Experiments with Ads

Back in October I ran a promo for White Dove and had unexpected success.  For five days, the eBook version was free on Amazon.  I had stacked a few ads and made a few social media posts, hoping that it would gain some attention.  What I didn’t expect was that it would rise to the #2 slot in its genre on Amazon.  For a very small investment, I got a lot of attention.  And I’m starting to see the returns…in the form of online reviews.  It was an overwhelming success, all things considered.

One data point doesn’t mean all that much, but it does inspire me to try it again–and this time, I’m going for the number one slot, baby.  I gave myself a little extra time to pre-game, setting up multiple ads to appear across the five-day promo.  I’ve also prepped the environment a little better–imploring all my superfans to spread the word on social media to gain as wide of an audience as possible.

I’m using three platforms for my advertising: Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter, and will run multiple Amazon ads.  I’ve found that Facebook has been the most successful in getting traffic to my website, but Amazon has been the most tried and true for increasing sales.   Luckily, each marketplace allows you to track activity so you can monitor how much bang for your buck you are getting for each ad campaign.  Keeping track of these statistics over time is important– it helps to better understand the audience that is most interested in each work and allows you to target your campaigns more precisely.  It’s always a work-in-progress and there is a learning curve, but the good part about each of these ad platforms is that you can test out ideas inexpensively, and adjust as you go.

I’ll track stats as I go and in the end, I’ll share my lessons learned with you.  Fingers crossed for a successful campaign as I try to crack some Amazon algorithms.

Until next time, keep scribbling!