Hey,

I’m going to argue with you today.

Well, maybe not you specifically, but I’m going to high-tackle the growing consensus that Facebook Ads Don’t Work Anymore.

The Book Marketing Tier List is back… and I’m here with it, to explain myself.

Namely, why Facebook Ads are S-Tier. Still. In 2024.

Before you harrumph too hard over there, let me add that I haven’t been boned by the 2024 changes which have caused such dismay in Authorland.

My ads are still just as effective, and I think you can navigate the changes too.

And should, as the prizes are considerable, especially if other authors are quitting rather than adapting; that’s just cheaper clicks for the rest of us.

I don’t have some Facebook Ads book or widget or $1,000 course I’m trying to sell you, so you can trust me to give it to you straight — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

And there’s a fair dose of each this week because FB is a hot mess. (But still hawwwwwt.)

Why should you listen to what I have to say? Views on Facebook are relatively entrenched but let me explain my perspective.

I ran my first digital ads in 2004 — long enough ago that we called them “online ads” back then; time turns us all into rubes but I guess it’s worth pointing out that by 2005 I was managing $40m in advertiser spend for Google.

It was quite some time later, perhaps around 2014, when I started advertising seriously on Facebook. But it wasn’t until 2016 or 2017 when I was comfortable enough with the platform where I could really run a big launch profitably, and then translate those principles across authors and genres as well.

I’ve worked as a consultant for a variety of bestselling authors in different genres over the last seven years. This is not a pitch; I’m not taking on clients. I say this by way of explaining that I’ve run a huge number of major Facebook campaigns in that time, helping put all sorts of books to the very top of the charts, and have regularly managed campaigns and releases with five-figure budgets... just for Facebook.

I’m not laying out this experience as a trump card — this doesn’t make me automatically right about anything. Instead, I am underling the time I’ve spent doing this to say:

Panics come and go.

I’ve seen a panic around Facebook Ads — and indeed other ad platforms and marketing tools — so many times at this point that I don’t get worked up. Blogging is dead, Amazon is dead, websites are dead, Facebook ads are dead, social media is dead; these sentiments are almost seasonal at this point.

Sometimes the panic is based on pure nonsense — one loud voice misreading something, or some big author assuming everyone’s ads are crashing just because their sales are down, for reasons which aren’t immediately obvious.

To be clear, this isn’t one of those times.

This “panic” is rooted in reality because Meta made considerable changes to Facebook Ads over the last two years — particularly around the kind targeting we specifically rely upon — and some long-standing, successful author-advertisers have been smoked.

The bit where all this diverges from reality — where I drop the scare quotes again — is when authors are panicked into assuming Facebook Ads don’t work anymore for anyone.

I’m managing one of those five-figure Facebook budgets right now, and I can tell you they most certainly do still work.

I understand people are having genuine issues, but there are workarounds and solutions for many of these problems.

So, please, go into this with an open mind; perhaps you’d find some ways to get your own ads back on track, or some useful nuggets for your own endeavors.

The Pot of Gold

The reason people are worked up is not because Facebook Ads don’t work; it’s because they work very well indeed, but recent changes have thrown some for a loop.

Change is the one constant in all the time I’ve worked in tech and marketing; every so often the paradigm shifts, and people must adapt or sales will suffer.

A favorite quote of mine is William Gibson’s, “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” Change might be a constant, but it doesn’t impact everyone equally, or on the same timeline for that matter.

I can understand newbies especially struggling with Facebook Ads in 2024 — especially if they follow Meta’s advice around all the “new” Advantage stuff. I can even understand the sentiment that this is all some shell game, or scam, or that the only people making money on Facebook are those selling courses.

I’m not selling anything here so let me tell you that the pot of gold on Facebook is very real indeed. People are worked up because a reliable source of sales and traffic and sign-ups has gone a little wonky as Meta jams more and more AI tomfoolery into the interface, when all that stuff needs way more time in the oven.

You don’t see people getting mad about Google Ads because they have never really worked to sell books. It’s different with Facebook Ads.

I’m sure you know that Facebook — together with its “family of apps” as the heinous corporate speak goes — is the biggest social network in the world.

