The power of AI and ads

[alhawke]

I have a very successful ad through BookBub that yields me one sale a day. It costs $5/day. This is a nice trade off and I'd love to replicate it, but I don't know what I did.

To show the power of bots, I copied this exact ad to see if I could increase the bid dollars by doubling it. I ran the copy for three weeks--same retailer, same advertisement, same targeted authors. During that time the copy of the ad yielded zero clicks. I even increased the bid to--get this--triple the $s. The successful ad runs at .25 cents the new ad at .75. The result: ZERO. This is important because when trying to target the right ad we rely on data regarding the ads we run. If chance, or AI, is this unpredictable, how can we know if our ad sucks?

AI can also get stuck on one retailer. Many of my Bookbub ads get stuck on either Kobo or Google and I have to shut them off because, even though they have a high click rate, they result in no sales. This happens too frequently.

I'd like to invite all of you to contribute any tricks that you use to combat negative bots. My only strategy is to shut off retailers that are resulting in no perceivable sales. I suppose I could set up another related thread to discuss philosophically how AI will soon run our lives (feel free to comment. You know, it's just a matter of time before AI runs the world. Or does it already?).

[notthatamanda]

Don't copy the ad, start it from scratch and see if it makes a difference. I have a vague memory that this was recommended for AMS once upon a time, but I could be wrong.

When I did some bookbub ads I did one ad per platform to make it easier to see the results and shut off just the platforms that weren't performing.

My ad name would be Title, Tag#, Platform, Daily Budget, Bid.

[alhawke]

Thanks! I didn't try that. So you're suggesting to use the same targets but try to trick the system by re-entering everything as a separate ad? I didn't think that mattered. I could do that and see.

I think the bots stuff also applies to AMS. I recall similar ads performing completely differently there as well. But I gave up on AMS about a year ago.

[notthatamanda]

It was something about copying the ad made the system treat it different from a brand new ad. May have been woo.

As far as separate ads for different platforms that allows you to turn off the bookbub ads that aren't working as opposed to turning off an ad where some platforms might not be performing and sacrificing the platform that is doing well along with it. I don't remember that you could change stuff in a bookbub ad once it is running but maybe I am remembering it wrong.

[alhawke]

You can pause retailers or shut them off and still run the BB ad. The one thing you can't do with BB that you can do with AMS, interestingly enough, is downgrade the bid. You can up it but not downgrade it once it's set higher.

[notthatamanda]

Okay, sorry I didn't remember it right.