#069: Testing Blurbs With Facebook Ads

Read Time: 4 Minutes

Blurbs (also referred to as book descriptions), have a major impact on every single piece of marketing you do: Facebook Ads, Amazon Ads, Social Media, whatever it is you do.

Your blurbs are the salesperson for your book.

Your book product page on Amazon, your own store, or another retailer, is your sales page and the words you use in your blurb will be the difference between a handful of sales and a truckload of sales.

This is why it can be worthwhile to test new blurbs occasionally.

But testing lots of new blurbs on your book product page itself takes time, especially if you're selling your books on Amazon.

The Amazon Algorithm can take a few weeks to crawl and index your book product page when you update the blurb, so ideally, you should be testing a single blurb on Amazon for 2-4 weeks.

Not practical if you have 3, 4, 5+ blurbs you "think" would work, but you want some concrete data on all of them to figure out which blurb has the best chance of success.

The Solution...

In my opinion, Facebook Ads is the perfect tool for testing blurbs quickly and cheaply while also giving you solid data for choosing a blurb that has the potential to transform your sales.

In today's newsletter, I will walk you through my process for testing blurbs with Facebook Ads (as it's something we've been doing recently with my wife's books).

The Key Metric I Look At When Testing Blurbs

I say "the key" metric, but there are 2 metrics I look at really:

– Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate)

– CTR (All)

Unique Outbound CTR tells me the percentage of people who have clicked on the Ad compared to the number of times the Ad has been seen.

CTR (All), though not 100% accurate, gives me a good idea of how many people have clicked on See More in the Primary Text (as you can see highlighted in the image below).

A high CTR (All) percentage tells me that the hook (the text before See More) is strong and invokes some curiosity that people want to continue reading.

CTR (All) factors in all the clicks on an Ad, but most clicks are either on the Call-To-Action button (e.g. Shop Now) or on See More.

So now I know the metrics I'm focused on, once I've run the tests and collected the data, I can ignore every metric in the Facebook Ads dashboard aside from Unique Outbound CTR and CTR (All).

This makes identifying the winning blurb incredibly simple.

Let's move into the tactical side of testing blurbs with Facebook Ads.

The Setup

Just as with everything in Facebook Ads, there are 100 different ways to test blurbs. Below is the method I've found works best when I'm testing blurbs. It's not the only way, so feel free to use the method below or tweak it to suit your workflow.

Here's a rundown of how I set things up:

Create ONE New Campaign

I build out a brand new Campaign that is used exclusively for testing blurbs with Facebook Ads. Even if I test some blurbs now and test another bunch of blurbs in 6-12 months time, I'll test them all inside this one campaign.

With this setup, I can easily compare the key metrics from all the blurbs I've tested over time without jumping around to different campaigns inside the Facebook Ads dashboard.

Use One Ad Set Per Ad

I'm not using Dynamic Creative for testing blurbs. Instead, I'm using a "standard" (non-dynamic creative) Ad and I'm forcing money onto each blurb, rather than letting Facebook decide which blurb to spend money on.

Inside my blurb testing campaign, I simply create one Ad Set (and one Ad inside each Ad Set) for every blurb I want to test.

$3-$5 Daily Budget Per Blurb

You don't need to spend a huge amount on blurb testing (though, clearly, the more data the better). But I've found spending $3-$5 per day, per blurb, gets me solid data I can work with.

I set the budget at the Ad Set level (not the Campaign level) and give each Ad Set (each blurb) the same daily budget.

If you want to test 3 blurbs, your additional daily spend (on top of your current Facebook Ads spend) will be $9-$15. If you wanted to test 5 new blurbs, your additional daily spend would be $15-$25.

It's all scalable to your budget.

100 Clicks Per Ad

Getting 10 clicks on an Ad really isn't statistically significant data, so I like to get at least 100 clicks per Ad to make a decision.

This is just an arbitrary number; feel free to set this to whatever number feels right to you.

After 100 clicks though, you should have enough data to make a confident, informed decision on which blurbs are good and which aren't.

Next Steps...

Once I've identified the winning blurb, I simply replace the existing blurb on Amazon with this new version and continue driving traffic to the book product page.

Then it's a case of waiting for the data to roll in to see if the new blurb has a significant impact on sales.

As I mentioned at the top of this newsletter, I would recommend testing a blurb on Amazon for 2-4 weeks to allow time for the algorithm to crawl and index the new blurb.

Alternatively, with your winning blurb now identified, you could test different hooks (the first line of the blurb) with Facebook Ads, keeping the rest of the blurb exactly the same.

Or perhaps you could test the call-to-action at the end of the blurb.

Or any section of the blurb you feel you'd like to improve on.

It can all be tested cheaply, quickly and effectively with Facebook Ads.

Wrapping Up

On a final note, even after rigorous testing of blurbs with Facebook Ads, using the winning blurb on your book product page offers no guarantee that this new blurb will perform better than the existing blurb.

But the chances of it working better are pretty substantial, especially if you've seen a dip in sales for an extended period of time (2-4+ weeks) with the current blurb in place.

At the very least, for all the blurbs you tested that "didn't work", they could still prove to be fantastic pieces of Primary Text for future Facebook Ads.

And that is my process for testing blurbs with Facebook Ads.

Thank you so much for reading and enjoy the rest of your weekend.

To Your Success
– Matt