Hey, Going by the amount of feedback on my last email, it seems many of you find Facebook's targeting interface confusing. Well, I think you find the entire interface confusing but let's eat this elephant one bite at a time. The good news is from my mailbag is that you are profiting from these serving suggestions – quite literally in many cases – which is good because you have five more to chew through this week! We've already covered these targeting landmines to avoid (and if you want to review last week's email, where you'll also get links to a comprehensive selection of free resources on Facebook Ads, including a detailed video guide to ad creation, then read it here):
We're going further this week – covering even bigger and more spectacular mistakes that authors make with Facebook's tricksy interface… often encouraged to do so by Facebook. Yeah. Be super careful before following Facebook's suggestions as they are generally intended for a different type of advertiser, i.e. one sending traffic to their own website, one with the Facebook Pixel installed - which feeds information back to Facebook so it can improve your targeting on the fly. Authors don't have that luxury as we are generally sending traffic to places like Amazon so that kind of advice often doesn't work for us. And – as I keep repeating – books are generally quite weird products in marketing terms and a lot of marketing advice has to be tailored for our industry, or discarded completely. Keep these warnings front-and-center when we dive into the next five things you need to watch out for with your Facebook targeting… right after a quick word from our sponsor. July Sponsor: Nicholas ErikJust 5 of the things you'll learn in The Ultimate Guide to Book Marketing:
When you pick up a copy directly from Nicholas Erik, get the How to Build to Six-Figures Masterclass: an exclusive 2-hour class breaking down a strategy that he's personally used to help multiple authors build six-figure careers. Get the Ultimate Guide to Book Marketing today! Five More Targeting FailsFacebook targeting is so easy to mess up – and there are so many ways you can do it. Here are five more targeting errors I see all the time, ones which can destroy your campaigns and torch your money. 1. Beware of Ebooks and EreadersNo, this isn't a headline from Publishers Weekly circa 2011. What you specifically need to be careful about are the general ebook interests on Facebook – I believe they are officially called E-books (publications) and ebook readers (consumer electronics) because everything was named fifteen years ago and they fired the guy who knows how to update it. A common error I see is the use of these interests in ads – particularly in ads going directly to retailers. These interests will include customers from Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and so on, so they are no good for any ads going to retailers or else you will loop in lots of readers who might click on your ad but can't actually by your book (which is even worse than them not clicking on it, as then Facebook's system might compound the error by serving, say, your Amazon ad to more and more Kobo readers because all it can track is the clicks). Using these interests might have worked for you in the past but you are really rolling the dice by using them. I recommend avoiding them completely, unless you are running ads to your site and are a wide author (e.g. lead generation ads to boost your mailing list, where you aren't sending readers to a specific retailer). However, even then, you might want to do some testing on it – I haven't found it to be the most accurate interest out there and it seems to hit lots of people who aren't even interested in ebooks, or readers of any kind. YMMV. So… what should you use instead? 2. Choose The Right KindlingWhen selecting your desired interest, Facebook makes you type it into a rather unwieldy search bar which looks like it hasn't changed since 2013 (guess why!). The UX isn't the only thing out of date – there are also some… strange 'uns, lingering there in the long list of interests, even after The Great Culling last year. One mistake I make all the time is selecting the wrong Amazon Kindle interest. When you type Amazon Kindle into the search bar, you'll see two there – one is to target Kindle owners, one is (rather weirdly) to target everyone who works at the Kindle department of Amazon. Which might be handy if you want to shout at them to fix your pre-order or something, I dunno. But I presume you are looking for the one with 40m Kindle owners. The audience size is the tell – I think the Kindle employee one is around 3,000 people or something so it should be easy to tell them apart. (I say that, yet still have to double check this all the time because it's easy to pick the wrong one when rushing!) But that's not all. There's another Kindle interest which I don't see everyone using – Kindle Store. This is an audience of approximately 25m people. There's a lot of overlap with the Amazon Kindle audience, but by targeting both you are looping in an extra 5m or so Kindle owners in total, so it's really worth doing every time. What I don't recommend doing is adding the Kindle Fire audience as that can include a lot of people who don't read ebooks. I'm sure some people will disagree with me here, but my own testing indicates that it might act as a small drag on performance overall. But feel free to split-test it yourself! 