ads based on what they're selling. And you can bet your bottom dollar that Facebook knows that we are selling a $5 product and we cannot afford a very high cost per click. I work in a lot of groups with authors, or not authors, sorry, marketers who are selling other things on Facebook, and a lot of times they're like, hey, if I got $2 a click, I'm happy. And we'd be like, dear God, $2 a click, like I would die if I had to pay $2 a click.
So it is, Facebook knows how much our product's worth. They also like go to Amazon and read about our book because they want to make sure we're not selling anything we shouldn't be, and they will think that your cozy mystery is selling adult services a fair amount of the time. You know, that does, happens a lot.
For whatever reason, the Facebook AIs really do seem to think that Cozy Mystery is somehow like secret porn. I'm not sure what's going on with that. So we really only get to advertise the people at the bottom of the pyramid. So that's why sometimes you'll build an audience.
You're like, this is a 10 million person audience, and I ran this ad for a year, and a quarter million people saw it. Why? It's because everybody else is buying countries and shit, and they're not buying your book.
So the other thing we have here, and again, this one's a little bit hard to see, but this is my Star Wars interest, the circle thing. Concentric circles. And at the outside of this thing is like people who've seen like one Star Trek movie one time.
You know, then you've got people who are kind of like into Star Trek, you know, they'll watch Mandalorian, they like Ahsoka, but they're probably not gonna watch like, I don't know, Clone Wars or something like that. They've made some choices. Then people have seen everything and then, you know, it gets better and better. And at the very beginning you've got the people that have their own Star Wars YouTube conspiracy theory channel, you know, and they're like, you're like, Jar Jar is the Sith Lord, right?
You know, those are those people at the center of that. Who knows that theory? The Jar Jar is this, okay, you guys are the right people here.
Awesome. So when you're running ads, that circle is actually even overlaid at the bottom of that pyramid. And so that's one of the reasons why we actually want to build really big audiences and why big audiences work better, because even if you've built this massive audience, you still want to target the people in the center of the interest circle who are at the bottom of the I'm spending money on shit pyramid.
So it ends up being a much smaller group of people that you target, which is why you do want to go big. So I recommend on any ad, you should be running over a one million person audience. And if you're running contemporary romance or mainstream thrillers, you should be having a 10 million person audience. If you're lower than that, your ad could be showing to a lot more people and probably work better and cost you less money as well. So definitely keep that in mind.
Also, if you narrow yourself to only advertising the Facebook feed, that will shrink your audience as well. Because a lot of these people are on Instagram. and your ads can absolutely work on Instagram.
If you're doing direct sales and you're selling things on Shopify, it'll actually even show you which placements made the sale. And I actually see Instagram Reels and Stories sell all the time. Instagram Feed, not so much, but Stories and Reels do work pretty well for selling books.
So all the placements do actually work. So the other thing that's really important is speaking to your audience. You know, if you go too broad with your targeting, how do you have the right message for them?
You know, so you want to think about that, like who am I showing my ad to, what are they interested in, and how do I convey that to them both in the text and the images that I'm using. And a great example for me is I write military science fiction, but I also write a lot of really high concept space opera with massive fleets and large strategies and nerdy science and all sorts of things. And also I write a lot of what will humans be like in the future. So my books tackle a lot of major topics. And like say for example if I'm writing, if I'm making an ad that's about ground-pounding soldiers like I got mechs and the mechs are like in the mud and they're like you know slinging depleted uranium rounds at each other and stuff like that, I'm gonna like be advertising to people who read David Webber and you know and people who have you know read Hammer Slammers and other like really gritty kind of stories like that.
But my main character is also a woman who was forcibly turned into a mech against her will and now is left with this body that's ruined that she hates. And that's a very different audience that's interested in that book. I can actually write, I can talk to people about that particular angle and have an entirely different group of people who will resonate with that and be interested in getting the book. So I will pick my audience and I will then pick my ad copy and the message I'm sending to people in accordance with the audience that I'm picking. I'm not going to like, you know, try and target, I mean actually to be honest it would work in a lot of regards too to target a lot of war vets and stuff like that.
