Hey,

I was just about to hit Send on this yesterday when I got wind of a big-sounding change to the ad-creation interface on Facebook. There will probably be a lot of noise around it as it rolls out, but it’s mostly a nothingburger so we can press on.

(Although Intermediate/advanced Facebook Ads users might like to read this Jon Loomer breakdown, particularly those running Conversion or Leadgen campaigns.)

For Facebook Ads beginners, we are going to start super easy today and go through the process of creating a Facebook Ad campaign in a basic way – showing you what you should spend time on, what you can skip over quickly, and what to watch out for. Along the way, you will learn a little about how the system works too.

Knowing how the system works is critical to success but it’s also important to dripfeed that side of things or your eyes will glaze over. Facebook is an incredibly powerful platform and there are unending things you can do with it. However, that comes at the cost of daunting complexity on the advertiser side – that’s you and me, btw, staring at the screen, wondering what the hell all these options mean. (And probably pondering a sandwich.)

So, let’s break it down today and make it all much more simple…

…to begin with, at least. We will return to this ad creation framework again in subsequent episodes, layering more complexity on top. Explaining the different nuances for other genres and authors at different stages in their career. Showing ways that you can feed a trickle of readers into your series starter… or send a stampede of them towards your latest release.

First you will learn how to:

• create images which draw readers in
• write sales copy which primes readers to buy
• find juicy targets for your ads
• test different audiences and ads to discover the most profitable
• measure success with a firm eye on the bottom line
• optimise campaigns to increase profitability
• scale up the winners.

And that’s not all. You will also learn how to push a limited-time sale or freebie, or how to continually feed readers into the beginning of a series, how to use video to draw new audiences to your work, and ways you can give your mailing list numbers a kick in the patootie.

I know you are eager for all the flashy stuff, but it’s super important to patiently go through ad creation first and explain some key areas where you can really slip up – rather than whizzing through things and setting you up to fail.

Today’s email, for example, is the first of a three-parter showing you how to create ads – and that structure nearly maps Facebook’s own nesting dolls of Campaigns containing Ad Sets which contain Ads.

You create your own ads in three stages which follow that, and today we’ll exclusively talk about Stage 1: the Campaign level.

First, the mother of all caveats.

Who Am I To Talk?

Facebook is not like Amazon Ads or BookBub Ads where there are, broadly speaking, a couple of different paths you can take to mastering the platforms. The complex nature of this particular beast means there are unending ways to use Facebook Ads.

I’m not going to show you every way to use Facebook Ads, I’m going to show you my way. Feel free to adopt my methods wholesale, pick-and-choose the parts which work for you, glean a few morsels here and there to adapt your own approach, or blow raspberries at the whole thing. It’s up to you – and if my approach doesn’t work for you, don’t worry. There are dozens more out there.

But why should you listen to me at all? Good question, and one we should always ask, he says, surveying the grim parade of obsequious internet marketers masquerading as authors that seem to predominate these days.

I don’t really like blowing my own trumpet so I’ll just answer this comprehensively once here in this email, and move on.

I began in marketing around twenty years ago and specifically in digital advertising over fifteen years ago. I used to work for the AdWords division of Google, and my job was to run ads for very high spending clients (to give you some sense of what that means, exactly, the account portfolio I was personally responsible for was spending approx. $40m a year).

Obviously, those skills came in handy when I started self-publishing, just as ebooks began exploding, and aside from growing my own author business, I have worked as a consultant for a number of bestselling authors in a range of genres, like some ad-flavored doula. (I’m not taking on any clients and do very little of that work these days… before anyone asks.)

I have worked on dozens and dozens of launches and promotions where the budget was anything from a modest amount to five figures – which is a fun number to get through in a week. Exceedingly profitable campaigns, I should add, before anyone has a heart attack. I’ve helped some self-publishers grow into six-figure authors and others again to six-figure months.

