Hey,

I don't know about you, but I am cheap.

Which means Black Friday is the most wonderful time of the year for me… not that pale imitation which gets all the headlines a month later. I have lists of gadgets and wotsits and thingamajigs pinned up on the walls of my lair, ready to be cross-referenced with the deals-ticker once it clacks into action.

This is a roundabout why of saying that rumors of my demise as the pre-eminent Deals Sherpa in Authordom have been greatly exaggerated: I will be sending out my traditional author-deals newsletter this coming Friday, once I have snootily surveyed all the merchants’ wares at the chateau gates.

To ensure you have enough doubloons to satisfy all your bargain-sized peccadillos I am going to show you today how to avoid losing money with Facebook Ads.

Last week we covered some changes coming to the platform, for intermediate or advanced users really. This time we are looking at some of the more basic mistakes that authors can make.

Before we dive into that buffet of blunders, some eager deal-beavers have surfaced their snouts from Lake Lucre a few days early. One cheeky chap in particular caught my eye – a giant discount which is popular with authors every single year.

​DepositPhotos is offering 100 stock photo credits for the just $39 over at AppSumo – a giant saving, hundreds of dollars off sticker price.

That's an affiliate link, but let me note that I put my money where my mouth is and grab this deal every year as it's a very low price and these credits never expire. Also, money tastes weird. Maybe don't do that part.

You can stack this deal unlimited times, and, if you are doing that, note that you get a further 10% discount if you spend more than $150 at AppSumo, on this or anything else, and that’s auto-applied at checkout. I like buying at AppSumo because there’s a 60-day money-back guarantee – no questions asked – and I've availed of that a few times personally with zero issues. Just so you know.

DepositPhotos now has a crazy library of 195 million images to pick from, all royalty-free – meaning you can use them commercially for covers, ad graphics, website images, and social posts. Make sure to grab this $39 deal before it expires if you have any use at all for graphics or stock photos – which describes most authors these days! Remember that AppSumo usually has a limited number of codes, and when they're gone, they're gone.

OK, back to making money... or at least not losing our shirts.

5 Basic Facebook Ads Mistakes

I can't teach you everything about Facebook Ads in one email, but I can give you some common pitfalls to avoid.

1: Using Boosted Posts

Many beginners start off using Boosted Posts – a simplified version of Facebook’s system where you can set up an ad relatively quickly.

Facebook’s full-on Ads Manager is quite daunting for beginners (and for plenty of non-beginners), but I recommend moving over as soon as possible because you will find it much easier to get genuinely good results... once you wrap your head around it.

It's worth noting that sometimes you will think you are getting good results with Boosted Posts, which will lead you to spending more money… before you eventually realize those clicks aren’t turning into sales.

2: Fuzzy Goals

You can’t really measure performance unless you have clear goals. If you allow things to be a little... fuzzier, you might let an ad run which should have been snipped because you are telling yourself porkie pies like “it’s good for branding,” or “maybe I’ll get some Likes.”

I recommend beginners stick to one simple goal: selling books. This has the pretty cool side-effect of helping the ads pay for themselves right now, rather than pinning your hopes on some hazy payday yonder down the road..

And while we are on the topic, this means picking “Traffic” as your Campaign type right there at the start of ad creation – something that should always line-up with your goals.

While you can use Facebook Ads to generate mailing list sign-ups or website traffic or Likes or video views or a dozen other things, I recommend starting off trying to sell books. Discounted books are easier. Freebies are easiest of all… albeit with the rather large downside of not immediately offsetting your ad spend.

Stick to shifting books in some form – you can branch out later once you have learned them ropes.

3: No CTA Because You Hate Money

CTA is acronymish for “Call to Action” – where you basically tell your audience what you want them to do, whether that’s downloading, clicking, or buying something, and so on and so forth. Beginning advertisers are often shy and demure and obscure their CTA or neglect to include one at all. Here’s an example of some ad text which is missing a clear CTA.

“It’s release day for the third and final book in my StarBlasters series, available now for just $2.99!”