3. The Narrowing Path To SuccessArrrr! Manys a good ship gets lost in the Narrows, with this cursed fog. Knowing how to use narrowing properly is crucial to finessing your targeting. However, Facebook's subpar interface leads authors to messing this up in a few different ways, highlighting all the wrong things and not putting warnings labels on the hazardous stuff. Narrowing more than once is especially useful for niche authors, anyone who lost key targets in The Great Culling last year, or anyone else who has trouble finding comp authors or targeting their specific genre – i.e. those who have to get creative with their targeting. The chief error when attempting this is pretty similar to last week's Boolean Girl… with a slight twist. I would have called it The Other Boolean Girl if I had any sense of style. In the image above, you will see our intrepid hypothetical author is once again seeking the overlap of E.L. James' audience and that of George R.R. Martin, but also trying to ensure that they only reach Kindle owners. On the left, they have put the Amazon Kindle interest in the top line – so far, so good – and then narrowed it by E.L. James and George R.R. Martin. If you remember last week's email, these fields operate by Boolean logic, so you are in fact narrowing by "E.L. James OR George R.R. Martin." In other words, with the targeting set-up in the first example, you will be targeting a very large audience – one who owns a Kindle but who also likes either E.L. James OR George R.R. Martin – i.e. an audience in the USA of around 15m people. Which is fine if that's what you want to do – but that's too broad for our hypothetical niche author. She has written a steamy fantasy romance about a billionaire dwarf who wants to usher in an Endless Winter and drive up the rental prices of his subterranean vice-pits. And she can't find good comp authors on Facebook anymore, so she must get creative. And what she wants to target is the overlap between the readerships of E.L. James and George R.R. Martin, rather than the entire combined audience. So, she must narrow it further by creating a new line of narrowing beneath – as in the second example, which delivers a smaller, much more targeted audience of around 400,000 readers. I wouldn't normally recommend targeting two radically different authors in this manner. But some kind of creative/sideways targeting can be useful to test when you can't target in the regular, straightforward way. Sometimes a strange-sounding overlap of two authors can be profitable, sometimes targeting a TV show and narrowing by the Kindle interests can work, or sometimes a combination of, or variation upon, these things can lead to success. If you are struggling to find targets in the regular way, test it and see. Your targeting will get into an awful mess, though, unless you are very clear about when to add interests on the same line, when to separate them, how to narrow properly, when to narrow twice, and so on. Make sure to go over these sections a couple of times when trying any unusual targeting like this. BTW, in case you are wondering, the audience number estimates aren't so reliable. You can't take them to the bank or expect them to be accurate or consistent – just use them as a very rough guide for comparing potential targets and/or seeing if you have gone off track. There's no specific number for an ideal audience I can give you which won't lead you astray in some sense, but to give you a very rough guide, I generally target audiences of sizes between 100,000 up to 5m-10m these days, whereas back when hyper targeting was the way to go, I was generally looking for pockets of readers more like 10,000-100,000 (and would get nervous going above 1m). Final point on this: completists will note that I should have the Kindle Store audience in the top line there for more complete coverage. I simply forgot, something that's really easy to do once your targeting gets more complicated, with all these extra Kindle interests, fancy narrowing, Boolean logic, and so on. Which is why it's recommended to… 4. Save Yourself (From This Madness)I do not go through all this laborious targeting nonsense every time I create an ad. I duplicate ads where possible, and make whatever minor tweaks I need to make – one handy time-saver. An even bigger one is Saving Audiences. This really saves time once your targeting gets complicated – and especially in the testing phase where you might be trying all sorts of different interests, trying to stumble across a winning targeting formula. When you do find a combination which works for you, scroll to the end of the Audience sub-section and hit that Save This Audience button. It will save the interest targeting, the demographic targeting, the country – the whole enchilada. The next time you are creating a campaign and want to use this exact targeting setup, simply click the Use saved audience tab right at the top of the Audience section – a drop down list will… drop down; there's a handy search bar too if you are like me and end up saving 4 million things. The clawing back of