While these were usually multi-channel campaigns also involving email, promo sites, BookBub, email swaps, cross promo, social media, and so on, Facebook Ads were always the primary component and the lion’s share of that heavy ad spend. In other words, I think it’s fair to say that I know what I’m doing when it comes to Facebook Ads, but does that mean I know it all or that my methods will work for everyone? Absolutely not.

My approach to Facebook Ads is just one of many useful approaches out there, and I’m sure I’ll share lots of things which are contrary to some of the advice dispensed elsewhere. Doesn’t mean they’re wrong (or I’m wrong), but it does mean that you should (a) test everything first, (b) follow the data, and (c) don’t stress if something I’m teaching doesn’t jive with you personally, or contravenes an approach that is already bringing home the bacon. Keep bringing home that sourced-elsewhere bacon!

It also means that you should be cautious as we go through these Facebook lessons. Always start with smaller budgets when you are learning the ropes, and test everything properly before increasing budgets. Don’t spend any money you don’t have.

Advertising is not gambling, but the old gambler’s rule of never betting anything you can’t afford to lose is a solid one – especially at the start, when you will burn through some cash just learning how the system works.

You can mitigate that at least somewhat by being cautious – so try to maintain your discipline. It’s really easy to fool yourself with magical thinking when it comes to advertising, especially when you are pushing your book babies.

OK, that’s enough preparatory piffle. Let’s start at the start.

Creating Facebook Campaigns

To create a Facebook Campaign you need three things:

1. A Facebook Page.
2. A Facebook Ad Account.
3. A valid payment method.

I’ll assume you have those in place already, but if you have any issues, follow Facebook’s advice on that here.

There is one more thing I personally recommend doing before you properly get into Facebook Ads, but this is optional, especially for beginners. Let me explain.

Facebook Business Manager

Like most experienced Facebook Ads users, I run all my campaigns and manage all my Facebook Pages via Facebook Business Manager rather than the default interface you might be more familiar with.

I do recommend switching to Facebook Business Manager if you are serious about Facebook Ads and/or if you manage multiple Pages (which you really should be doing if you have more than one pen name or a side-business).

It’s free, it gives you some extra tools/data, and a slightly higher level of customer support, as well as some extra protection if anything happens to your primary ad account – for example, if you are hacked or banned by one of Facebook’s rogue bots. Aside from that, one other advantage I personally like lots is that it more clearly delineates work and play on Facebook; when you are in Business Manager you won’t be distracted by the dank memes your friends are posting.

Meme FOMO aside, the only real downside to switching is the (moderate amount of) time involved in set-up and familiarizing yourself with the Business Manager interface. Do be aware this is a one-way deal – you can’t go back.

If you want to just dip your toe in Facebook Ads first before considering the switch to Business Manager, that’s fine.

It doesn’t affect the performance of your ads – have no worries on that front – just be aware there might be some small differences between what I will be showing you in screenshots and videos etc. and what you see in Ads Manager… but you should be able to figure it out.

​Facebook explains the process for switching to Business Manager here, and you can follow the steps listed to add your Ad accounts and Pages.

Facebook Campaign Objectives

Once that is taken care of, and you are in your Business Manager, navigate to Ads Manager – which will be a largely empty dashboard if you have never run any ads – and click that green CREATE button on the left-hand side. Don’t worry, nothing goes live until you approve it at the very end, so feel free to follow along and learn as you go.

If you are a professional marketer, or otherwise know your marketing jargon, you might be delighted at how Facebook forces you to choose a campaign objective, and how they are split generally into the familiar-to-pros steps of Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion – but even experienced marketers can make missteps here.

Everyone else is probably just confused… which is unfortunate because the decision here is really, really important.

If you want the short version, to sell books on Amazon and elsewhere, just pick Traffic and move on to the next step (and skip down to "Final Campaign Choices" below.

But I think it’s important to indulge in a digression here, and speak about the other objectives, particularly why this choice is so important; it will help you understand a little more about how Facebook’s system works.

What you pick here will influence all sorts of things:

• the format of your ads
• the shape of your ad images
• the kind of person who gets to see them
• how you are charged.

