Hey,

Today’s email is a greedy beast which will take up quite a bit of your time.

I recommend getting comfortable in that chair of yours – which I imagine is one of those 70s-style egg chairs, hanging from the ceiling and swaying gently as you sip fortified pineberry juice from a glass skull.

What I’m trying to tell you is that this is the third-and-final part of creating campaigns in Facebook – view previous episodes here – neatly mapping Facebook’s three-step interface, for those following along.

And this is the level where the rubber hits the road. While the previous two stages were basically tinkering around with settings to determine what kind of ad you are running, where you were showing it, and to whom, this stage is all about what those people actually see. In other words, the main bits to concern yourself with here are the ad image, the ad text, and the destination.

All that might seem a little obvious – this stage of the ad creation interface is a lot more intuitive for beginners and has fewer profit-obliterating pitfalls. But your image and text are the two biggest factors in whether any readers actually click on your ad, so we better make sure to put in some real effort at this stage.

Quite frankly, most beginners don’t put in nearly enough effort making their images attractive and their text enticing. It’s okay to learn as you go, and improve with each new campaign… but let’s try and shortcut some of the painful bits.

OK, with the preamble nicely preambled, let’s go through ye olde Facebook interface once more. I’m using Facebook’s nomenclature and headings to avoid confusion, as per usual.

Ad Name

You got this, one sincerely hopes.

Identity

This is the section where you associate your Facebook Page with the ad you will be running. Make sure to do that – and select the right Page if you are running multiple ones! – and you will benefit from some spillover Likes and clickthroughs to your Page. (Another reason why your Page should be set up properly, and looking neat, with some activity on it, before you run ads.)

If you see an option to associate an Instagram account with your ad, that means you skipped my suggestion to only run your ads on Facebook (and specifically only to News Feed).

That’s fine, if that’s your choice. I try and direct you as best I can based on my own knowledge and experience, but if you have good reasons for choosing differently (on this, or anything else), then fire away. Test the alternatives, follow the results.

For example, in this specific case you might be someone with a decent Instagram following, or you might feel strongly that your target audience is more active on Insta than Facebook. That’s fine, and a sound reason for making a different choice than I do.

But consider the following: part of the logic in guiding you in this manner is to keep things very simple to begin with. One platform (Facebook), one placement (News Feed), one ad format, etc. And then when we get to testing later on, and we are measuring audience response to different ads and images, or when you are trying out new audiences altogether, then things don’t spiral out of control.

It’s much easier to run through testing if you can minimize the variables as much as possible – so I’m trying to help you with that by focusing on the types of ads which are more likely to succeed for you. Feel free to overwrite any part of that advice if it doesn’t work for you, as always!

Where was I?

Ad setup

You actually don’t need to touch anything in this section as the defaults work for our purposes here. But just to highlight one thing: if you are ever turning a Page post into an ad – which is something that can be very handy, and is far superior to a Post Boost – then you simply hit that dropdown menu just under the Ad setup heading and switch the default of “Create Ad” to “Use existing post” – and then you will be able to select from the posts on your Page. But we’ll get back to that in a future email.

For now, let’s press on with our streamlined mission of creating one straightforward ad, aimed at selling books on Amazon, and move to the next section as there is nothing else here we need to tinker with.

Ad creative

This is the main event, where you upload those images you have lovingly created, and type in that ad text which you have spent hours honing into a sales generating machine.

I’m guessing that describes like one person. Well done, you.

For everyone else, first of all, don’t panic. As with earlier stages in the ad creation process, you can save your progress and return at any point later. So, if you need to spend some time on your ad assets (i.e. your image and text) that’s fine – you shouldn’t lose any of your work thus far.

Media

This is where you add your images. What you need here is either a 1200x628 image – the standard/old-school letterbox format that you will have seen on Facebook for years now. Or alternatively you can use a 1080x1080 – which is the newer square format that has become much more popular since the rise of Instagram, and which is now favored by many because it slays on mobile, where it dominates the feed more.

Over-achievers can even do both and let Facebook pick the winner, but we’ll return to that topic in more detail when we talk about testing in a future episode. For now, keep things simple and pick one of those two formats. I often let the design decide – sometimes a certain concept for an ad just works better in one shape over the other.

