Well, I had a much better September than I did an August. I realized after reviewing the data for my August ads that I was getting many more hits on keywords that tied to authors or book series that were similar to my book, instead of tags like “fantasy,” or “sword.” I also upped my bid on each keyword to be $0.76 instead of $0.66. For some reason, that made all the difference. Instead of being in the hundreds of views, I’m now in the tens of thousands of views and I can make some decisions based on actual aggregated data. Amazing!
My first ad (runaway and subversive print shop copy) didn’t do so well. People were clicking (31 of them), but no one was buying. I actually ended this campaign early since it had cost me almost $15 and had brought me no book sales. It seemed a waste to keep running it.
My second ad (epic fantasy with a strong female lead copy) did fairly well. I had 42 clicks and sold 3 books. Since almost 80,000 people saw my ad before clicking this is the data I was able to get: someone would click through to my page after about 1850 people had viewed the ad. Once people viewed the book, about 11 people visited for every one person who bought.
This isn’t great. Most click-throughs cost me about $0.50, which means that I need my numbers to be more like 5 click-throughs for every buy to just break even. I’m getting closer to that on my third ad.
Ad number three (LOTR/Little Women mashup copy) is almost where I’d like it to be. I had 58 click-throughs and sold 8 books. 81,000 people viewed the ad, and so I’m looking at about 1400 people to visit before I get a click-through, and 7 people to look at the page before I get a sale. Still not where I want to be, but MUCH closer.
I’m rejiggering a few things, per normal. First of all, I’m only running ads 2 and 3 this month. I’ve added keywords, too: Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown, Jessica Day George, Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted, His Dark Materials, Narnia, and CS Lewis.
Second, I have changed my book blurb to be a little more punchy. We’ll see if that works out to equal more clicks. The great thing about self-publishing is that I can change it all back if the other was working better. Nice.
Lastly, I put up an ask for my friends who have read the book to please leave me a review. I ran the free promotion almost two months ago, so I feel like people have probably finished the book and maybe just haven’t remembered to review? We’ll see if that’s actually a thing. Over 100 people downloaded the book, and right now I have 5 reviews, so either people take a really long time to finish things or most people aren’t review-leavers, or they forgot. We’ll see…
That’s all for this month. I’ll report back on how that all did next month per usual. I have modest goals. I’d really love to have 7-10 reviews by the end of the month, sell more than 11 books, and have a better click-through to buy rate on both ads.
I hope this helps!
Casey E. Hamilton 