Aliens, Armageddon, and Romance
Fire in the Woods is only $.99 on Ebook
For a limited time!
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Last week, my book went on sale on Ebook for $.99. This was a bit of a surprise, and I wouldn’t have even known unless a friend happened upon it and let me know (funny how that happens in the publishing biz.)
Anyway… in a perfect world I would have had tons of marketing ready, but since my book was only going to be on sale for a week, I needed to act fast.
- Instagram Posts
- My Newsletter
- My Street Team
- Tumblr
When I hit Facebook, the app prompted me to boost the post. I figured, why not? It was the perfect chance to test the waters.
The process was insanely easy, and not really all that expensive.
I started with a budget of $7.00 total, for an add that would run for seven days. (A dollar a day. That’s not too bad)The results were interesting…At the end of the seven days, I had reached an additional 1,995 people, and 56 people had clicked on the buy links.
(more on WHO clicked below- stay with me)
Breaking that down, about 8 people clicked the buy link per day. NOT HUGE NUMBERS, but not that bad… because I know from research that you need to see the cover of a book at least three times before you consider buying, and then another 3-5 times before you decide to find out more or buy.
I had an “organic” reach of 150 people (that is average for me… these are the people who would have seen it in the feed without any advertising).
I asked the App to send the ad to women only in the USA between the ages of 13-50 who have shown interest in reading, science fiction, romance, young adult… etc.
Then I drilled down and found something REALLY interesting…
I looked at the demographic of the “clicks”. This was a real eye-opener. I know that my book is written for the 13-18 age group, but I went for the broader 13-50 range because I know a lot of adult women read YA as well.
But guess what?
48 of the people who clicked the buy links were in the 13-19 age brackets. My exact target audience! So sending out to a broad age range, I decided, might have been a mistake.
But the sale wasn’t over yet…
Then, I noticed that the sale had not ended on Saturday as scheduled. I decided to give my ad one last push. I was going to do one day for $1, but decided to try 1 day for $2 to send it to more people. I also adjusted the age bracket to 13-19 year olds (Sorry, adults… I was experimenting)
On that one day I received an additional 515 views and an additional 11 clicks
The final stats
So, at $1 a day I received an average of 284 views per day and 8 clicks per day
At $2 a day (On a Sunday, which might have skewed things) I received 515 views and 11 clicks
If you want to be really anal, for a total of $9.00 it cost $.00359 cents per view, or $.13 per click. Personally, I don’t only value the “click” numbers, because I know how important just the face time of the cover is.
How does Facebook stack up against other advertising?
I have purchased some other forms of advertising that cost $280 for just a few mentions. While those did provide great face time, I don’t think they were as good of a value as the Facebook ad.
So, to sum it all up, YES I would do this again, but with a few changes.
#1. I’d not shoot for such a wide age audience. If it went to more 13-19 year olds, I might have ended up with more clicks
#2. I’d taken a class on Facebook ads a few days before this happened, but I didn’t have time to create my own ad. Instead, I used just a picture of my book, and a friendly post about the sale. I’m going to experiment next time with the suggestions from the course I took. (Below is the Instagram version-same pic, same text as the Facebook Ad) Here is a link to the actual ad https://www.facebook.com/JenniferEaton.Author/
State breakdown… In case anyone is interested…
The most “clicks” came from California. 11 clicks from 167 people who saw the ad.
Followed by Ohio: 7 clicks from 123 reached
Arizona, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania: all 4 clicks from 50-99 reached
Most of the rest were 50-ish views with 1-3 clicks per state.
Yes, there were 24 states who saw the ad, but had no clickers. [Sad face]
If you’d like to know anything else about the experience, please let me know!
Has anyone else tested out the waters of Facebook advertising? How did it work for you?
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You can find Fire in the Woods and Ashes in the Sky at all these awesome bookish places!
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Kobo | Chapters Indigo! | iBooks | IndiBound |
Catch up with me on social media!
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Jennifer M Eaton 
Appreciate you sharing your experience and insights. Very interesting
Thanks for sharing, this is really interesting! I’ve often wondered about the worth of various advertisements — Amazon, Twitter, etc — and this gives me some solid numbers both on price and results.
Thanks for the post Jennifer. I wondered how Facebook ads worked. Something to think about.
Sounds like a decent ROI. So I must get my author FB page up and running before my big release in October. Thanks for sharing your experience and the actual price per click stats.
You don’t even need an author page to boost a post. This post was originally on my personal page.
This is cool. I was wondering if this worked. Definitely gives me something to think about.