I run Google AdWords campaigns continuously throughout the year, and for each book I set up an “ad group” specifically to support your book. Here are the key issues.
- I have run AdWords for several years, but I have never been able to prove that it is anywhere close to cost-efficient in terms of $ sales generated per $ spent. The fundamental reason is that books are not very profitable relative to major purchases: it is one thing to spend $500 to buy 1000 clicks when you are selling real estate or a car, but another when you are making $3 or $5 per book. I keep running the ads anyway because I think the click-less impressions held build awareness of what is a very new company and, to be perfectly honest, because tinkering with the AdWords controls is fun for me.
- My total budget for AdWords is in the low thousands per year.
- I run two separate campaigns: one for backlist books, and the other for newly released books (last three months). Each campaign gets the same amount of money, so the total effort is split evenly between frontlist and backlist marketing.
- To be fair to all my authors, I set up ad groups for each book … and Google automagically distributes the ads based on which topics generate the highest click-through rates. This can be pretty random, but it means that every author is getting a fair shake.
What you can do to help: provide me with a list of 5 to 10 highly relevant keywords that should draw likely buyers to your book. Because the Google algorithm distributes ad impressions to the best-performing keywords, it’s in your interest to suggest the most relevant keywords.
Example: the key phrase “torpedo boat” does very well on persuading readers to link to a book about torpedo boats! But so does “confederate boats,” because (as far as I know) the only confederate boats that anyone is interested in were torpedo boats.
Related posts:
Recent Comments