If you are stuck and can’t decide, perhaps go for the 1080x1080 shape as most traffic is mobile these days, and Facebook is kind of nudging everyone in that direction anyway.

In terms of creating your own ad images, it’s much better to go through this in video format, so here’s one I recorded last year for my YouTube channel.

It’s a 30-minute tutorial on how to create Facebook ad images with Canva, but if you are using BookBrush or some other tool, you can still watch this and get pointers – because I spend most of the time talking about the kind of things that readers respond to on Facebook, and you can replicate the approach outside of Canva easily.

Two final things on images:

1. Do spend quite a bit of time on them. It takes practice but with tools like Canva even the least artistic people can turn out something workable… if they are patient and keep at it. Alternatively, you can outsource this or (even better) ask your cover designer to bundle graphics with your covers. Or even “templates” you can work with in something like Canva.
2. Watch out for old advice circulating on not using text in ad images. Facebook no longer has any restrictions around that. But because of that previous restriction, many stopped using book covers in their ad images. It’s perfectly fine to use them now. Indeed, I get best results when using a cover vs. not using one. But feel free to test the alternative, as with anything, and follow the data. We’ll talk more about this when getting deeper into testing and optimizing later on.

Once you upload the images – and ignore the pop-ups asking if you want Facebook to edit your images (no, thank you!) – then you are ready to move on.

Primary text

I feel like the image is what catches readers’ attention, and then the text closes the clicking deal. (Your Amazon page must still close the sale, of course, but that will never happen if they don’t click through!)

But whether I’m correct, or not, it doesn’t matter because what is most certainly true is that both your images and text need to be good for your ad to work.

The primary text box is the main bit of text which appears above your ad image. This is what you should primarily focus on – the other boxes are just icing on the cake and we will whizz through those.

As for what to put there, you could fill a library with all the books and blog posts about copywriting, but let’s continue in our mission of keeping things simple by suggesting an easy formula which you can adapt to your own purposes: tagline + CTA.

Doesn’t have to be a tagline as such, but some short, hooky sentence which captures the essence of your book and communicates the genre is what you want. And then some CTA – call-to-action. Readers respond best when you tell them exactly what to do.

Just coming up with a cheesy example on the spot here – apologies! – but here’s one for an SF:

“When aliens destroy most of the Earth, Captain Spacepants must rebuild… and then take the fight to them. Download on Kindle for $2.99.”

Facebook has a soft limit of 150 characters – meaning anything over that will get hidden behind a “See more” link. Which you don’t want, so try and keep it under the limit.

I should note there is a school of thought out there arguing longer is better, and many subscribers to that theory will simply use their book’s blurb, or a modified version of some, with some CTA at the end, and just past all that in there. I’m not violently opposed to that way of thinking, and there’s a logic too it in that your book’s blurb is – or should be! – an optimized piece of sales copy. I have tested it, and occasionally seen better results with this approach. But ultimately I prefer the clean and simple and shorter approach of tagline + CTA. As with everything, feel free to test alternatives and find your own winning approach.

The other reason I’m suggesting a basic approach of tagline + CTA is to keep things simple for you, and give you something straightforward to practice with. There’s a knack to this kind of short copywriting that you can only gain with practice, so do plenty of that. You’ll find endless advice on the internet, and tons of examples too.

Movies often have very hooky taglines that are also quite brief – and just looking at some websites with lists of the best movie taglines can be both fun and instructive. Personal favorites include:

• Alien – In space no one can hear you scream
• Volcano – The coast is toast
• Dude Where’s My Car – After a night they can’t remember, comes a day they’ll never forget
• The Big Lebowski – Her life was in their hands, now her toe is in the mail.

Here’s one thing that will make this part much easier for you (and that goes for image creation also): having a strong offer. Remember me banging on about that in the first episode of this series? Here’s what Gary Halper had to say on that, one of the most famous copywriters of the 20th century:

“Strong copy will not overcome a weak offer but…in many cases, a strong offer will succeed in spite of weak copy written by marketing morons.”

Obviously, something being free is a very strong offer, followed by a 99¢ deal. But pricing is only one aspect of your offer to readers, and Facebook is not as price sensitive as other platforms so more expensive books can work.