I think a lot of them might resonate with that. They've got a lot of messages, but I still might find. And generally speaking, I find that women resonate better with one message, and generally speaking, men resonate better with another one. So I can adjust my targeting based on the kind of messages and tropes I'm using. So keep that in mind as you're building your ads, that you do really want to think about, who am I showing the ad to, and what am I showing them, and what message is more likely to resonate with them.
If you've ever done marketing, you'll find that people do things like they have an ideal audience. They'll create archetypes of the people that they're marketing to. And they'll have one archetype that maybe is an intern, and they need to satisfy the needs of the intern to get their job done. And the other archetype is the marketing director, and they need to provide a product that will work for the marketing director and match their needs.
And they think about, well, this feature's for the intern, and this feature's for the marketing director. The same thing is true with your books. These themes and tropes are for this kind of reader, and these themes and tropes are for this kind of reader.
I can speak to them. to them differently. So definitely something to keep in mind.
So with all of that said, I want to dive back into the actual looking at Facebook ads themselves to analyze if they're working. And there's a lot of columns you can enable and stuff like that. And I'm going to tell you right now, you actually only need to look at three of them. These three columns will tell you everything you need to know about whether or not your ad's working for the most part. There are two more advanced columns that take like 45 minutes on their own to kind of get into.
But they're usually like something you only look at if an ad's been working. running for like six months or something like that and you want to see are you reaching new people but most of the time this is really all you need to look at cost per result is going to be how much money it costs you to get the result for a traffic ad that's basically synonymous with your cost per unique outbound click because it's you know the individual humans that are clicking that's a result if you're running Shopify ads for example your cost per result is how much money it costs to get someone to click that you know checkout button at the end of the add to cart process and give you money If you're running reader magnet ads to BookFunnel, your result is going to be how much money it costs to get a conversion on BookFunnel, which is going to be an email address. And you'll be like, it's costing me only 30 cents to get an email address, which is actually a really good deal.
But for most of us, it's going to be traffic ads that we care about the most. And you're going to want to find cost per results generally under 20 cents per click. If you're writing something more mainstream, like mainstream thrillers or contemporary romance, you're going to want to see the cost per result under 15 cents per click.
And you can get them even lower, especially if you use video. I work with a lot of authors that will take their best TikToks and will run those as video ads on Facebook. And we can actually run those sometimes as low as like three or four cents per click for a little while, and then they'll go up. Most people probably start video ads around eight cents per click, but they work pretty well. And you can even run multiple video ads at the same time and get really good cost per results.
Result rate is another metric. It's not on by default. You have to click in the upper right on the ad manager.
There's a box that says columns. You have to click. that and then go down to customize columns and when you click that it'll open up another window and then you can choose result rate and enable that it's like the second check box down it's super easy to find and then frequency is like the fourth check box down.
Result rate is the percentage of people who saw your ad and then clicked and so if you don't feel like enabling a column it's just results divided by impressions number of people that saw that then took did the thing that you want. Result rate is a really good indicator about like are people liking what they they're seeing. seeing? Have you picked the right audience?
Are you showing the right imagery to the right audience? The higher your result rate is, the more longevity your ad is going to have and the more likelihood is, the higher the likelihood is going to be that you're going to get people that will convert and buy because they like what they saw and they bought. Provided again that you're not saying click here for free pony, right?
You can get a great result rate on that, but you're going to get really low conversions. So you do want to make sure that always that the ad they see is going to align with the Amazon product page or whatever product page they're going to end up seeing. That they're like, okay, I clicked on this and I I see this and it's connected, I understand these two things. And then frequency is basically, are the same people seeing the ad a lot? And over a 30-day period on a standard creative ad, your frequency should be under two.
