My Facebook ad for Being Emily has been running for nearly two weeks. I also did a book giveaway for Goodreads. Here are the stats that I have so far from both -- including the total spend.
Number of people who saw the ad = 99,023
On average they each saw it 2.4 times
Total clicks through the ad = 172
This cost me $75.01 so far (I’m paying about $0.45 per click.)
Those 172 people took 205 actions:
130 clicked a link in the post
46 liked the page
16 viewed photos on the page
13 took other action such as sharing posts
How many bought a book? I’ll have a better idea when I get my Bookscan sales data on Friday but my guess is not that many (based on obsessively watching my Amazon.com sales rank).
However, I looked at the people who chose to “like” Being Emily after clicking through the ad and the majority of them are young people (late teens to early 20s) who are out in the GLBT community. That is very good target audience for me and by liking the page this means they’ll see future Being Emily updates, so this has created a good channel for me into segments of the population I would not reach otherwise.
In addition, the younger skew in likes suggests that there are others who don’t want to like an openly trans Facebook page, but have seen the ad. No way to know the numbers on this, though.
For the small price tag and the ability to reach people I might have no other way to reach, I would do this again – and I probably will in the fall with a flashier ad.
Goodreads Giveaway
I did a Goodreads giveaway offering 10 copies of the book. In the week that I offered it, about 130 people added Being Emily to their “to-read” list. I just mailed the books out on June 29. So far I have one review and one additional rating from readers who received the book. Total cost was about $115 (books plus postage).
Did this cause a bump in book sales? Again, nothing amazing happened in my Bookscan numbers. I hope to get at least one more review and a few more ratings. I would probably do this again too but with fewer books. I think it's a good opportunity to get noticed in a community of readers -- but it's less targeted than the Facebook ad.
However, if I didn't have a book easily associated with a cause, I'd probably lean more toward promoting on GoodReads due to the access to a rich community of people who really love to read.
If you have an online marketing tool that's working well for your book sales, I'd love to hear about it! And stay tuned for more updates as the numbers continue to roll in.
Not sure if this will help Rachel. But you might get some good techniques from this journal. http://www.thetrafficblogger.com/.
I work on one of his websites as a contributor and he's been pretty successful with helping with blog traffic.
Posted by: Joseph Douglas | August 14, 2012 at 12:00 AM