From $6.5k to $17k Profit/Month in Just 3 Months

I've seen many people trying to spend more money on Facebook without seeing an improvement in revenue and they get stuck at a certain level of income.

Fortunately, we have a smart way of scaling Facebook ads profitably that I'll share in this post along with all the lessons we've learned.

The author already had some small success with the ads before, so she was doing something right.

The goal was to optimize things, even more, to make everything more profitable.

Her ad costs were a bit high (the average CPC was 0.25) so the first thing I needed to do was to create better ads and lower the CPC. After that, I would move on to improve the targeting as well.

Step 1. The Ad Creative Testing Process

There is one rule, test everything individually.

If you want your ads to be as good as they can be, you need to test every element individually.

We created a new campaign where we only test ad creative elements. (copy, headlines, images)

Each adset will have the same targeting. One adset tests images, one adset tests headlines, and one adset tests just copy.

We took the best performing audience she had at the moment and we set up the tests.

1. We started with images.

We took the best ad on the account, we kept the copy and the headline and we tested 50 new images. (50 is the maximum number of ads you can create in an adset)

The images we tested were pictures of vampires, creepy images with a vampire vibe, images of women with a paranormal vibe, landscape images with a paranormal vibe, and landscape images with castles.

The ones that outperformed everything were landscape images with castles. We use adobestock.com and unslplas.com to find images.

2. Once we had our best image, we moved to a new adset where we only test new copies.

We keep the current headline and the new image from the previous test and we set up a new adset where we test 50 new copies.

The best performing copies were between 30 to 40 words long. I'll get into detail on what worked further in the post.

3. Once we had our best copy, we test new headlines.

We tested 50 new headlines and the best ones were 6-8 words max. The reason I mention the word count is that I've noticed it has a big impact on the CPC.

By doing this process we lowered the CPC from $0.25 to $0.15.

In every test, we set a custom rule so the ads would shut off once they reach 400 impressions. That's about $3 to $5 spent per ad. That way you give all ads a fair chance. Otherwise, Facebook will only send traffic to a few of them and you can't test properly. If something is over 200 impressions and it has a really high CPC and low CTR we shut it off. No reason to let it spend money since we will never use them.

We judged the performance based on low CPC and high CTR. The ads with the lowest CPC and the highest CTR were the best.

It's important to mention that you first need to have a good enough audience that you know sells your books before you optimize your ads.

Why?

Because you want to optimize your ads based on an audience that is buying your books. You shouldn't let people that don't buy your books dictate how your ad should look like. Very IMPORTANT aspect!

If you don't have an audience yet you might want to start with that first and then optimize your ads.

How Should Your Ads Look Like

There are multiple approaches to Facebook ads, from ads that contain reviews to ads that contain part of the blurb to ads that contain the book cover or illustrations from the cover, or ads that mention kindle unlimited.

"People should know they click on a book ad. So it's important to prequalify them."

I heard this so many times. And I partly agree with the statement.

It makes sense to do this if you're advertising to an audience that you're not sure buys your books, then only people interested in the content of the ad might buy your book. The downside of this is your costs will be high therefore fewer people will visit your amazon page each day therefore fewer sales.

In our case I already know I have an audience that buys paranormal books, and my book is at 99c so there is not much logical convincing I need to do with my ads. My goal is to get people excited and in the mood to read a paranormal vampire book. If my book is appealing enough people will buy it.

What I DON'T do in ads anymore…

I don't mention price, I don't show a book cover, I don't mention the name of the book or the author, I don't use a call to action, and I don't mention kindle unlimited.

I've split-tested everything I mentioned above on multiple books and I stopped doing them because I've learned there is more money in NOT doing them. I'm not saying they don't work, they do, just not as efficient as what we're doing at the moment.

What readers want is a book that they won't be able to forget for a long time. A book so good, they would want to read it again for the first time. That's a feeling I want them to have before landing on the amazon page.

Saying it's at 99c, available on Kindle, or mentioning a title they never heard of before doesn't add any value to the potential readers.

You might say 99c ads value but you're only attracting people that are unlikely to buy a book that is at 2.99 further in your series.

An ad that is more oriented toward generating a strong feeling related to books will sell more books than an ad that is more rational or logical.

You are not selling a logical solution to a problem, you are selling a reading experience, a character, or a fictional universe that makes them feel a certain way. They should feel like that's what your book has to offer because that's what they're hoping to find.

