I will conclude this 3-part special on Facebook ads by sharing other people’s experiences.

David Penny’s Experience

I recently came across a great post by British author David Penny. Here are my most important takeaway from it.

  • Keep it simple. Don’t complicate your image. Don’t add more than one point of focus.
  • Don’t try to explain your book. Instead, sell it. People make a decision in an instant. If an image grabs them and the words don’t put them off, they might click on your ad. Too many words and they’ve already moved on.
  • This worked:

David Penny's Facebook ad| From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's books

Adding the word “fabulous” didn’t – it actually lowered conversions.

So, don’t let your text get in the way of your sale!

Mark Gillespie’s Experience

Author Mark Gillespie has shared his experience in a wonderfully detailed way that serves as an excellent A-Z on Facebook ads.

Mark stresses the importance of right target audience and offers some great tips on achieving that, going into as much detail as anyone could hope for. He advocates aiming at an audience of 500,000 people, and describes how to choose the right Campaign Objective.

He then offers the following tip, which perfectly describes where I went wrong with me ad:

Scaling your ad

IF your Ad Set is performing well and you want to add more money to the budget, DO NOT just triple or quadruple your budget in one go. This can really screw up Facebook’s algorithm, and your performance could suffer accordingly.

It’s a real problem and a mistake people make all the time.

To get round it, scale your budget by around 50% every few days. So if $5 works, then go up to $7.50…measure performance…and if all is ok, scale up to $11.25 and so on.

Keep an eye on your performance data to make sure the numbers remain consistent. Once you hit a point where your metrics start to suffer, scale back down and leave it at the daily budget amount that last worked best.

Writing the perfect ad copy

Mark then explains how to go about preparing your ad blurb using the example of his book, Fab.

Mark Gillespie's Facebook ad| From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's books

and offers this great tip:

A question is always a good one to use in ads as no one can ignore a question!

Further tips

He finishes his post with a few words on the Power Editor, A/B testing and data reporting. If all that sounds daunting, it isn’t – not really.

The Power Editor is an alternative way to design your ad on Facebook, but you don’t have to use it.

A/B testing simply refers to running a variation of your ad, and seeing which one performs better.

And data reporting simply refers to seeing how many people clicked on your ad, how much it cost you etc.

Know your numbers

His final tip has to do with something I, too, have stressed in my posts: it’s very hard to make money on a 99c book. In a “measure twice, cut once” kind of way, be sure you know your numbers and know how much an ad should cost for you to make money.