Mark Gillespie's Facebook Ads tips | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's booksMark Gillespie writes speculative fiction and is a passionate Indie author. He recently published the most detailed how-to on running Facebook ads I’ve come across so far.

His main tips are as follows:

  1. Know Your Target Audience

Mark Gillespie's Facebook Ads tips | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's booksFacebook sits on a treasure trove of data. You can access it all through Facebook Audience Insights – a free tool that allows you to target just the right audience for your book. Are you writing about humans mating with prehistoric beasts (yes, that’s an erotica sub-genre, as I recently discovered, much to my bemusement)? You’ll be able to target everyone else who’s into that using Facebook’s Insights.

2. Target Audience Segments in the 500,000 – 1,00,000 range

Mark Gillespie's Facebook Ads tips | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's booksThis is very important as you want to be able to target and realistically ‘reach’ as many people as possible within that audience segment. This allows for much better ad performance and data reporting.

3. Choose The Right Campaign Objective

Mark Gillespie's Facebook Ads tips | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's booksWhat is the objective for your campaign? Is it book awareness, leads, or sales? Once you’re clear on that, you can move on.

 

4. Scale smartly

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.

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.

Once you hit a point where your performance start to suffer, scale back down and leave it at the daily budget amount that last worked best.

You’ll have found your optimal daily budget based on your audience segment size.

5. Use the PACE Formula to Write the Perfect Ad Copy

PACE is an easy way to make sure you’ve included all your major points in your ad copy:

  • Pain – Identify a pain or, in your case, an opportunity or clear benefit to be gained from reading your book.
  • Attention – Grab attention with a powerful image.
  • Command – Include a clear call to action, such as ‘‘Click here To Learn More.”
  • Expectation – You’ll get a free sample/sale etc. What they should expect next.

6. Create 2 versions of each ad for testing purposes

Mark Gillespie's Facebook Ads tips | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's booksSplit Testing in its simplest of terms is the process where you create one Ad (let’s call it Ad A), then duplicate it (let’s call that Ad B), but maybe change the image in Ad B for something different to what is used in Ad A.

You now have 2 ads, with just a minor difference between them. Run them both, then see which one performs best and stop the other one. Duplicate the successful one with a new minor change, then repeat the process.

A small uplift in performance can make a huge difference, especially when you go up in scale and start increasing your advertising budgets.

Read more

I have included here my personal take on which tips are the most important, and have skipped Mark’s more detailed instructions on how to do all this. If you are interested in running any Facebook ads, I suggest you read the complete post on Mark’s blog first.