Part 2 to follow tomorrow!
Hi, my name is Felicity Green. I’m an indie author and translator. I write urban fantasy and paranormal mystery novels in English and in German. I‘ve been invited by Indie Translations to tell you about my experience with Facebook ads.
This is a HUGE topic and I‘ll only be able to skim the surface. I actually took Mark Dawson’s Facebook Course for Authors, which I highly recommend. My thinking was, if I invest money in this marketing strategy, I need to really commit to it. It paid off for me, so I am happy I did that. 🙂 If you don’t take a course, take some time to go through the Facebook tutorial/help pages, otherwise it can be a little bit overwhelming. https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1412450085649679
If you are totally unfamiliar with Facebook ads check that link out and have a look a the Ads Creator and Power Editor, because I can’t get into the technical stuff or else the post would be even longer!
Instead, I’ll give you my top 5 tips. So far I have only done ads on Facebook for German books, so this might be particularly useful information if you are an English speaking author with translated books and want to reach German readers with Facebook ads. I’ll point out to you what might be different when targeting the German market.
- INVEST TIME AND MONEY!
My first recommendation is that you DO invest a little bit of money in this, even though you don’t need to pay for an expensive course. But I recommend you play around a little bit with different ads and images. It’s very unlikely that you’ll have success with this if you just quickly create an ad and hope for the best. So you create a campaign in the Facebook Power Editor, say „My super awesome German translation“, then you create one or more ad sets, where you can select budget, target audience (more on that later) and timeframe. For every ad set you create one or more ads. You can upload different images and play around with the ad text, call for action button etc. Set the budget low (say 5 EUR per day) and see what target audience, image, text etc works. You keep those ads, deactivate others. Then increase the budget (But ALWAYS set a daily budget!), monitor the ad, increase the budget some more … Take your time and tweak those ads until you have an ad set and ads that really work.
- MONITOR YOUR ADS!
Create a spreadsheet where you calculate conversions and ROI daily. Unless you are sending Facebook users to Amazon and track via Amazon Affiliates tracking ID (more on that later) it’s not always easy to track sales back to your ad. People might click on the ad and decide to buy later or via their Kindle etc. If you have lots of ads in different media running at the same time you can’t be sure they work. That’s why it’s a good idea to test run one ad at the time. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. In the end, if I make more money in a day than I have spend on ads, all is well. Yes, spreadsheets are boring and monitoring takes times, but do it, at least in the beginning, because if you aren‘t careful, you’ll simply be donating money to Mark Zuckerberg!
Read part 2 of this article here.
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