And if you're running dynamic creative, your frequency should be under three. I'm not going to talk a lot about dynamic creative and standard creative in this one, but if you look at my talk from last year about, I think it's like how to easily set up Facebook ads, I talk about those two options and how they work. So those are really the only three numbers you have to think about.
have to look up in Facebook. And do I have a slide? I think I accidentally moved it later. But for result rates, if you're writing contemporary romance, your result rate should be over 8%, ideally over 10%. If you're writing more genre fiction or genre romance, like you're writing sci-fi romance or fun monster porn or something like that, no laughs for fun monster porn?
Come on. I did it quick. I was figuring I could get some laughs in there as I moved along.
Anyway. That stuff, more genre stuff, you're going to find yourself in like the 6 to 8 maybe percent result rate. And then if you're writing, if you get super niche, like for example myself, I write military science fiction with queer women as the main characters.
And so that, I'm usually lucky to get around 4% for my result rate. Sometimes I can get as high as 6%. So if you, say for example, you're writing mainstream thriller, you've got like a Jack Reacher main character or something like that, and your result rate is 2%, you're missing your mark. So either you've targeted the wrong audience or you're showing them some something that they don't care about.
You should be, you know, so you can kind of use those as rough guidelines. And again, very few people see over 10% result rate. And that's kind of actually good to know, right?
That like, hey, 10% of the people that see, or sorry, 90% of the people that see pretty much every ad just don't care. So you're not like alone. You're not failing.
If you're like, why does no one care about my ad? They should see my book and instantly want to read it, right? You know, it is normal. That's the way it works. Also, you have to remember, you know, on Facebook, we're not advertising to people who are currently looking for books.
We're advertising for people who just. surfing cat pics, you know, so we're sort of a surprise to them sometimes. Okay, so what your acceptable cost per result is, is unique to you.
Everybody has a, well, not everybody, I guess there's probably cohorts they fall into, but that's an autistic moment for me there. Everybody has a different acceptable cost per result and it's going to come through three things. The first one is what is your read through, sell through value? So, you know, if you're in, if you're wide, it's only sell through.
that you care about, but if you're in K, you care about both the read-through and the sell-through value on your series. And what that means is when someone picks up book one, how much money do you make when they're done? How many people actually make it through to the end and finish your book, and it drops off?
So say, for example, every time I sold a book, I made $3 royalty. Let's just pretend I priced it, so I got that. I'm never going to make $9 every time I sell book one, because not everybody that picks up book one is going to read all three books.
books in my series. I'm going to get a bit of a drop off. And it's probably going to be in the neighborhood of four to five dollars that I'll make each time someone reads a series. So an easy way to figure this out is I just released some new software called Solaris that you can use to determine this.
It's like for just the read-through part, it's ten dollars. You pay once, you have it forever. And it helps, like it's useful that you can see a lot of historical information. Author Helper Tools, formerly Reader Links, also has this built into their software. And also there's a spreadsheet that I have available.
If you've ever bought the Help My Facebook Ads Sock Book, there's a link in the back of that to a spreadsheet that you can fill in to figure out your read-through as well. So they're all three great ways of finding out how much money you make when a book sells. And a cool thing, you can't quite see it up there, but one of the numbers I give is every time you make a sale of book one and then include KU, how much money will you make?
Because KU, when you're running ads and you're relying a lot on KU, it can take weeks for those KU reads to show up. someone like sees your ad and then they borrow your book, but there's 10 other books in front of yours, you know, and they read those ones first and then pick your book up like in the second week, but then they go on vacation. So they read it on the beach in their Kindle and there's no wifi and the battery dies.
And then they get back home and don't charge their, their Kindle for a week. And then you get those reads. So, I mean, that's obviously kind of like a worst case scenario, but that explains why one of some of the reasons why KU reads don't show up right away.
So the neat thing about the software that I wrote is it says like, hey, based on your KU to sales. ratio, every time you sell a book, you're going to get about this many KU reads. So you can have a bit more of an instant metric coming back as for whether or not an ad's working, provided you get a decent number of sales. There are some people who are so lopsided that they're like 97% KU, 3% sales, and it won't work as well in those cases.
