Last year, I experimented with Facebook’s pay-per-click ads. I wrote out my thoughts in two blog posts: Do Facebook Ads Work for Authors, Part 1: Set Up and Do Facebook Ads Work for Authors, Part 2: Results. Since I’m a huge fan of Goodreads, I decided to try out their pay-per-click ads* since it sounded very similar to Facebook’s. You write a short sentence or two to entice people to click, and only pay when they do click. You’re also able to narrow down your target audience, something I love about these types of ads. I usually add in keywords like “urban fantasy,” “fae,” “magic,” and the names of a few urban fantasy authors since I think their readers may also like The Shadow Reader.
Goodreads gives you a few more characters than Facebook does, so I was able to include a couple more words in my ad. That didn’t seem to help, though. I started my ad on June 10th, and as of today, I have a total of 4 clicks.
A couple of weeks ago I changed the text of my ad so that it was exactly the same as the text of my Facebook ad to see if that made a difference. No. I’m getting less than one click a week. Contrast that to Facebook where I had several clicks a day, and quickly reached my $25 cap.
I have to admit, I was surprised my Goodreads results were so much worse than my Facebook results. Goodreads is a READING community. I thought people would be more interested in finding new books. On further thought, though, maybe they prefer to find new books through their friends reviews and not through advertisements.
Also, I think Facebook ads are much more visible than Goodreads ads. For the Goodreads pay-per-click ads, you usually have to scroll down quite a ways to see the small advertisement. Plus, I think there might be too many PPC ads running on Goodreads site. When I click through my account, I see different books almost every time, and most of the time, those books aren’t ones that I would read (not my genres).
So, my overall impression of Goodreads Pay-Per-Click ads? Not worth the effort.
Have any of you tried out Goodreads PPC ads? What did you think of them? And where is your favorite place to run ads of your books?
* The ads I’m talking about our the small ads with a tiny picture of a book and a few lines of text next to it. I’m not talking about the fancy square ads that are easily seen above the fold. Those ads are way out of my marketing budget.
July 23rd, 2012 - 9:35 am
Thanks for this post, Sandy! I was actually thinking about running a Goodreads ad, but after your review, I think I’ll wait. I’ve had great success with Facebook ads in the past. It’s still my preferred way to advertise.
July 27th, 2012 - 12:31 pm
I had free Facebook ad credit and Google Adwords credit from my ISP, so I tried these out too for my winter release. I have not tried Goodreads.
I set up a couple of different sizes of ads. Some I hooked directly to Amazon, using my “amazon associates” ID where I would get a tiny referral fee if someone clicked through on my ad and bought my book.
I know I played with pay-per-click and pay-per-impression on Google. The credit went pretty fast, and yet when I checked the Amazon associates credit, I think I only sold 1 actual copy of my book where someone clicked my ad and eventually bought it.
The facebook ad credit also went super-fast, and I don’t know if any of the facebook clickers bought through Amazon.
I couldn’t directly track sales to B&N or direct to the publisher’s website. I tried hooking the links to my own site for a while, and did see a bump in traffic, but clickers weren’t staying on the site and browsing around.
That might say something about the appeal of my book, or it might just show that people are clicking on ad links to help support their hosting website, rather than clicking on ads because they are interested in purchasing.
Bottom line: I am glad I didn’t pay actual cash for the ads. It is possible that I got some visual exposure I wouldn’t otherwise have had, but I have no way of correlating that to any sales.
I did have fun playing with Photoshop to make pretty ads (and had a devil of a time coming up with an ad that would make the Facebook censors happy as my book cover had naked man titty on the cover and apparently that’s “too graphic”)