Not you-you specifically. Not you, [FIRST_NAME] [LAST_NAME], who lives in [CITY], and likes [FAVORITE_THING]. Stalking you would be creepy. I am referring to a more abstract you: the potential audience for the things I write, such as this blog post and my fiction. That you. Facebook’s built its bazillion-dollar empire on helping people like me stalk people like you.
Spoiler: This post will not tell you how you should set up and run a Facebook ad campaign.
Customer vs. Product
If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
This is the essential fact of Facebook and multitude of “free” media sites, social and otherwise. If you are not paying a dotcom for its services, it’s a safe bet that someone else is paying that dotcom to access your eyeballs. There is nothing inherently sinister about this. The hippest alternative free weekly newspapers of the 20th Century had ad-supported business models. Facebook took this model to a new level by promising to put the right advertisement in front of the right eyeballs by exploiting what it learned about a user/product-unit’s demographics, tastes, and interests. This makes the customers (advertisers) salivate and the products (users) cringe.
Marketing is an acquired skillset and an acquired taste. Having matured enough to respect and seek the skills of a marketer, I decided to try a taste of Facebook ads. Come with me now as we cross Facebook’s product-customer barrier…
Set the orbital mind-control laser to…
Knowing—or at least deciding on—what you want your ad to do is the first step to conquering the world. I chose to Get More Website Visitors. Sending clicks straight to the Amazon product page was not an option and might have lost folks who get their books elsewhere. There is another benefit/hazard to inviting potential readers to slflynn.com which I will discuss later in this post.
The goal guides the ad set-up process. I went with the default daily budget. As a sub-experiment, I changed the graphics from what you see on this site to feature a blue biofluid background. The idea there is that the red biofluid of the book’s cover will pop. What do you think?
The biggest question remained. Who are you? You, the reader whose eyeballs I want and need to rent.
Know your target audience.
Or take a wild-ass guess and see how it works. Amazon lets you target keywords (including other books) or lets you trust-fall into the magic of its algorithms. Facebook has you describe the products (users) whose eyeballs you want to rent. Therein lies the art and science. Facebook will provide hints about the science. For this experimental ad campaign, I used the following audience profile.
At my most grandiose, I want everyone, everywhere, to read and enjoy my novel. This audience profile narrows the scope of the campaign a bit.
Location – Living In United States
Age 20 – 65+
Language English (UK) or English (US)
People Who Match Interests: Speculative fiction, E-books, Thriller novels, Suspense or Fiction books, Education Level: College grad or Some college, Undergrad Years: 1980-2025
Note: I know for a fact that readers outside of this profile have enjoyed Raether’s Enzyme.
The science-y part of Facebook says that these parameters successfully whittle the ad targeting from 2.45 billion global users and 225 million US users down to mere 120 million users. Focused like a laser!
Or not. As the little gauge at the bottom suggests, this is still rather broad. Part of what makes it so broad isn’t visible above. It turns out that the interests are combined with a logical OR. If you remove ‘Fiction books’ from the equation and leave the remaining sub-categories of speculative fiction, thriller, and suspense, the audience contracts by 35 million. That refinement is something I will test in another experiment.
One week
Over the course of the ad’s one-week run, results trickled in. The first evidence was in my own Facebook news feed.
The rest of the story played out on various dashboards.
Traffic to my blog (which, as of this writing gets very little) rose during the week with referrals from the ad.
The peaks on April 14th and 15th are…interesting. Wednesday and Thursday. Was Facebook placing my ad more vigorously on those days and saving the weekends for bigger advertisers? Or are those just days people are more inclined to explore books from unfamiliar authors?
There was a corresponding (small) uptick in book page views on Smashwords.
At the end of the week, Facebook had many graphs to share with me. They had shown the ad to 2,360 people. The eyeballs they found for my ad tended to be older. The older the audience member, the more likely they were to be female.
Within the various United States, the audience shook out along the lines predicted by the states’ populations, with Texas nudging California out of first place for unknown reasons.
My own use of Fb is limited, so I was surprised by the number of places Facebook found to slide my little ad into.
Tucked away in a different corner of Facebook, the Ads Manager, I found one of the juicier graphs.
Of the 2,360 people who saw the ad, 52 people clicked on it. That’s almost two percent, which doesn’t sound like much, but is actually pretty good. Amazon showed my ad to nearly 43,000 people to get the same number of clicks. The cost-per-click was much better on Facebook than my various experiments with Amazon Advertising. On Amazon, I had spent $123 for 52 clicks. The Facebook ad had netted the same number of clicks for $35. Facebook covered $20 of that with an ad credit. Thanks, Facebook!
So, Facebook ads are better than Amazon ads, right? Not so fast. The Amazon ad clicks went straight to the Amazon product page. The Facebook ads came here to slflynn.com. Of those visitors, 16 clicked a link to the Amazon product page and one clicked over to Barnes & Noble. It cost about $1 to get Facebook eyeballs to the point where they might buy the book. This is better than $2.37 I paid for Amazon eyeballs. But it is not a matter of better. It is a matter of less bad.
NaN
Computers are great at working with most numbers, but there are various semi-exotic classes of numbers where CPUs must throw up their hands and walk away. These “numbers” are Not a Number (NaN) as far as the computer is concerned.
An important metric of success for an advertising campaign is what Amazon calls the Advertising Cost of Sales (ACOS). It is amazingly easy to calculate. You divide the cost of your ad by the amount you made in sales driven by that ad. If you sold zero goods, then the ACOS is NaN, because dividing by zero is a flavor of mathematical infinity that computers really do not like.
My Amazon and Facebook ad campaigns resulted in zero book sales. Their ACOS is NaN. I spent less to fail on Facebook, so that campaign was less bad.
Abandon all hope, ye who advertise here.
Nah. These are early experiments. 43,000 and 2,360 seem like big numbers, but they are small samples in the scope of Amazon and Facebook audiences. Less than one hundred people reaching the sales pages and not buying is disappointing, but the general statistics suggest that only a small fraction of people that reach the page of an unfamiliar author and book proceed to buy it. Now is not time to panic. Not yet. But it is time to experiment some more. Perhaps the current blurb is not closing the deal. Perhaps a more refined audience or better keywords will connect the book with the readers who will enjoy it.
I may yet grab your eyeballs.
Okay, that did sound creepy.