He Craved Her Salt

A Poem

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Facebook and Google Ads for Authors

Please find the intro of this series on Marketing for Authors here.

Whenever I mention that I work in Marketing to an author, usually the first question I’m asked is “how do I run ads for my book?”

I am happy to give advice on setting these up, because I know that’s the answer to the question they’ve asked. But there’s an unasked question, one that I try to answer as well by providing as much context and information around the world of digital advertising as I can.

That question is: Should I run ads for my book?

The answer, if you’re a traditionally published author, is very like No. No, you should not. (Update Oct 2022: I’ve changed my answer to “Maybe”. You can read more on why here)

To understand why, let’s start with how online advertising works and the strategies employed by companies that use it successfully, then we should think of that in the context of being an author who receives a royalty via a publishing contract.

How does digital advertising work?

The benefit of digital advertising is that you can see direct causation. I ran an ad, I can see the number of clicks it got, and then the number of purchases that occurred as a result. This is something that TV and radio ads always tried to achieve (quote “SALE2021 when you purchase today!”), but digital ads mastered. It means that people can see exactly how much money they earned for the amount that they spent.

Facebook and Google then take that purchase data, analyse aggregated metrics about the people who purchased (what other things have they expressed an interest in? Do they follow any similar pages or click on other ads?), then update the targeting of the campaign based on those similarities. This means the longer a campaign runs and the more people who purchase, the more it learns how to show ads only to the people who are most likely to find your ad of interest. This is what it means when you hear the phrase “Interest-Based Targeting”.

[Something I’m not going to delve into in-depth in this post is the ethics around said interest-based targeted ads. This is another reason why I caution people away from digital ads, because there is so much legislation, policy, and personal comfort levels at play here that it becomes extremely complex. The short answer is that there are ways to do this ethically, and there are ways to do this unethically. Interest-based targeting, when done anonymously, in aggregate, targeting adults who have given permission, can be done ethically. For the most part, following the prompts in the advertising dashboard will help you from straying into running ads in a problematic way, because more parameters and regulations have been put in place in recent years. In the end you have to decide for yourself whether you’re comfortable with using advertising platforms that have been used for unethical behaviours. This paragraph has been edited based on feedback in the hopes of making it clearer to read.]

The thing is though: when you’re traditionally published, the ads don’t work that way, because you don’t get purchase data. You can see clicks, but unless you are selling the book yourself, you have no way of seeing whether your ad successfully led to someone purchasing a book. So already you are working with less data, and the campaigns themselves are unable to optimise. I could optimise my campaign to get more clicks by using some click-bait headline, but that doesn’t mean people will purchase. Or maybe it does? Who knows, without the ability to see that?

Imagine a company that is successfully running digital ads…

A company that is successfully running digital ads will have a budget purely for running those ads. Let’s say this budget is $10,000 per month (sorry, I know you probably just fainted. Bear with me, as it’s easier to explain things using larger numbers).

For that $10,000 per month, we will get a certain number of impressions. Meaning, the number of times your ad is seen (not the number of people who have seen it!). A percentage of those impressions turn into clicks, and then a percentage of those clicks turn into purchases.

NUMBERS STUFF

For those who get overwhelmed by numbers, jargon, and formulas, feel free to skip this section.

The number of impressions you get for your $10,000 monthly spend is calculated based on what’s called an eCPM (estimated cost per mille). An average eCPM might be $10 for 1000 impressions. This means for your $10K per month, you are getting 1,000,000 impressions per month based on this formula:

A million impressions sounds great, right?

Not so fast.

Still sounds pretty good though! Surely people wouldn’t click on an ad unless they intend to buy the book. If those 10,000 people each spend $10 on a book, that’s $100,000 on a $10,000 investment. Amazing! No wonder everyone’s talking about running ads!

In this scenario, that is 100 books. Multiply that by the $10 purchase price, and you’ve now earned $1000 when you’ve spent $10,000.

Except… you haven’t actually earned $1000. If you’re a traditionally published author, you’ve only earned a 10% royalty on that $1000, meaning you’ve earned $100 for the $10,000 you spent.

Hang on. This all sounds very gloom and doom. If the numbers were this bad, no one would ever run ads!

You’re right! I’ll admit, I did tweak the numbers to keep the percentages clean (1% instead of 1.5%, for example, or a $10 eCPM instead of a $4.50 eCPM). If you mush those numbers around, you will find variations where they work out. Those numbers are averages only.

Here are some reasons why people are able to run ads profitably:

END OF NUMBERS STUFF

The summary of all of the above is that when you combine earning a royalty percentage of a sale, not being able to see purchase data, and running on smaller budgets, it is impossible for your advertising campaign to earn you back what you’ve spent on it.

This is a problem, because “breaking even” is how these tools are built to run. A company selling t-shirts isn’t just pouring $10,000 per month into ads for the fun of it. They will have $10,000 set aside every month, and then optimise those ads to earn back $10,000 every month.

But why only earn back $10,000? Shouldn’t they want to earn back more? Where is the profit?

Well, yes. Ideally. But the reason it’s done this way is that more copies sold benefits word of mouth. So there’s an assumption that if you get 10,000 tracked sales, you might see another 1000 that aren’t tracked from your campaigns. And those 1000 are your profit. So instead of spending $8000 and earning $9000, they decide that it’s better to continue investing that additional money into ads because it results in more sales and profit in the long run. For those companies it’s better to keep the volume higher, as it works out better for them. This is, of course, out of reach for a single self-employed author trying to earn a living.

In the end though, whether spending $20 per month or $1,000 per month, the point is that as a traditionally published author you are not going to earn your money back.

I get it. Don’t run ads. What if I still want to run ads anyway?

If the above didn’t deter you, that’s fine. I’ve actually run ads for my own book. I wrote out all the above so that you are going into this with your eyes open. But don’t say I didn’t warn you, and don’t try to lay at my feet that you didn’t earn back the money you poured into ads. Proceed at your own risk.

One final thing I would like to mention is that these websites and dashboards are constantly changing (like, seriously, one of the challenges of the digital advertising industry is that just when you get used to doing something a certain way it changes completely). For that reason I’ve kept my guidance below slightly more general, rather than giving specific step-by-step instructions with screenshots. If that causes challenges, please leave a comment and I can try to update this to make the information more useful.

Here are some key things to know and think about:

Setting up ads on Google

Running ads on Google is simple compared to Facebook because it’s more straightforward to set up and you have less granularity in what you can target and tweak, so I usually recommend this as a starting place.

Setting up ads on Facebook:

Once you have set your ads live, keep an eye on them in the coming days. Running ads is all about experimentation, so try different images, different text, and different audiences. Try to tailor the images/text to the audience that you’ve selected.

To wrap up…

Marketing yourself as an author is challenging and often scary. Digital ads provide a certain level of comfort, because they don’t require you to pitch or email strangers or beg people to follow you. Despite all their complexities, there’s something straightforward about turning on a campaign and watching numbers tick up.

But running ads is still a complex beast that is constantly evolving, and as I’ve outlined above, with limited odds of you being able to measure any increase in sales from running them. But if this is an experiment that you are interested in trying, I hope the advice above is helpful.

Best of luck!

Read my follow-up article on running ads on Amazon here.

He Craved Her Salt

Facebook and Google Ads for Authors

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