In other words, you don't necessarily need to run a sale to move books on Facebook. It’s just that it's easier to get things moving with a discount of some sort. Otherwise, the ad text and image will have to work a bit harder to close the deal – as you might expect. As with many marketing things, it’s a trade-off. You might choose to drop price now to create more income down the road, or you might want the bigger margin of moving higher priced books now. But we’ll return to strategy later.

For now, write your ad text in the Primary text box, and move on. (Don’t worry, we are nearly done!)

Headline

As per the above image, the Headline is the even shorter bit of text that appears below the image. You must fill out this box or else it will pull in something from your destination URL (i.e. your Amazon page) and it will probably look messy.

Besides, this is a perfect opportunity to further close the deal with another tagline, a review quote, or some social proof. And if you have something which helps zero in on the genre even further, all the better.

Description

The terminology is confusing here – description isn’t a great label for what it really is, but that’s what Facebook uses so here we are, I guess.

Anyway, this is one final opportunity to layer on some extra social proof, if you wish, but it’s totally optional – not least because it won’t be visible on mobile once we add our CTA button below… and probably won’t be visible on Desktop either, unless the Headline above is super short.

Soooooo, this days I mostly ignore this. But that’s what it does. Now you know.

Optimize text per person

Skip this.

Call to action

This is a really cool little feature where you add a CTA button.

Options for authors here can be LEARN MORE (good for Awareness campaigns or maybe for Freebies), DOWNLOAD (also good for freebies, some use it for paid books, but I prefer…), SHOP NOW (best for paid books in my opinion.

The reason I prefer SHOP NOW in most cases is that I’m priming readers to buy, and that lines up with my Campaign objective (remember that?), my ad text, and my actual intent here in the real world – i.e. to sell books.

Destination

Finally at the next section, and we are on the home stretch now.

Leave it on the default of website, and drop in a direct clean link to your book’s Amazon listing. What do I mean by that? Well, sometimes if you navigate to your book’s page organically – like via the charts or your Author Page – then all sorts of HTML gubbins can be appended to the link.

It’s important not to use these messy links in your Facebook Ads, or in your emails or on your website for that matter either. Use a clean link instead. This is the most basic form:

amazon.com/dp/ASIN – but replace the ASIN with your actual ASIN, which is the code Amazon assigns to every book, and you can find that on your book’s page on Amazon, or in your KDP dashboard.

Sometimes the interface can bug out and not accept these links. There was an issue for a few months last year with UK links in particular, and somewhat in Australia.

If you do ever run into issues with the above form of Amazon link, simply switch to an alternative like this:

amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN – but again, plug in your own ASIN there.

And then always check, and double-check, that the link is correct and working by clicking on the “Preview URL” button to the right of the box where you entered it.

Display link

You can ignore this as it will automatically display “amazon.com” as the display link, which is what you want.

Call extension

Ignore.

Languages

Ignore.

Tracking

Also ignore everything here, just one thing to perhaps check: if the “Website Events” box is checked – which it might be, if you have your Facebook Pixel set up – then uncheck it. The Pixel is something that lives on your site, if you install it, and it’s irrelevant for ads sending readers to Amazon. We’ll get to Pixel-related stuff later!

Summary

For now, really spend time on those ad images, and keep polishing that ad text until it shines. When you are ready, and you have checked over everything on all three stages of ad creation, you can hit Publish and send your ad out into the wild.

It might go live quickly, or it could get stuck in review for a while, but pretty soon it will be out there attracting clicks for your books… or getting ignored.

We’ll talk more about how to improve results in the next emails, looking at testing and optimizing and improving your results. So be cautious and keep bids conservative until that point – you likely have a lot of failing to do before you get the hang of this.

Images are often the trickiest for authors to get right. Make sure to watch the tutorial above, and the other videos on making ad images I have on my YouTube channel – they will all be useful for anyone learning this approach, even if the video is nominally for BookBub Ads; the exact same principles apply – that part is fully transferable from BookBub Ads, at least!

Finally, before spending any real money on ads, you might want to review my 15 Rules For Advertising Books – a list of dos and don’ts good for all platforms. (BTW “don’ts” is a typographical abomination and I’m sorry.)

That’s all. Now you can make a Facebook Ads! Huzzah, etc.

Dave

P.S. Ad-wrangling music this week is Hall & Oates with Did It In A Minute.