precious time continues: you can also use these saved audiences to quickly generate similar ones for different territories, or other variations. Simply open the saved audience as above, click the Edit button at the bottom of the Audience section, make whatever changes you desire (e.g. changing USA to UK), and then click Save as New. Don't click Update as that will save over your original audience. Save as New will create a new one with your changes. You can do this as many times as you like and really save a lot of faffing about. And more advanced users can do the same for Customs, Lookalikes, and whatever else you want to throw in there and mess around with. Super handy stuff! But what is not handy at all is how Facebook keeps pushing something which could totally undo all this hard work. What I need you to do right now is picture GIANT NEON WARNING SIGNS around this final mistake, as it is a sneaky blighter. 5. No Advantage WhatsoeverFacebook is really pushing the Advantage stuff right now – and I recommend being extremely cautious here. If you have watched my Facebook ad creation tutorial you will know that I strongly warn against Automatic Placements – these have now been rebranded as Advantage Placements (nothing else has changed, including the fact that this is a terrible option to pick). Similarly, something else I warned against very strongly indeed was Detailed Targeting Expansion – which has now been rebranded as Advantage Detail Targeting. Nothing else has changed about this feature. Savvy advertisers avoid it so Facebook rebrands it every couple of years, without addressing the fundamental issues. Let me be very clear: don't use it. You may have used Advantage Detail Targeting – or indeed Detailed Targeting Expansion – in the past and gotten good results. I'm going to explain how it works – and then you will know why it sometimes works, but often doesn't, and why using it is a massive risk which can completely destroy your campaign and waste your money. Advantage Detail Targeting is where Facebook uses lots of buzzwords like AI and Machine Learning and algorithms to basically overwrite your chosen targeting. It says that its system can determine new interests to add which will improve your performance – which sounds tempting, until you see how it actually works, and what those additions are. This is something which might work well for more general products, or ads going to a site with the Facebook Pixel installed – so the system can make corrections on the fly, once it sees which clickers actually convert and buy the product. But when authors send traffic to retailers, there is no Facebook Pixel giving its system feedback – it doesn't see which clickers turn into buyers, so it can't make those critical adjustments. It just keeps flying blind and sending more and more of the wrong readers to your retailer listing – which is not good for several different reasons. The problem with Advantage Detail Targeting specifically is that it adds interests to your targeting which it thinks are similar to those you have selected already. For example, let's say I'm targeting Dan Brown. The system then might add Harlan Coben or David Baldacci or James Patterson – not great matches perhaps, but not terrible to be fair. Sometimes it's a little better. If we return to our example of E.L. James, the system might add Sylvia Day, Carla Philipps, or Abby Glines. Slightly better perhaps. But then it goes off the rails altogether. With George R. R. Martin as you primary interest, the system then might add JRR Tolken (fine), Brandon Sanderson (okay), and then… Emilia Clarke. As in the actress who plays Daenerys. These things look similar to a computer, but are glaringly obvious errors to a human being, onces that could completely kill your ad. Unfortunately, once you tick the box and enable Advantage Detail Targeting, you are handing the reins over to that computer. And it's a black box. You don't find out afterwards what killed your ad (or what made it work so well if Facebook's system actually stumbled into something useful). Facebook doesn't explicitly tell you how it has expanded your audience in your reports, so you can't even learn from this process and identify new interests – we can only infer. And the way we do that is via the suggestions box when selecting interests. You can go to the interest targeting search bar yourself and plug in an interest or two, hit the suggestions button, and see how accurate it is. Some of the suggestions will be great, I'm sure, and some will be awful – I'm equally confident. Using Advantage Detail Targeting really is playing Russian Roulette with your ads. An Apple user looks similar to a Kindle owner – to a computer – and your ads could easily show to someone who can't even buy your book, or someone not interested in your genre. Instead of doing that, skip Advantage Detail Targeting altogether and control your ad's destiny yourself: build your targeting manually, test to see what works for your books and your target audience, and then save the winners so you can use them again and again. With ease. Dave P.S. Music this week is Elvis with Milky White Way. |
Friday, July 28, 2023
5 more huge mistakes you are making
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