All right. So the other thing you need to figure out is how many clicks it takes to make a sale or a borrow. I'm going to talk about that in a little more detail later when I get into attribution links, but you do need to figure out need to figure this out. How many clicks is it taking to get that sale to happen? And then lastly, you'll multiply that by your average cost per result, and that's going to tell you how much money it costs to sell a book.
So you can see here, I've just did some examples. If I have a CPC of 25 cents and it takes 30 cents to sell a book, well, that means it's going to cost me, sorry, 30 clicks to sell a book. So it's 30 clicks times 0.25. It works out to $7.50.
And up at the top here, I have my series read-through at $6.50. That means I lose a buck. But even if you could get your your cost per result or cost per click, which are synonymous most of the time, down to 20 cents, and you could sell a book in 20 clicks, well, now it only costs you $4 to sell that book and you make $2.50.
And then a crazy example is all the way down at the bottom, where if you were paying 10 cents per click and sold a book every 10 clicks, you'd make $5.50. So those numbers matter a lot. You can have some ads that even in that 25 to 20 cents per click range, there could be ads that are losing money or making money. So understanding these these numbers is really important to have ads working. I have some help here in analyzing cost per result.
So, like, basically anything over 30 cents per click, the ad has a serious issue. If you have, and I always look at averages, by the way. Don't look at just, like, today's cost per result or yesterday's cost per result.
The data is lumpy enough that you'll just drive yourself crazy if you try to look at daily numbers. Usually look at, like, weekly or monthly averages to see where your cost per results are. But if I have an ad that's up over 30 cents per click for seven days, that ad's going to...
problem. The audience is driving Facebook is, you know, just I have creative fatigue or something like that. Something needs to be done. Sometimes every now and then, ads will flip and start showing for less than five cents per click. And if that happens for a decent amount of time, that also means something could be wrong with your ad.
You might have picked worldwide as your location. You might have accidentally picked the wrong country in general. Or a lot of bots are, for whatever reason, clicking on your ad.
And that does happen sometimes. And they click really cheap. And then you get no conversions.
Your sales just completely dry up for that ad. And that usually means that you have to just actually remake it from scratch. It's a bug that Facebook has. has too, I feel like, that that happens.
Because it seems to come in waves, where suddenly a bunch of ads will drop down really cheap, and the only way to fix them is to remake them, and then it doesn't happen again for a few more months. But that's something worth noting as well. If you ever talk to a Facebook rep, they're going to give you great advice, like try targeting Argentina, because you can get three cents per click in Argentina. And you're like, great. They don't have an Amazon store.
I don't think they do, at least. And if they did, they probably still wouldn't buy my book. And I've actually had them suggest that you choose the worldwide audience, which is like...
like a specific thing. And then basically before you wake up, all of your ad spend will have been spent in the Philippines. And you won't sell very many books from that either.
So that's something to look out for. Don't ever take that advice when they give it, which is unfortunately more often than they should. And I do have just some ideal cost per results that you should be looking for in there as well.
All right. And then placements, we actually did talk about placements. And that's at the very bottom of the ad set page where you choose where your ad shows. And some people will say only ever show it in the Facebook feed. In my opinion, logic is the same humans that are looking at ads in other places.
Why not show it to them? With the one exception being reels, I don't recommend showing non-video ads on reels because what will happen is people will see your ad, they're flipping through reels, they see your ad, and it doesn't start playing. So they tap it thinking that maybe I have to touch this to make it play, right? And then they end up on your Amazon page and like, well, I'm looking at cat videos right now.
I'm not looking to buy a book and they go back. So if you're running static images, I recommend not showing them on reels. But all the other places can work and you can do it. what's called a breakdown on ads. You go into the ad manager, there's actually a button that says breakdown in the upper right, and you can choose to do a breakdown by placements and see, you know, on this particular ad, the right column on the desktop is getting 15 cents per click, and the main Facebook feed is 21 cents per click.
And you can look at that data and say, like, okay, well, Facebook feed is usually the benchmark. If there's stuff that's cheaper than that, that's gravy. If there's stuff that's more expensive than that, I might turn those placements off.