I see ads like that regularly and, while it’s not terrible, it’s missing a clear instruction to the audience. I would change more about that ad text, but one simple tweak will make it quite a bit more effective – and that's telling your readers exactly what you need them to do.

“It’s release day for the third and final book in my StarBlasters series. Download now for just $2.99.”

See the difference? It mightn’t seem like much but including a CTA invariably improves performance. Of course, you could make that ad text a lot better, but that’s worth an email all on its own.

One last thing on CTAs: they should also line up with your goal, along with your Campaign type. My goal is selling books, my Campaign type is Traffic (because I want clicks to Amazon so I can sell my books), and my CTA is telling them to download my book. Everything is in harmony.

I hope you like the sound of that drum because I’m not done banging it!

4: Amateur Hour Image Party

I gets a sad when I see someone put in all the time and effort needed to write books which readers truly respond to, be truly diligent about figuring out who their Ideal Reader is, and then undergo the monumental head-shift needed to grapple with Facebook Ads… only to mess it up when they get to the image.

Don’t rush this step. Maybe you laboriously made your way through the Facebook Ad interface only to realize you don’t have an image. We’ve all done it so don't panic – your campaign will be saved in draft so you can return at any point later and pick up right where you left off.

Take the time to make your images really pro. (Of course, one thing that will help a lot here is quality stock photos, like that AppSumo deal I mentioned earlier.)

What makes a great ad image? That’s a huge topic in its own right but you can watch this video if you want an over-the-shoulder tutorial on how to make a Facebook Ad in Canva (which is my preferred tool and which has a handy free version – you’ll get links to all the excellent free tools I use in the description of the above video).

But here’s one thing I probably didn’t stress enough in that video. Your ad image should also reinforce those pesky goals of yours. That’s why I make such a big deal of throwing in a price tag or some other kind of visual CTA like that. You want to come at your audience from multiple angles simultaneously with the same message – each aspect of your ad subtly reinforcing the same instruction.

5: Aiming Like A Drunk Chimp

Success on Facebook isn’t just about having clear goals and great abs. Ads. I meant ads. These great abs are totally useless when it comes to success on Facebook. Anyway.

Even if your ads are great and lining up neatly with your goals and all that good stuff, you still must aim the blinking things at the right people or all that harmonious marketing music will fall flat.

Targeting can be one of the trickier parts of Facebook Ads, so take your time with it. It’s also one of the parts of Facebook which is constantly evolving, so watch out for old advice here. For example, a few years ago I might have recommended that you really drill down to your niche with Facebook Ads, and target small-to-medium sized audiences, much as you might do with BookBub Ads.

However, Facebook has evolved and uses all sorts of groovy machine learning to do a lot of the optimizing for you. Where I might have specifically shown my ads to a certain demographic before (e.g. women aged 45-65), I now target everyone and let Facebook’s almighty algorithms to the refining for me.

Giving general targeting advice is a fool’s errand, but I would suggest that you focus more on getting the interest targeting part right, and don’t sweat the demographics so much (aside from targeting people one country at a time – you need to send peeps to the correct Kindle Store after all!).

And then when it comes to choosing appropriate interests to target, don’t get yourself in a muddle here. One of the most common mistakes is to do something like target someone like Nora Roberts AND Kindle. What this will do is show your ad to everyone who has shown an interest in Nora Roberts as well as showing your ad to everyone who has shown an interest in Kindle. Selecting it this way won’t target the crossover you presumably want.

What you need to do is select Nora Roberts at the top level, and then underneath narrow the audience by those who like Kindle. And then that will get you the overlap you want – i.e. people who own a Kindle who also like reading Nora Roberts.

It seems a bit fussy to begin with, but you’ll get the hang of it soon enough.

That’s Not All Folks...

So those are five of the biggest mistakes I see authors making with Facebook Ads. I could easily do another five-or-more of these, so if you want me to keep it going next time, just reply with MOAAAAAR and I’ll line ‘er up. Otherwise we'll change lanes.

In the meantime, if you want to dig into Facebook Ads further, don’t forget that I have a whole free series for you to chew through over at the trusty Email Archive.

Dave

P.S. Snappin’ my cap this week with Mose Allison and Seventh Son.