Last week I wrote a blog post
describing my Twitter Ad experience. Over the next few days, I was asked by several people (one of
whom was an editor from BookLife) if I have used other platforms for book
advertisements and how those ads performed. I have used Facebook to advertise—I'm not talking about "boosting" a post, but rather a real ad targeted at romance readers. The questions
caused me to do a little digging and I found a graph from one of my Facebook ad
campaigns that is fairly comparable to the Twitter ad I posted about last week. Here are the bare facts regarding the Facebook ad:
Date of ad: October 26th
and 27th of 2014—48 hours
Total Spent: $50
Total Views: 33,811
Engagements: 1,136
Engagement Rate: 3.36%
Cost Per Engagement: $0.04
Book Sales: 0
*Amazon Sales Rank on October 25th : #94,220
Amazon Sales Rank
on October 26th : #101,690
Amazon Sales Rank
on October 27th : #165,114
Amazon Sales Rank
on October 28th : #175,668
After looking over all the
information, I must conclude that paid Facebook ads do not sell books.
However, there is no way for me to tell if the exposure was a benefit; after all, over 33,000 people saw my book cover, my name, and the fact
that I’m a USA Today Bestselling Author, and over 1,100 of them noticed enough to engage with the ad in some way (with a "like" or a share or a comment).
If you’ve used Facebook,
Twitter, Goodreads, etc, I’d love for you to leave a comment below and tell me
about your experience, whether successful or unsuccessful. Thanks! This is great information for Indie Authors to have available.
*To find your book’s Sales
Rank on any given day, log into AuthorCentral.com, click “sales information”
located along the top bar, click “sales rank” in the dropdown menu, and then
click the down arrow in the box marked “all books” to choose a particular
title. Once you’ve selected a title, use the various time spans offered (2
weeks, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, all available) to gather the
information you need.