So look at your placements and evaluate them. Am I getting a good copy? cost per result in this placement?
Is my result rate okay? And is the frequency too high? Am I just spamming this placement with my ad and no one's engaging?
So you can look at your individual placements that way. And then you'll also be able to examine your creative the same way too. This one shows in the upper left, you can see there's like a dropdown. It's a little bit hard to see, but sometimes if your screen's small enough, you have the button doesn't say breakdown, it just has some columns.
And you click that and you scroll all the way down to the bottom and it'll say by dynamic. creative element, and then you can choose image, text, or headline, or description. Even if you don't run dynamic creative, you have the option to run multiple text options, and then you can actually see, you know, which of these are working well.
And images are usually the most lumpy, where one image will be winning and the other images will barely be being shown. But you can see here that there's actually a huge variety, where one image is eight cents per click, and then there's another image that's all the way up to 13 cents per click, and they have wildly different result rates, too. Because you might look at that and think, well, geez, are that eight cost per result image is, it's only been shown 157 times.
And the reason why is if you look at the result rate, I'll just sort of step back, it's 3.18%. So Facebook on its own is being like, wow, no one gives a shit about this picture, and they don't like it when they see it, so I'm hardly going to show it, even though it's cheap. So they usually actually, on their own, are going to find the best combination of price and result rate, and that's actually what they're going to show the most. So what I would actually recommend is if you do find... one that has a really good price and a really good result rate, start weeding out the other ones that aren't working.
Because something that happens a lot is you'll be running an ad, it'll be working great, and then suddenly it just falls off a cliff and all the conversions dry up. And if you go back and look at when it was running great, you might find it was showing entirely different images. And then when it fell off a cliff, Facebook switched for whatever reason, just felt like it, and started showing another image or maybe another piece of text more commonly, and that one doesn't convert. So once you have one that's working or a couple that are working, it's good to prune out the ones that really aren't doing it. doing anything, lest Facebook switch to them and start showing them.
That's a relatively new thing it started doing lately. All right. And this is here just a screenshot of what direct sales look like.
So if anyone hasn't run direct sales ads before on Facebook, your cost per result column stays the same, but now it's this crazy high number. And you're like, oh my God. But you see underneath it says per purchase. So let's say, for example, you're selling on your Shopify store a $19.99 bundle.
then you can tell that two of these ads are profitable and one of them probably isn't unless you have an upsell that everybody takes all the time on your Shopify store maybe it'll work out. You'll also see that the result rates are wildly different and they don't line up with the regular traffic result rates and really to be honest when you're doing direct sales what matters the most is cost per result because it will just flat-out tell you whether or not you're making or losing money on your ad right there on the Facebook page which is pretty handy and you also notice too that when you're doing direct sales your cost per outbound click which is pretty analogous to the cost per result when you're running traffic ads because it's when it says unique well this is just cost per outbound click it's a cost per result normally like on a traffic ad it isn't necessarily a unique human if you were to if someone were to click on your ad one day and then click like a day later Facebook would count that as two results so that's why I use cost per outbound click as the as a number that's close to that and you would you know normally if you're paying a buck thirty eight per click You'd be like, my God, I need to turn this ad off now, but because this is direct sales and you're spending $12 to make $20, that's actually a pretty good deal. And it's also really nice, too, when you're running direct sales because, you know, Shopify is going to send you that money in three or four days.
Whereas if you're running Facebook ads, you oftentimes have to float your Facebook bill for 60 to 90 days before Amazon pays you. So it's kind of an added bonus for folks who do that, too. Because sometimes one thing you want to think about, too, if you're going to run a really big ad campaign, and you're going to spend a lot of money, and you might have to put that money on a credit card, start that ad campaign at the end of the month.
Because a book you sell on January 1st, you get paid for that book at the end of March. But a book you sell on January 31st, you get paid at the end of March, right? So in that scenario, you float for 60 days, whereas if you were doing a big ad campaign on the 1st, you'd be floating the bill for 90 days. So just a little thing to think about. All right, so result rate.
