How To Combat The Ups and Downs of Book Sales

So, your Ads are working great one day:

– Sales are up

– Page reads are up

– Royalties are up

– CPCs (Cost Per Click) are looking good

– CTRs (Click-Through Rate) are strong.

The next day is a different story though:

– Sales are down

– Page Reads are down

– Royalties are down

– CPCs are high

– CTRs are down

What's going on?

Why are the results so volatile and fluctuating from one day to the next?

Why is there no stability?

All of this boils down to Ad Variance.

And today, I'll be breaking down what Ad Variance is and also, how you can combat it.

Let's discuss...

What Is Ad Variance?

If the above scenario is something you can relate to (which I'm sure you probably can if you've been running Facebook Ads for any length of time), you're probably wondering what's going on and how can you stop this from happening.

The short answer is, you can't stop it from happening. Not 100%, anyway.

Your Ads are being seen by different people each and every day and different people react in different ways to your Ads.

Some will resonate with your Ads, some won't.

And if a larger percentage of people who see your Ads one day buy or borrow your book, it's going to have a bigger (positive) impact on:

– Sales

– Page Reads

– Bestseller Rank

– Readthrough

– Organic Visibility

– Email Sign-ups

– Cost-Per-Purchase

Everything will just perform that much better.

The next day, a different pocket of people will see your Ads, and perhaps fewer of them buy or borrow your book, resulting in a poorer performance all around.

The other factor that plays a role is your daily Ads budget, as well as the CPMs (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions) which translates into the CPCs (Cost-Per-Click) you're paying.

Advertising is a simple supply and demand situation; there's only so much inventory (placements) for Ads on Facebook.

The more advertisers there are competing for these spots, the higher the CPMs and CPCs of your Ads will be.

New books are also launched every day, and advertisers increase budgets every day and run more Ads every day...

There are so many factors that play a role in how your ads perform that are completely outside of your control.

So, that's a quick look at why Ad Variance happens.

Now, let's look at what you can do about it...

How To Combat Ad Variance

In short, the best way to combat Ad Variance is to increase volume; i.e. increase the number of people who are seeing your ads.

How do you do that? Two very simple ways:

– Increase your daily Ads budget (i.e. scale up)

– Create new Ads that target different audiences

If you're running Ads for your direct sales store, something I'm currently testing is Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns.

These target different audiences to the standard Unrestricted Targeting Campaigns, and though it's still early days, performance is strong (more updates coming on this over the next 1-2 months as I gather more data).

I have found that increasing volume provides more stability, which makes sense... if you're showing your Ads to fewer people, there's less opportunity for sales than if you were showing your Ads to more people.

The other answer to how to combat Ad Variance is much more simple...

Don't worry about it!

There is absolutely no difference between consistently selling exactly 50 books per day, every day, over the course of 1 month...

Versus...

One day selling 10 books, the next day, selling 19 books, the next, 68 books, the next, 57 books, etc, and it averages out to 50 books per day over the course of the month.

Clearly, that example is slightly exaggerated, but you (hopefully) get my point...

It's not the day-to-day that matters, it's the results over an extended period of time that truly matters.

So, if an ad performed poorly yesterday or the day before, it's no biggie.

But, if an ad has been consistently performing poorly for 1-2 weeks, then yes, that's something that needs your attention.

If you're looking at your Ads multiple times per day (I’m guilty of this, believe me!) and you’re getting super stressed, tearing your hair out thinking about how you can rectify the situation when sales are down one day, up the next, then down... you're in too deep.

You also become very susceptible to jumping into your Ads dashboards and making big changes and adjustments to your campaigns that could actually have a negative impact on the performance of your Ads.

Don't do that.

Instead, do this:

– Look at the bigger picture

– Identify trends in the data

– Optimize based on the data

– Look at data over an extended period of time (at least 3-7 days)

– Don't fret about the peaks and troughs in your sales, page reads and royalties

I know it's tough not to worry about the seemingly random highs and lows of your book sales, but trust in the process, pay attention to the law of averages and enjoy the ride.

To Your Success
– Matt