Important stuff, and Facebook hardly makes that clear at this stage.

You can click the “Learn More” link under “Choose a campaign objective” if you want the official Facebook spiel on what each of these mean, but even that can lead a novice Facebook advertiser astray – as you will see in a moment.

Let me go through them with a firm focus on authors instead.

You are unlikely to use “Brand Awareness” so we’ll skip that, and “Reach” is for more specialized use among intermediate/advanced users (when you just want to show something to lots of people and don’t care so much if they click it – not very good for book sales).

“Traffic” is the big one for authors looking to sell books, and we’ll return to that momentarily.

“Engagement” is occasionally used by authors if they want to drive likes and shares and comments on a post (if you have ever Boosted a post on Facebook, unless you fiddle with the defaults, this is essentially what you are doing).

“App Installs” can be skipped and “Video Views” is something we will talk about when we get to more advanced stuff.

“Lead Generation” is for collecting emails, but as we will see later on you might get better results by using “Traffic” for that also. “Messages” can be skipped.

“Conversions” is what some authors pick for their book-selling campaigns, but I don’t recommend doing that right now - it’s for intermediate/advanced users who are pushing traffic to their own site rather than the likes of Amazon. I strongly recommend you do not pick this campaign type if you are sending readers direct to retailers - this is a common mistake authors make.

The last pair of "Catalogue Sales" and "Store Traffic" can be ignored also.

One last thing on Campaign objectives: the primary reason why your choice is important here is because it will hugely influence who your ads are served to.

Remember, there are billions of people on Facebook and, as you will see later, you will be targeting audiences that could have anything from, say, 10,000 to 10 million people in them.

Unless you have money to burn, you won’t be showing your ads to everyone in your target audience - so Facebook uses AI to prioritize.

And it makes that decision based on your Campaign objective.

So, if you choose “Traffic,” Facebook will try to show your ads to the people in your audience most likely to click through to your desired destination.

But if you chose “Engagement” Facebook will try to show your ads to the people in your audience most likely to Like and comment and share your ad, but not necessarily those who are likely to click through to Amazon – and the difference can be quite big.

And if you chose something like “Reach” Facebook will try to show your ads to as many people as possible for your budget, the cheapest eyeballs going. And because they are the cheapest eyeballs going, they tend to be even less likely to click through to Amazon or elsewhere. Keep all this in mind.

Your campaign objective should line up with your personal goals. And as you will see later, your ad image and text should also line up with this campaign objective and your goals; everything should be in harmony for maximum effectiveness.

In summary though, if you want to send people to Amazon, you pick Traffic. If you are following along – he says after the longest aside in email history – then simply click Traffic and press that big blue “Continue” button at the bottom of the pop-up.

Final Campaign Choices

You’re not quite done with the Campaign stage yet though. A new screen will pop-up where you make the final choices at the Campaign level, and we’ll run through those very quickly now.

Name your campaign at the top. You will figure out your own system for that, I’m sure. Skip the “Special Ad Categories” section, which won’t apply to most authors. Also skip the “Campaign Details” section which just pulls through your choices from the initial screen, and the A/B test – something we will return to later. Campaign Budget Optimization is something else we will come back to in the future but you don’t need to worry about it now – just leave it switched off as well.

And that’s it for the Campaign level! You can simply click “Next” to save your work and then close out of the screen and wait for me to guide you through Stage 2: the Ad Set.

This is where you decide important things like your budget and who sees your ads as well as where they appear on Facebook…and elsewhere. If you want to nose around ahead of next week’s email, scroll down and take a look at the “Audience” section – something that can make or break your ads – and specifically the “Detailed Targeting” sub-section.

If you hover over it and click the blue “Edit” link a search box will appear, and you can start typing stuff and seeing the different audiences you can target. Test out your genre(s) and comp author(s).

This blog post will be a huge help for finding your own comp authors.

Aaaaand that’s all he wrote,

Dave

P.S. Soundtrack to my glow-up this week is Bobbie Gentry with Fancy.