A general question about FB ads...

[The Bass Bagwhan]

I've seen a lot of complaining lately on various Facebook groups that Meta has been tweaking the algorithms and "system" resulting in ads being less effective, just as expensive (or more) and just the usual "blah, blah, I'm thinking of quitting FB ads".

It's hard to cut through the noise and determine if there's any merit to the discussion.

My two books with FB ads are still in the black ROI, but not as high. Mind you, they're long-running ads and could be coming to the end of their effective life.

Facebook has been promoting all kinds of "improved" strategies to get better performance, and I wonder if older ads that don't adopt these strategies are purposely disadvantaged?

Thoughts, anyone? Has anybody experienced an unexpected drop in FB ads results?

[Bill Hiatt]

For me, the drop was years ago. I have no difficulty believing FB would do something like that, but I have no recent evidence on the issue, having not run an ad in years.

[The Bass Bagwhan]

Thanks for the input, Bill.

[alhawke]

I don't do Facebook ads but my BookBub ads have suffered lately. Could be a summer slumps, which I often get with my titles.

But here's one concerning development. Ad bids. When you post an ad on Bookbub, you set a bid, just like Facebook, I assume. Well that bid is rising. It used to average around .50 to .60. Now I'm seeing it at .70. This is significant because in order to get a favorable ROI, you have to drop the bid down. If you drop it too low, you don't get visibility.

Why is the bid rising? Either more competition or higher priced ads. I think it's higher priced ads.

Problem is the industry is not following inflation. For me, I still can't sell well in the $5.99 range. My standard price is $4.99 (this was $3.99 a year ago). With inflation, our pricing probably should be up to $5.99 to even $7.99, I'd think.

In other words, you might be seeing across the board problems with ad sales with AMS, Facebook and Bookbub contributed by the poor economy. Not just Facebook. But this is conjecture. Just thought I'd mention the sudden bid rising on BB.

{Oh, and for a more practical point, Bass Bagwhan, you might want to play with raising your bid on Facebook.

[The Bass Bagwhan]

I don't do Facebook ads but my BookBub ads have suffered lately. Could be a summer slumps, which I often get with my titles.

{Oh, and for a more practical point, Bass Bagwhan, you might want to play with raising your bid on Facebook.

Thanks for this, it's all good points. I've wondered too if the election cycle in the US might even impact on people's daily habits.
I've dabbled with raising prices. Mine are 5.95 and adding a dollar might offset the decline in ROI ratio. I was getting 100k page reads a month too and that's cut by half... I have a daily spend budget of $5 per book, rather than a bid figure, averaging around 0.19 per click across both.
Which I know all adds up to a reasonable ROI — better than many can hope for — but I can see some writing on the wall — I just can't read it!  We're talking historical fiction that sneaks into historical romance, BTW. I've never been able to translate the successful ad formula across to my horror and crime stuff. That's still a WIP.

[alhawke]

I have a daily spend budget of $5 per book, rather than a bid figure, averaging around 0.19 per click across both.

There has to be a bid built into that though ... right? I've never done Facebook ads, but GooglePlay, AMS and Bookbub all allow you to vary the bid per click.

.19 click is really good. I usually average around .35-.50 per click. The only way I make it back is in series co-sales.

Back in the day, I mysteriously used to spend $5 and get $5 back on one particularly successful ad. Most of my ads now lose money-- that is, I run a loss on the lead book I'm advertising, not co-sales in series.

Anyway, can you bump up your bid somehow this month? Be willing to spend .40 instead of .19? When an ad is faltering, I up the ante.

Unfortunately for us Indie writer/publishers, this ad adjusting can be time consuming. I always tweak a BookBub ad to spend the lowest amount possible to garner sales.

[The Bass Bagwhan]

Possibly if I reconfigure the ad format completely, I can determine per click budget rather than a daily spend. But I've never seen that. The cost per click is determined, as in other platforms, by the audience you're competing for... I'd have to check.
Essentially, I could double or triple my daily budget and that ROI ratio will return more dollars, but not necessarily a better ratio.
I mean, theoretically I could budget $1000 a day and make a killing, but there must be a ceiling to the algorithm somewhere.
Food for thought...

[Bill Hiatt]

With regard to the election comment, people reported a slump during the 2016 cycle. 2020 wasn't affected in the same way, I suspect because of the pandemic giving people more time to read. But 2024 is likely to be another 2016 in terms of drawing people away from novels and toward news outlets. That especially true in an election that seems to be fraught with surprises. People are waiting for the next unprecedented thing to happen.