A decade of scandals and investigations and media maulings and boycotts and protests have done... exactly nothing to dent its popularity. Nothing meaningful, at least, because it keeps growing all the time, in terms of daily active users, and monthly active users.

The latest numbers reveal there are now over 3 billion monthly active users on Facebook (a standard way of measuring the userbase). Here’s another way: 51.5% of the entire US population are Facebook users — penetration is still on the rise. Those numbers are even more impressive in important international book markets like the UK, where the proportions are even higher.

It annoys some people when I say this but it’s true: Facebook isn’t just where your readers might be, it’s where everyone’s readers are, every day.

Google Ads is more than twice the size of Facebook Ads in terms of reach, thanks in part to a huge network of partner sites, but Facebook is easily the biggest ad platform which is actually effective at selling books.

Unlike Amazon Ads, you can target customers of any retailers, users of any device, and deploy all sorts of targeting to reach different pockets of readers. The platform is much more flexible than Amazon Ads or BookBub Ads, and you can run campaigns to sell books on your own website, as well as at any retailer, or you can drive sign-ups to your mailing list, boost group promotions, drive engagement on your posts, page, blog, or website — you are only limited by your own imagination. Well, also by the prudishness of the Silicon Valley policymakers, which romance authors will know all about.

The flexibility carries through to ad and post formats too — you can do square image ads, letterbox ones, video ads, carousels; there’s lots of different ways to reach people, lots of formats to catch their eye when scrolling, and lots of things you can do with them once you get their attention.

Facebook is frustratingly complex and the interface is famously unhelpful, but that springs from a unique flexibility that no other bookselling ad platform can match, once you get beyond the learning curve.

Creating your first campaigns can be daunting, optimizing them can test your reserves of patience (and dollars), and the road to profitability can often seem unclear.

But when you crack it, when you get an ad really cooking, when you learn what your target audience responds to, when you have mapped out several audiences which enjoy your work, then you have built a sales machine. Like no other.

The scale of Facebook is truly impressive — and that might be hard to believe when you are trying and failing — but when you have several good audiences with millions of readers in them you will know exactly what I’m talking about.

When I’m building a huge launch campaign, I generally start with promo stacking, then split the mailing list over several days, but that’s all a platform for the real rocket-ship: Facebook Ads.

The platform is so flexible that you can do all sorts of things like push your ads to your friendliest audiences first, who generally say nice things under your ads like, “I loved this book so much!”

This social proof is gold. I try to collect as much as possible and then push the ads out to newer, colder audiences to find fresh readers for the series.

This is just one simple, reliable, sales-generating technique which you simply can’t do with any other ad platform, and it’s why Facebook was, is, and still remains, an S-Tier marketing option.

Even after the changes over the last couple of years which really screwed a lot of people. But those aren’t the only issues with Facebook, of course.

Meta Problems

I mean... where do you start.

Support sucks — maybe more than ever. And the platform is riddled with scammers. I can’t post on my page without getting a dozen phishing attempts in Messenger.

Sometimes Facebook even emails me to encourage me to engage... with a phishing attempt. Those messages come right into my Gmail Inbox, along with more direct phishing attempts related to my Facebook Page (side note: being verified makes this worse not better).

Meanwhile genuine messages from Support — when they bother replying — go into my Spam bucket now.

This is 2024, where the tech companies that rule the world are basically like absentee landlords, without even passing curiosity in what the serfs are doing.

Keeping an eye on him instead is the friendy neighborhood Al, who doesn’t just patrol the streets for moderately offensive memes and the scandalous displaying of clavicles, but now also runs customer service and wants to take over our ads too. Soon we’ll be laying in a comforting pool of amniotic fluid when all decisions are made for us in advance and we can truly switch off…

People mostly saw through this re-skinned robot — having lived with various annoying and crappy automated systems on Facebook for several years now — so Meta is now forcing us to play with its malfunctioning AI toys.

All of this is happening while the ad platform gets ever-more complex; AI didn’t deliver the promised simplicity to go with all this dumbing down and relinquishing of control. What a surprise!

Meanwhile, the path to useful, ethical, actionable advice gets trickier to find for author — especially beginners.

