Well, I Did It (Facebook Ads)

(kidding)

 

The very last promotional avenue I had left was Facebook ads. Everyone knows that Facebook ads are the gold at the end of the rainbow, right? Just look at these survey results. And David Gaughran talks about them endlessly.

So, fine.

I pulled up Gaughran's Facebook ad video and forced myself to start again at the beginning. But this time I would follow along on my own ad creation screen. Well, the first thing that jumped out at me was that my screen and his looked completely different from one another. Okay, Facebook makes changes; no biggie. At least I could kind of find the elements he was referencing, even if some of them had different names. But when I got to the point of uploading my ad (that I had made with Canva) Facebook didn't want it. Nope, it wanted to use my profile pic instead. Because I write under a pen name, my profile pic is a lovely cup of coffee. Not exactly what I was going for in an ad. I found an option to change that, but it would only allow me to use pics I'd previously uploaded to FB, and my ad image was not among them. So, I opened a new Facebook screen, because there was no way to save what I'd already chosen for my ad and I didn't want to lose all that, and I uploaded my image to my Facebook page. Then I went back.

Yes, I could now use the correct image for my ad. Great. Time to move forward. The default description of my ad was "Author". Well, what the hell? Who would want to use that? But again, I found the description field and changed it. I got through all the fields and hit "publish". Whew! I did it.

Wait. Ad Set Error? What does that even mean? Naturally, I clicked "publish" again. Same response. Again. And Again. I then filled out the support form and submitted it. Then I took to Google. Someone on Reddit had posted about the same thing and a response said, "Yea, me, too. I just deleted my ad and redid it until it worked." Okay ~ except there was no place to delete my ad, so I kept creating new ones until I had three or four, all with the same "Ad Set Error" message attached.

Now I was pissed. I never even wanted to do this in the first place, but once I resigned myself to it, you won't let me? I thought, well maybe I'm trying to do this under the wrong account. See, I have three FB accounts ~ one as me, another for Facebook games, and a third under my author name. My author page is a "subset" of my gaming page, so maybe I needed to try to create the ad under my gaming account. Boy, I was getting good...and fast...at making ads. I whipped one up under my gaming account, hit publish, and...yes, you guessed it. Oh, come on! Well, I was done. I mean, what more could I do anyway?

I busied myself with other things and then began to wonder ~ what if I try under my "me" Facebook page (the one I never use)? What did I have to lose? Well, the first thing I noticed was that all the ad screens were completely different. What the hell? Some people get the "good" screens and some people don't? These more closely matched the ones in Gaughran's video.

Again, even though the screens were different, I still whipped up my ad in a flash. (After all, I'd already done it six times.) I hit "publish" and guess what? Facebook likes me! It really likes me! It agreed to take my money!

So, now I will have a Facebook ad running for one week, and one week only. That's enough ~ actually more than enough, but I set a small daily spending amount, so I'll be okay. I like David Gaughran, and he is very thorough, but to be honest, I simply couldn't sit through an hour's worth of instruction. It's not his fault; the subject is really boring.

Here are the important takeaways, and if you follow these, you'll be fine:

1. Choose a traffic ad. Don't even consider any other type. Go with traffic. Traffic = clicks on your buy page (the URL you enter on the creation screen).

2. Be sure to set an end date for your ad or you'll end up poverty-stricken. I don't remember if it was on the crappy screens or the nice, new ones or both, but at least one of them wanted to default to "no end date". Watch out for that!

3. You can leave the default "audience" as is, or choose specific age groups, regions, or  gender, or mess with all of these. I would have just gone with the default, but I can't imagine any men buying my novel, so why waste money on them?   

4. Take a good look at your ad preview. Initially, I'd included a fairly long description (taken from my blurb), because I assumed a description was required. It's not. What it did was obscure half of my image and it looked like shit. So I deleted the description ~ much better.

5. You can target specific authors; the concept being, "readers of so-and-so will like this book". I considered doing this, but I decided against it. I struggle with comp authors to begin with, since I don't read the genre I write in, and what if I targeted the wrong ones? I decided to just leave it up to Facebook to do its thing.

6. Don't mess with fields you don't understand. It's best to leave them alone. Once you see your ad stats, if they don't look great, then maybe explore some of the nonsensical fields.

Here is how my ad will look on Facebook and on Instagram:

I'm good with it. It's simple; it doesn't try to do too much. There are also reels and "stories", but since they're all basically the same, I'm just posting these two.

Since tomorrow is my free book offer, the ad won't start until Sunday, and it will be interesting to see if anything comes of it. If I was to bet, I'd say, not much. But the good news is, I'm no longer afraid of Facebook ads. They're not scary. As long as you don't get an error message, creating an ad is a breeze.

NOW I've exhausted all my options.