Oh, I did have the slide out of order. This is the slide that I was... trying to remember precisely all the numbers for. So that can be useful in just sort of knowing, is your result rate kind of like in the pocket that it should be?
I mean, better result rates are even better, but, you know, they're pretty rare. So these are ones that you would normally see people attaining. And beyond that is pretty uncommon. So you might be thinking like, wow, I just went and looked at my ads and my result rates are 1% and I'm running traffic. So they should be higher than that.
These numbers are for traffic ads, again, by the way. Different campaign types will have different result rates. So you're thinking that, right?
Why does my result rate suck? And the answer is that the ad is not resonating with the audience. So usually what I do is I examine the audience first.
Like did I like, did I like have trouble building a big audience and kind of throw the kitchen sink in there? You know, am I like targeting like anybody who ever liked a sci-fi movie ever kind of thing and and it's not working that well? Maybe I should be a little more focused and and pick this, pick stuff that aligns with my genre. Or you're like, no, I do actually have a really tight and focused audience. You know, I went and like, because you can do this, I went and like tried to enter in every single romance author in existence and found like all these romance authors that match my heat level.
And they, you know, they write the same tropes that I write. So I've definitely had people who are my audience and my result rate still sucks. Well, in that case, then it's probably your image. You've got the right people, but you're showing them the wrong thing and they just don't care. In fact, I say that one slide later.
So always, So first, like, take that look at your audience. Just make sure, just do a quick sanity check. Because maybe, or maybe you just, you forgot to choose women for your romance ad. Or you forgot to choose men for your military science fiction ad that's targeted at men.
You know, definitely pay attention to that. Or this is something I struggle with a lot. Like, my main characters for my books are all women.
And because it's the 42nd century, you can basically look like whatever you want. So most people choose to look, like, good. And so my ads are generally fairly attractive women. And then I run my ads mostly to men.
So you can get a lot of clicks that don't convert to anything because men like clicking on ads of pretty women. And don't think you're better women because Manchest is still one of the best images that you can show on an ad to get clicks. So as it turns out, both men and women are visual and we like pretty things. Who would have thunk it?
But anyway, so do think about that sometimes. Do think like, okay, well, am I showing something that is too interesting to the people that I'm showing it to in a way that doesn't relate to my book? So I know it's a lot.
That's a very nebulous thing to think about, but when you're looking at an individual ad, you know, and saying like, this isn't working, just think, what are all the ways people can misinterpret this information and kind of go from there? Oh my God, I only have four minutes left. Last time I looked, I had 20. What happened?
Okay. We already talked about that. I have my slides out of order again. This always happens to me.
All right, we're going to talk conversion. So using Amazon attribution links, we've actually had them for just over a year now, and I can barely even imagine what life was like before we had these things. We used to, well I know what it was, we used to use affiliate links and just sort of like say like I got some sales on my affiliate link with Amazon, I think my ads are working, and then they shut down your account because it's a violation of actually the law to use affiliate links on ads. So they gave us the Attribution link system, it's tucked inside AMS. If you actually go look if you go into AMS There'll be a little bar graph on the side You can mouse over that and it'll say affiliates and you click on that and you can make these tracking links and you use these Tracking links you can use them everywhere use them in the back of your book use them in your newsletter use them on your app ads and you can see like, hey, this thing I did, how many reads and sales did I get from it?
This particular graph, the blue line is clicks, and the green line is the number of page reads, and this is the default view that it gives when you come in there. Then down below, and this is for multiple ad groups. That's how the affiliate system calls them and an ad group is analogous to an ad set on Facebook mostly.
But the neat thing is you can say like okay I've got this particular ad here and I'm running on Facebook and I've got 5600 clicks. That number. be close-ish to what the Facebook number is. And the interesting thing here as well is I have 75,358 pages read off of those clicks.
And I don't know if that's a good thing or not. This particular author actually has a ton of purchases too off that. that number of clicks, which is really great.
