Do Facebook Ads Sell eBooks? #AmWriting

Last week I wrote a blog post describing my Twitter Ad experience. Over the next few days, I was asked by several people (one of whom was an editor from BookLife) if I have used other platforms for book advertisements and how those ads performed. I have used Facebook to advertise—I'm not talking about "boosting" a post, but rather a real ad targeted at romance readers. The questions caused me to do a little digging and I found a graph from one of my Facebook ad campaigns that is fairly comparable to the Twitter ad I posted about last week. Here are the bare facts regarding the Facebook ad:

Date of ad: October 26th and 27th of 2014—48 hours
Total Spent: $50
Total Views: 33,811
Engagements: 1,136
Engagement Rate: 3.36%
Cost Per Engagement: $0.04
Book Sales: 0
          *Amazon Sales Rank on October 25th :   #94,220
            Amazon Sales Rank on October 26th : #101,690
            Amazon Sales Rank on October 27th : #165,114
            Amazon Sales Rank on October 28th : #175,668




After looking over all the information, I must conclude that paid Facebook ads do not sell books. However, there is no way for me to tell if the exposure was a benefit; after all, over 33,000 people saw my book cover, my name, and the fact that I’m a USA Today Bestselling Author, and over 1,100 of them noticed enough to engage with the ad in some way (with a "like" or a share or a comment).

If you’ve used Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, etc, I’d love for you to leave a comment below and tell me about your experience, whether successful or unsuccessful. Thanks! This is great information for Indie Authors to have available.


*To find your book’s Sales Rank on any given day, log into AuthorCentral.com, click “sales information” located along the top bar, click “sales rank” in the dropdown menu, and then click the down arrow in the box marked “all books” to choose a particular title. Once you’ve selected a title, use the various time spans offered (2 weeks, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, all available) to gather the information you need.


3 comments:

Unknown said...

Another great post, Donna. I'm fascinated by the whole business of book publishing because I'm a writer, but I think readers are fascinated, too. I think Facebook is a great "word of mouth" way to tell readers about our books, but my guess is that no one buys anything in response to the Facebook ads. I certainly don't.

Derek Haines said...

I stumbled across your article while I was preparing a similar finding about Facebook Ads, Donna. I got the same result. I have linked back to you in my post.
http://www.derekhaines.ch/justpublishing/do-paid-facebook-ads-sell-ebooks/

RedMoonRising24 said...

I currently make the bulk of my sales through Facebook ads with my romance books that I publish. If you do the ads correctly you will make money and you will get sales! If your interest (audience) is too broad forget about it. You must niche down and capture an author's audience that matches your style of books. Also don't make your ad look like an ad! This turns people off. I can spend as little as $3.50/day on a facebook ad/promoted post and gain anywhere from $4-25 profit back. You have to test variables. If you only try an ad for 1 day you won't get any results. they need time to take off. If something's not working try changing the interest first then go from there.