Advertising Through Facebook

I’m considering setting up a Facebook ad campaign. That’s supposed to drive traffic to my Facebook page, which drives people here and to Amazon to buy books. But it makes me nervous.

I don’t like advertising. In fact, I hate it. I can barely stand to watch Hulu and YouTube these days, because there are too many ads. I don’t even much like setting up this blog, because it feels too much like I’m trying to get hits by having regular new content and so on and so forth. Drives me nuts!

But they tell me it works, and I’m pretty sure I know a great deal less about advertising than do people who are in the business.

If I do it, the way it works is, I give them a daily budget, a target type of audience (US & UK, fantasy books, etc.), and a slideshow of book covers. The Facebook system says if I pay $1/day, I should get 2-15 new likes per day. If that’s true, and a tenth of the new likes buy a book, then that’s pretty much paying for the advertising. And presumably a reasonable fraction of those people will go on and read another volume, generating revenue. So what’s the down-side?

Well, I don’t know about you, but I really hate it when ads pop up in my Facebook stream or elsewhere, and I’m not happy about being the guy who caused that, you know? So it’s a puzzlement.

My current thinking is that I should start an ad campaign on Facebook timed toward the release of The Roof Of the World. Maybe a month ahead, start a low-level campaign ($1/day), then advertise a promotional for The Deeping Well on Amazon to coincide with the new volume, ramp up the FB campaign to $2/day for the last week, and keep going for 2 weeks after June 30. So that’d be something like $75 in advertising. At the end of July, I go through the reports and see whether it worked or not.

That all seems very sensible, I guess, but I’m still kind of bothered about the whole thing.