They've got a really good numbers for both of those. But this is not the full number of people or the full number of reasons that ad got. This thing usually misses about half of the pages read and about half of the clicks.
And there's a number of reasons for that. But one of the main ones is there's a lot of people out there who will click on an ad and then pick up a different device and buy the thing on the other device. I actually was talking to this one author about that.
And she's like, that's me. She's like, I take screenshots of like anything that I like and then I buy it later on my computer. So people do that.
Or this thing only tracks for 14 days, or maybe they're using an ad blocker that blocks the tracking codes. There's a whole bunch of reasons why this system may miss the sales. So if you look at this and you're like, my God, I spent $700 and it says I only made $328, well, you might still be profitable because this thing is going to miss a lot of the read-through and it's even going to miss a lot of the initial sales.
So really what the attribution system is good for is comparing two ads head-to-head, or three ads, or four ads. Remember before I was talking about having... about having, sorry, I saw the time and my brain froze for a second there, about having like three different, entirely different audiences working for three different romance authors is because we would use different attribution links for each one.
And then we would say, oh, this particular ad is getting us more pages read. And so the easiest way to look at attribution data and tell if it's working is divide your clicks by your reads, or sorry, reads by clicks. So reads divided by clicks.
So in that particular case, it was 75,000 reads divided by 5,600 clicks. clicks, and if that number at the end is more than 10, then the ad is probably working, provided you have a series with some good read through. So if you've got like a three book series or more, and you divide your number of pages read by your number of clicks, if it's bigger than 10, it's probably working. If it's under 10, it might be, where is it? Is it like at two?
Then that ad is not working. Is it at like eight? Then maybe you could tweak it a bit and see if you can get a higher number out of that. Is it over 20?
Increase the spend on that ad. It's probably making you you really good money. And then if you are wide or you also just get a decent number of sales as well, what you want to do is divide your clicks by your sales. If it's taking you fewer than 50 clicks to make a sale, then the ad is likely working. It might be depending on your read through, your pricing, and read through pricing, I guess it's those two things.
That might not be profitable. It might be profitable. If you have a 12 book series and you get great read through, one sale every 50 clicks is like probably doubling your money. money.
If you've got two books and your read-through is like 10%, then no, this is probably not making you money unless your book is like $8 and that's enough to pay for the ad. If your clicks to sale is under 30 clicks to make a sale, then your ad is definitely profitable. And if it's like under 10, then you are super lucky and you should be like running that ad at like $500 a day. If you're selling, if you sell a book every 10 clicks, actually double check all the numbers, make sure everything's right. And if it is, yeah, up that spend because that is a a sign of definitely a profitable book.
All right. So last thing, profit. I just talked about that. Hooray.
The last thing, the last, last thing is ROI is a lie, which is awesome because we gave away pins that said, I love ROI. So it's sort of. So I've got, oh my God, I'm at the end.
We're just going to power through this last thing because I really want you to think about this. In scenario A, I spend a hundred dollars on ads and I get $400 in sales. Scenario B, I spent $800 on ads.
I get $1,400 in sales. So scenario A is 300% ROI. It's amazing.
I'm tripling my money, and I walk away with $300. In scenario B, I have 75% ROI, but I make twice as much money. So do think about that.
As you increase your ad spend, your ROI will go down, but it's entirely likely that you could be walking away with more money. So don't worship only at the altar of ROI. Think about what are the numbers actually work out to.
And you might say, like, wow, at 30% ROI, I can make $1,000. $15,000 a day and that would be really cool. So you can check out more about us at thewritingwives.com slash Vegas.
We have some special offers for folks who are here. You can get a little bit money off of, I think $300 off our consulting. We also will be doing a live, more basic ad class where I walk through all the steps of creating the ads, what I would choose for different audiences, how we do creative, all that stuff. It's a three hour class and there's a discount on that too.
And it'll be live, I think on the 17th. Jill nodded. It's going to be on the 17th. So thank you very much, everybody. I think we have a couple minutes for questions if you want to come up, and then we'll have to get out of here Thank you.