[alhawke]

Possibly if I reconfigure the ad format completely, I can determine per click budget rather than a daily spend. But I've never seen that. The cost per click is determined, as in other platforms, by the audience you're competing for... I'd have to check.
Essentially, I could double or triple my daily budget and that ROI ratio will return more dollars, but not necessarily a better ratio.
I mean, theoretically I could budget $1000 a day and make a killing, but there must be a ceiling to the algorithm somewhere.
Food for thought...

Can you scale back after you increase the daily budget? On AMS, you can increase your $ amount temporarily and then bring it back. BookBub doesn't allow this. If you can't change the bid, increasing the daily budget is a way to bring more visibility. I used to do that with AMS. (I'd probably try $10-$15 first).

[The Bass Bagwhan]

At the moment I'm thinking of running a completely fresh advert with all the suggested FB bells and whistles and compare performance.
I'm tempted to trying switching across to AMS. But although, theoretically, the books that do well via FB ads should potentially do well with AMS — meaning, they're a proven seller — I worry about how much AMS budget I might blow on the learning curve.
I need a few hours of solid analysis, I think.

[Bill Hiatt]

AMS always worked better for me than FB--though that isn't saying much.

By no means are my AMS campaigns huge successes, but I have picked up on a couple of things that might be useful (keeping in mind my relatively small dataset.

In recent times, the sponsored product ads based on product targets have performed better than sponsored product ads based on search terms in terms of actually generating sales. I used to think search-term based ads were better, but the ones I have running currently aren't doing a thing (except burning money). I don't know why that is. They didn't used to perform so differently.

Sponsored brand ads do a little, but not much. Remember all the fanfare about custom images for sponsored brand ads that made them perform so much better? My one sponsored brand ad that does much in terms of sales is an old one with no custom image. But maybe I did overkill on the images. Each one of my new sponsored brand ads has a an image carousel (you can have up to five images). Theoretically, the movement should draw the eye. But maybe it doesn't for some reason. I don't know. As I said, my dataset is rather small.

Product targets give you the option of targeting by categories or by individual products. Individual products give the further option of exact or expanded. It's okay to use expanded, but monitor carefully. That's supposed to pick up related product searches, but sometimes Amazon's idea of what constitutes related is a little...broad. You can counteract really odd hits using negative targeting using. If you use categories, narrow ones are better than really broad ones, though it's a dilemma. Fantasy all by itself gives me the most sales, but also way more clicks. Goodbye, ROI!

Keyword targets use exact, phrase, or broad targets. Stay away from the third one. If you check the actual search terms Amazon has decided to connect to your ad if you go too broad, you'll probably find some that don't fit the book at all. Phrase is better, but you may still need to use negative targeting to cut out the occasional mismatch. (For instance, "fantasy" in phrase mode can connect to "erotic fantasy.") Obviously, there's no point in that kind of connection unless our fantasy actually is erotic.

Hopefully, those observations may save you a little time.   

[The Bass Bagwhan]

Thanks, Bill. It's tempting to try an AMS ad for a few weeks to see what can be achieved, and I accept that I have to gamble — and probably lose — some money in the process. It's hard to understand how people can lose money on AMS ... meaning, what happens? Do people browsing books (or Amazon in general) click on appealing adverts but not buy the book?  I realise that conversion rates from clicks to sales are probably in single-figure percentage rates, but how do people "burn through money" as you often see? Is it high bids in a genre/market they can't really compete? Or are their adverts promising a product/book that falls far short of the hype?

I've often seen advice along the lines of "set your bids high — don't worry, you'll never spend that much." (Meaning it's a ceiling amount you never reach.) It's still daunting advice.

On paper, AMS should work better than FB. Simply because we're advertising a book inside a bookstore — your target audience is already there. Cracking the AMS code seems to be the biggest problem.

[Lorri Moulton]

I don't pay for ads, but what I've seen in author groups suggests lots of clicking and no buying. 

I hope it goes well for you!! 

[alhawke]

I've failed at AMS and I'd advise caution. Lost lots of $ over the years with AMS. The competition is too great.

But... my books are wide. They could be more effective if I sold in KU.

I use BookBub ads. And they're only worth it with series books for me.

[The Bass Bagwhan]

I don't pay for ads, but what I've seen in author groups suggests lots of clicking and no buying. 

I hope it goes well for you!! 

Good point — I doubt that anybody actually cares that clicking on an ad will cost the author money, but at least on FB an ad is blatantly an ad, whereas on Amazon your advert is just another image in a montage of links and images and browsers aren't aware that some of that visible page/montage is actually paid- for advertising. I can see where idly curious clicking and "surfing" could rack up costs by people with no real intent to buy anything. Maybe that's what Amazon wants?