So how do those ads that scaled from 6.5k to 17k profit/month look like?

I'm not able to share the exact ads for obvious reasons but they are simple, short, and catchy.

The copy is 30 to 40 words long, and it talks about a feeling or an experience a vampire novel can create for a reader. I recommend reading reviews and paying attention to the ones that sound the most outrageous. You want something similar to that.

Don't use "jaw-dropping", or anything too clickbait, that will get you into trouble.

The headline is 6-9 words long. Short and catchy, similar to the copy just much shorter.

Image:
We use landscapes of castles or creepy landscapes of a place you can run into a vampire. The landscape is key.

The image and headline have the most impact on your costs. Images are nr 1.

The Key To Writing Effective Copy

In a report, we got from k-lytics we've learned that there are specific keywords people look for when they want to buy books in our genre.

Example: Paranormal romance, vampire romance, for women, best for women.

We took the keywords that had the biggest search volume and we made sure we always integrate those keywords into our copies and headlines.

This way we made it easy for them to understand that we have what they're looking for.

This works really well for us, and I encourage you to do it in your ads too.

At this point, we already started seeing a good improvement in sales because there was almost double the traffic going to the Amazon page every day because of the drop in CPC. The audience was still the same.

Step 2. The Secret Sauce Behind The Targeting Testing Process

After we managed to get good low CPC high CTR ads we came up with a list of 50 new targetable interests that we split into 3 categories.

* Category 1: Autor names
Lora Leigh, Jr Ward, etc.
We found most interests here.

* Category 2: Book sub-genres
Romantic fantasy, Paranormal Romance, Romantic Fantasy, etc.

* Category 3: Vampire/paranormal popular movies
Twilight, vampire diaries, etc.

The process to find them is quite simple but requires some time.

Search on google, for top paranormal romance authors, top urban fiction authors, top romantic fantasy, top urban fantasy, etc.

Try and find as many blogs with those lists and put together a big list. Then you have to check what you can target on Facebook. Most of the interests you find will not be targetable, that's why you need a huge list to have a decent audience.

Then I created the main campaign where I would target each of the three categories per adset. I also narrowed everything down with Amazon Kindle, Kindle Store, and Ebooks. (so I don't have to mention them in my ads)

Inside each adset, I have the 2 ads, and the only difference between them would be the image. I used the same ad copy and the same headline in both ads but use 2 different images.

Facebook will push just one of them anyway. Usually the one with a lower CPC.

We set the campaigns up and we let them run and the sales came in right away. So we knew we need to take advantage of the opportunity and scale more.

How To Scale Facebook Ads Profitably

The technique we used helps you scale fast and is low risk.

We duplicated the original campaign to add the budget on top.

So we used the same targeting. The only difference was we changed the ads. New copy, new images, and new headlines. We have plenty of new ads we can use because we tested a lot of variables.

I'm aware some people scale by small increases on the adsets and that's great if that works for you.

We don't do it for two reasons:
1. it can mess up a well-performing adset.
2. it takes too much time to scale the budgets.

To maintain the performance of the ads, whenever we get an increase in CPC that creates a drop in sales. We duplicate the campaign and add new ads. And we shut off the campaign that stopped performing.

If we run out of ads we repeat the creative process and improve the creatives based on the best ads we initially got.

To recap, this paranormal author went from making $6.5k to $17k in profit per month in just 3 months. Read thru has not fully kicked in so next month should be over 20k pr just by maintaining the current spend.

The three pillars of our scaling strategy were: Ad Creative Testing, and Targeting Testing Process and The Scaling Strategy

Here are the important notes:

* If you have a working audience, focus on creating low CPC high CTR ads by testing every ad element separately.
* Test a lot of variables, 30 to 50 creative elements per test.
* Focus on creating a feeling vs convincing them with logic to buy your books.
* Include the amazon keywords with the most search volume in your copy to make people understand you have what they're looking for.
* invest time in finding new relevant audiences to test.
* scale by duplicating campaigns and changing the ads.
* always spend money on ads and things will become easier in the long term.

The mistakes you can make when implementing this process:

* You treat it superficially. If you don't do it properly, you'll have to do it multiple times and it will cost you even more time, money, and disappointment.

* To judge your adjustments too quickly, we judge on a minimum of 3 day period, ideally 7 days. 1 day is not enough.

I hope that you find specific information that you can take and implement in your Facebook ads, especially if you're a paranormal romance author.

Cheers and good luck!