I got this question asked a few times so I decided to address it.

I tracked conversion rates in a spreadsheet for the past 4 years and I’ll share with you what I’ve learned.

I want to present some real-life data.

I’m advertising a mystery novel at $2.99.
In 2 years it generated a total of $247,146

• 3.1% – $7.7k comes from paperback sales
• 23% – $56K comes from ebook sales
• 73.9% – $182k comes from page reads

A way to accurately track the sales (ebook sales) is through an affiliate link.

However, it’s against amazons affiliate terms to use a link in a Facebook ad. You need to have the link on a landing page. (currently running tests like this)

Another way is to track them through a google spreadsheet where you track all your daily clicks and daily sales and you get the daily conversion rate of your whole marketing budget. I tracked conversion rates in a spreadsheet from 2018 to 2022.

Here’s what my average numbers looked like. ( on more books not just the example above)

• In 2019 my ebook conversion rates were between 5 – 10%
• In 2020 conversion rates were averaging at about 2%
• In 2021 my ebook conversion averaging at about 1.2%
• In 2022 my ebook conversion rates are below 1%

Conversion rates are going down over time by a lot.

There are a few things that contribute to this decrease:

• Facebook ads are getting less efficient.
• Amazon is slowly shifting readers into kindle unlimited.

Kindle Unlimited has limited-time offers where they offer kindle unlimited to prime members for just 99c for 3 months. This is one of the best offers they have. Top amazon affiliates get special rewards to bring in a large amount of those sales.

The more people sign up the more they get paid per signup. I personally know affiliates that were getting 3-6k signups per day during those offers.

For you, as an author, this tells you that over time your conversion rates will decrease and page reads will increase.

A question I asked myself is, should I base my marketing decisions on a metric that is consistently going down every year and represents 20% – 30% of the book revenue?

Conversion rates are very different based on how much money you spend.

They are very different based on your CPC. Lower CPCs tend to have a lower conversion rate and higher CPCs have higher conversion rates.

If I were to spend $20 a day on Facebook ads my conversion rates will likely look great, can be even 10% in 2022.

Would I be able to scale your budget and maintain a 10% CR?

Very unlikely. If that was the case we’d all be rich.

If I scale to $100 a day your conversion rate drops to 3%.

If I scale to $300 a day then I’ll probably get around a 1% conversion rate.

So is it smart to always look at the conversion rate?

Let’s take 2 real-life examples.

Example 1:

I’m spending $200/day

CPC = $0.11

1800 clicks/day

I generate $211/day

I get 30 sales/day on average

Conversion rate of 1.6%

Example 2 – Higher CPC ads that convert better

I’m spending $200

CPC – $0.15

1300 clicks/day

I generate $190/day

28 sales

Conversion rate of 2.1%

You may wonder why I spend $200 to make $211, well this is a 4 book series and if book 1 generates 200 per day, the profit is made on the last 3 books. The series generates a total of $500 per day. That leaves me with $289 profit every day. To put it simply, I spend 200 and I make 289 profit per day.

So in a month I spend 6k and make 8.7k profit just from this series.

In most cases, high conversion rates will come at a higher cost because it usually requires a longer copy to prequalify the reader.

A shorter copy will generally bring more unqualified traffic but at a lower cost.

However in this case, and many other tests I did, low CPC brings more traffic that converts less on ebook sales, but in most cases, it brings more revenue than higher converting traffic on ebook sales.

The reason is simple, more people land on the page, in the example above I get 500 clicks extra every day, in a month that is 15k people extra that land on my amazon page. They might not buy my book but if they have kindle unlimited they are more likely to start reading it, therefore the book generates more revenue.

I have to mention that your targeting is important. If your targeting is not so accurate then maybe having a copy that prequalifies them could be better. But having low CPC on great targeting is best.

So I have two examples where I have a **conversion rate of 2.1% **and I generate $190/day

And I have a conversion rate of 1.6% and I generate $210/day.

In this case, if I were to go based on my conversion rate I would make less money.

So do I track conversion rates?

I certainly don’t track it anymore.

I don’t look at how many sales my ads are bringing and I don’t care about my conversion rate.

I stopped looking at sales and I base my decisions on the revenue that the book is generating.

What I do is I set revenue goals for the book I advertise.

It would look like this:

If I spend $200 a day I know the book must generate at least $190 or $200 per day for me to make a good profit at the end of the month.

I would generally say that if you have a series breaking even on book 1 is the most profitable long-term scenario. So I always aim for breaking even on book 1.

This tends to be something that can be achieved long-term with books that are not priced at $2.99 or higher.

My conclusion:

The point of the conversion rate in marketing is to predict how much revenue we can generate.

And since in kindle publishing you have both sales and page reads, sales being only 20-30% of your revenue I don’t look at it anymore.

Because too many times conversion rates looked great and I was making little money and other times conversion rates looked bad and I was making great money.

In an industry where conversion rates are consistently dropping, I decided the best way to make decisions, is to look at the return on the ad spend. If I spend x I make back z.

I’m sure this is not the answer most people were hoping to hear but I hope it helps you make better marketing decisions.