The 99¢ Black Friday Sale Results

Hey,

As promised, today I'm going to share the results of the 99¢ Black Friday sale I ran on my wife's books.

This is going to be a slightly longer email than usual, but I'm sure you'll find it valuable and will take away some key insights you can apply to your own promotions.

First, a recap of the promo details:

Dates: Friday November 25th - Monday November 28th

Books: 1-4 of The Ancestors Saga

Price: Each book was 99¢ for the duration of the sale (as a Kindle Countdown Deal to retain 70% royalties, even at 99¢)

The Experiment

We've never run a Black Friday sale on Lori's books; we usually only run discounts as part of a book launch, or through Amazon's promotions (e.g. Kindle Monthly Deal, Kindle Daily Deal, etc.)

So, we decided, fairly last minute, to run this Black Friday sale as a little experiment to see how the books and Ads performed.

The Tactics

The main driver for the promo was Facebook Ads; however, I also ramped up the Amazon Ads with bigger bids, budgets and placement adjustments.

At the last minute, I also spent $15 on one book promotion service (the only one that could fit us in at such short notice!). This promo went out with them on the Monday (the last day of the sale), to give the books a final big push.

With Facebook Ads driving the most traffic to the books for this promo, that's what I'll focus on for the remainder of this newsletter.

The Audiences

Whenever I run any sort of promo, I like to use proven audiences.

Time is of the essence during a promo; it's not time to test new, unproven audiences.

And as I covered in a recent edition of The Morning ACOS, when working with big budgets (we were spending around $350 per day), Facebook Ads perform best with big audiences. So, I used a couple of Ad Sets stacked with a bunch of individually proven audiences.

I also ramped up the budget of my Retargeting audience, as these warm audiences tend to respond well to promos.

The Ad Creative

I created 4 Ads for each Ad Set and initially, for the first day of the promo, I was using several variations of the image below, that were sending people from Facebook to the Series Page on Amazon:

However, by the second day, the CPCs and CTRs of these Ads were far from sustainable. We're talking CPCs of $0.50 - $1.00 and CTRs of below 1%.

Even with the more expensive costs I was expecting over the Black Friday weekend due to a flurry of advertisers flocking to Facebook Ads, these Ads just weren't cutting it.

They had to go.

So, on Saturday morning, (before the Learning Phase was complete) I changed the image on all the Ads to a variation of the following 2 images (testing a total of 4 images again).

These new Ads did the trick! CPCs came down to $0.25 - $0.35; much more in line with my expectations and far more sustainable. CTRs also improved to 3% - 5%, on average.

I kept the same Amazon Attribution links used in V1 of the Ads (sending people to the series page), even though the image was styled from the book cover of Book 1.

The quotes I used in the images themselves referred to the series as a whole rather than an individual book from the series.

On the Amazon series page, people would clearly be able to see that they could pick up all 4 books in the series with a single click for $3.96.

I love series pages when running promos and launches; they just convert so well!

It does help that there are very few Amazon Ads on series pages at this time, so it's more difficult for readers to be distracted and drawn away to other books; the same can't be said for individual book product pages!

So, with the Ads under control, I let Facebook do its thing, which it did, as we'll cover next...

The Results

The results below are all based on the USA only and are for the 4-day promo (25th-28th November 2022).

Overall, the Ads sold a good number of books and generated some decent page reads:

Facebook Ads Orders: 772

Facebook Ads Page Reads: 25,602

Amazon Ads Orders: 90

Amazon Ads Page Reads: 6,314

And the overall results for the 4 days were pretty healthy too:

Total Orders: 1,109

Total Page Reads: 182,369

What was less impressive, was the financials over the 4 days (USA only):

Facebook Ads Spend: $1,028.61

Amazon Ads Spend: $212.35

Promo Site Spend: $15


Total Spend: $1255.96

Total Royalties: $1641.39

Total Profit: $385.39

Takeaways and Learnings

So, with these results, which are just about acceptable, though, I would have liked to see slightly higher profits, would we run another Black Friday sale?

The costs of the Facebook Ads definitely had an impact and are still at least $0.05 - $0.10 more expensive than I achieve outside of Black Friday, so this definitely meant that we drove less traffic (eyeballs) to the books, for the same budget.

Another observation I made was that despite the increase in sales, the bestseller rank of the books, especially, Book 1, improved very little.

I'm assuming, though I could be wrong here, that this was because of the sheer number of books being sold over the Black Friday weekend and that it required more sales to achieve a better rank than usual.

Due to this, we would have generated fewer organic sales and borrows and achieved less organic visibility, which definitely had an impact on the overall results.

On the plus side, we've just brought 100's of new readers into the series, which is great for the long-term success of the series and all of Lori's future books.

We should also see a nice tail of page reads coming in (which we are already, in fact), as people who borrowed the books over the Black Friday weekend as part of their Kindle Unlimited subscription, start reading.

As I talk about a lot, as an author, you're always playing the long game.

Promotions like this can really help to build your reader base, even if they're not too profitable in the short term; in the long term though, they can be wildly profitable.

So, to wrap up...

Yes, we would run another Black Friday sale, BUT, I wouldn't use images of the book covers, as I did initially; I would stick to the types of images that I know are proven to work and are proven to have lower CPCs and higher CTRs.

With the inevitable higher costs for Black Friday weekend, every saving you can make on your CPCs will help your budget go further.

We're working with tight margins as it is with books. And even at 70% royalties, we were only making $0.69 per sale, minus the delivery fee of, in this case, $0.10, we were in fact only earning $0.59 for every sale.

These books are in Kindle Unlimited, which certainly helps with profit. Though if the books weren't in Kindle Unlimited, there would have been no profit to speak of for this promo!

All in all, it was a good experiment and I hope it's given you some insights, ideas and inspiration for your next promotion.

To Your Success

– Matt