Facebook Ads

— Mark Paxson

In my ocassional, but neverending, quest to find some promotion efforts that will succeed, A writer friend we talk about occasionally in our video chat has told me that she has success with Facebook ads. After months and months of delay, I finally tried two ads over the last couple of weeks.

My cover artist charged me $25 to design each ad and I spent about $50 to run each ad on Facebook. I won’t claim to be an expert at this point, but here’s my experience.

You have to have a business page on FB to be able to run ads. You can’t run ads if all you have is a personal page.

There appear to be two different ways to create ads on FB. There is the “Create Ads” option and the “Ads Manager” option. As near as I can tell, they create two different types of ads. What the differences are I have absolutely no idea, but the Create Ads option isn’t as advanced or complicated as the Ads Manager option.

I made my first ad with te Create Ads option and that led to a rookie mistake. I believe, without any evidence of course, that the best ad is one that is clickable so the viewer can click on it and go straight to where the product can be purchased. I did not do that with this first ad and when I went back and looked throughout the Create Ads option, I couldn’t see anywhere to make it clickable in that fashion.

No, instead, it appears that viewers clicking on my first ad were given an option to send me a message or to view my business page on FB. The result was that I got messages from several people begging me for free copies of my book and several others who wanted to sell me their promotion “expertise.”

I set my budget for the ad at $8 a day for a week. I have no idea in the Create Ads option how that money is spent. Unlike in the Ads Manager, where it describes it as an auction, the Create Ads option doesn’t say anything about what happens with that $8 a day. (To be honest, I have no idea how an “auction” works when running ads.)

After realizing that I screwed up the clickable nature of the first ad, I burrowed a little deeper into the FB ad mechanism and decided to use the Ads Manager option for my second ad. I found where to make the ad clickable to take the viewer to where the book is available and added the link from Draft2Digital that shows all of the stores where the ebook is available.

I didn’t get any messages for the second ad like I did for the first ad, so I think I got the clickable function right. But here’s where one of the biggest problems is. While FB allows you to preview your ad, all that does is give you the chance to see what the ad looks like. It doesn’t actually allow you to see how the ad works … as in clicking it to see where the click takes you. As a result, I simply don’t know for sure how the ads function.

The end result of this is that the first ad reached 2,205 viewers. The second ad reached almost 13,000 viewers. What those viewers did when they saw the ad is mostly a mystery. I’m assuming that the vast, vast, vast majority just scrolled right on by.

Since the ads ran, after several weeks without any sales of any of my books, I got four sales for the book covered by the first ad and three sales for the book covered by the second ad. I believe there may be a few more that wander in as sales from the different channels get reported to Draft2Digital (not all channels report them immediately). But it won’t be enough to cover my expenses.

Ad design costs of $50 plus ad distribution costs of $100 versus about $10 in revenue. Well, again, the math on this just doesn’t work out.

I know that there are those who can make these ads work. There are secrets buried in the process of making and running these ads. The Ads Manager has different “objectives” for the ads. Maybe if I had chosen a different objective, I would have done better. Maybe if I understood the auction method better I could have tailored the ads better. There are all sorts of tricks to this. Tricks that I’m completely clueless about. I found a lot of the “helpful” parts of the Facebook ad info, to be either completely devoid of any actual help or to be like reading Greek.

So … I guess the thing is that doing something like an ad is for those who really get into the details and learn the ins and outs of how ads work.