Failures in Advertising

Earlier this year, I ran some Facebook ads to send people toward my serials on Kindle Vella. Not because I was making much per episode read, but Amazon was still giving out black-box-generated bonuses every month.

Run ads! How hard can it be?

The first month of ads was encouraging, and I saw a 300% return. Then — of course — everything crashed and I never saw that kind of return again, though I did break even on the space opera. The SF romance — which should have had a larger audience — never got off the ground. In looking into why it tanked, I learned some interesting things.

First off, Facebook is really pushing their "Advantage+" service that automatically determines the best users to show your ads to. They certainly collect the data and they keep track of who clicks on things or probably even pauses to look at it too long. Someone who comments? Absolute gold as far as the FB algorithm is concerned.

The problem is that everything I've ever seen says serials are almost exclusively read by young people. People over 50 have no idea what the hell they are. (I'm 56. I can say these things.) And romance is almost exclusively read by women.

Advantage+ in action

So who was FB's super sophisticated automated algorithm showing my SF romance ads to?

Men over 65 years old.

Then I told it to only serve the ad to women. Two days later I looked at the stats.

Men over 65 years old.

In order to get it to limit it to women under 35, I had to turn off all the Advantage+ features. Then the problem became targeting the right group of women under 35. When FB went all in on Advantage+, they removed most of the ways to limit the audience. At one point a few years ago, you could find similar authors and then say "show this ad to people who like these authors and also read books". Now most of those author choices are gone, so you have to figure out some other way of getting the ad to the right group of people. It was a mess.

Everyone has to have the last word

But what finally tanked the ads was the comments. The number one comment I got on my Kindle Vella ads was something along the line of "I don't read serials. I'll wait until this comes out in book form." Remember what I said about comments being gold? Facebook quickly learned to serve my ads to people who commented — the group of people who absolutely refused to read serials.

Oh well. Kindle Vella is a thing of the past anyhow. I'll chalk this up to a learning experience.

Kitten Watch 2024

We didn't lose any ground yesterday, which is good. The littlest kitten didn't gain any weight, but I can be content with her not losing any weight as long as she progresses tomorrow.

The boys

Have I reached my 1700 word goal today?

No. I've just barely started. I definitely still have enough time, but it's gray and cold and I'm feeling pretty unmotivated today. On the other hand, I really need to get this done. Ugh.