Facebook ad sells a Trillion Books!

Well, I tried out advertising on Facebook to see if I could gather a bit more interest in my novel Jolted: Newton Starker's Rules for Survival. Anyone who is on Facebook will know that ads appear on the right hand side of every page. That was the space I was buying. You can choose to pay for the number of impressions that an ad has (that is how many times it appears on the side of the page) or you can choose to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. I chose the second option, believing I'd get a fair number of impressions before someone actually clicked on it. There is also a "bidding" system, which means you are competing with other people for that ad space.

Here's the ad I came up with:




Catchy, eh? I thought the title would grab people's attention. I made sure they knew it was a YA book, since I didn't want people to click on it (and cost me money) unless they were truly interested. If you click on the ad now, you'll go to the page that people would have gone to.











These are the "targets" I chose. Since my book was released in the U.S. a month or so ago, I thought I'd try getting the attention of readers there. The other choices are a bit more obvious.






The ads ran on April 15th and 16th. I, of course, didn't see them since I'm in Canada. Here are the results:






As you can see there were 328,000 impressions and 107 people clicked the ads. I paid $25 (U.S) per day for a total of $50.00. I also used google analytics and my own website stats to verify the results.

My conclusions: The advertising worked in that it brought people to my website. I have links to several online bookstores, but there's no way to measure how many books I actually sold. My Amazon.com #'s went from around 800,00 to 700,000 and are now at 250,000--but figuring out Amazon #'s will drive one mad. Mad, I tell you! The rise in my ranking may mean that my mom bought a few copies. I would have to sell about 25 books to make back the amount I invested, so I highly doubt that 1 in 4 of my new visitors bought books (though maybe they went to a nearby story and bought all of my books). But at least now there are 107 people who are either going "that was a neato book" or "geez, I'm never gonna get the 10 seconds I spent on that website back."

Overall, it was an interesting experiment which wasn't too expensive to my pocket book (uh, can anyone loan me $50.00? Anyone?). If I were to do it again, I would probably set up a page specifically for Facebook visitors with some kind of offer for free bookmarks, just so I could track them. I'd also put a link so that they could sign up on my listserv. Or I could have the ad go directly to B&N or Amazon or another bookseller and see if that improves sales.

Anyway, that's my Facebook ad experiment. Anyone else have some interesting advert experiences?


Art