With all this stupid Advantage stuff being forced on us now in many areas, even well-meaning advice can lead authors astray because general best practices for Facebook Ads can be awful for the kind of Traffic campaigns we typically run, or the inexpensive, niche products we typically sell. (You can argue that books are fungible but genres most certainly aren’t.)

In other words, I’m not at all surprised about the downer vibe when Facebook Ads get mentioned in author communities.

But I’m here to give you solutions — or at least point towards processes you can work through to get your ads firing again.

Meta Solutions

Some of these issues are really complex so there’s no way we can cover them all today in anything other than the broadest of strokes.

But I can at least point you in the right direction and explain what (free!) help is coming your way.

#1 Ignore Facebook

Specifically their advice on how to sell books with Facebook Ads. Books are weird products, and authors are weird advertisers, with weird readers. You have to know the business — advice from outside is mostly useless and often dangerous. If you know the publishing business and understand basic marketing principles and have a firm grip of Facebook Ads already, then you can totally filter advice from the outside; otherwise, be careful.

Be especially skeptical of anything Facebook says about their “new” Advantage features, many of which aren’t new at all, just old, unpopular features which have been rebranded (and, in some cases, now forced on us).

Take advice from authors instead. Lots of savvy author-advertisers hang out in this group I mentioned before.

Many of them are doing cool and interesting things with Facebook Ads which are quite different from my approach so you can get a totally different perspective there which might work for you better.

Just be careful about taking advice from people who don’t know the book business as a lot of general best practices can lead you astray, especially if you are just trying to run ads to Amazon.

This has the added bonus of reducing the number of times you need to interact with Facebook Support, which I only recommend bothering with in the most extreme circumstances — account warnings, bans, ad rejections, and so on.

And even then... good luck; you’ll need it.

#2 Go Back to Basics

I also have 20 years experience watching numbers drop, ads hitting a wall, me scratching my head, and my brain offering exactly no help in solving the problem.

When there’s no obvious path forward, I go back to basics. pare things back. Reduce the variables. Turn down the static and isolate the issue. Go back to basics and test, test, test.

It’s the same reason I always recommend starting quite basic too — I generally advise minimal placements, clear-eyed targeting, and cutting out the fancy stuff. Once you have a basic ad firing, you can branch out. Otherwise, you won’t know the reason for your failures, or successes, for that matter.

#3 Diss Advantage

Turn off as much of the Advantage stuff as possible, and corral these rampant robots as much as you can when forced on you.

The exception is Campaign Budget Optimization, which I don’t particularly care about as I usually have one ad set per campaign anyway and control my budget completely that way. Otherwise, all this Advantage stuff goes in the bin.

(Side note: in case you think I’m some kind of Luddite, I think some of this stuff is great in other contexts, but for the kind of Traffic campaigns authors typically run... it’s garbage. I also think some of this stuff could be great for us in the future, or with some key changes. Today is definitely not that day. It’s just not ready for what we need to do with it.)

#4 Flip The Script

Switch it up — especially when all else fails.

Short and snappy ad text isn’t working? Go long. Ad image with book cover not getting the clicks? Try without. Regular image ad not cutting mustard? Try a Carousel — or maybe some video.

Think outside the box. (Pssst: the box is your own head and its usual thought patterns).

Test new approaches. Listen to different voices. Outsource the graphic for once, workshop the ad copy, get feedback from true genre fans on your packaging and/or landing page. Try something new.

Every solution has a problem.

I’ve hit the wall innumerable times both in my corporate days as well as with my own businesses, and when working on someone else’s launches too.

The path back to profit is almost always the same: simplify, go back to basics, and test your way out of trouble — variable by variable.

The above process rarely fails but I’m guessing you might need more help than these (necessarily) general pointers.

Coming your way soon:

(i) Advantage Survival Guide

I’ll show you how to turn off what you can and better control what you can’t. E.g. just because Advantage Detailed Targeting is forced on it now, that doesn’t mean you are a leaf in the wind, subject to the vicissitudes of Facebook’s algorithmic black box. You can and should influence the direction the algorithm goes in (and draw lines around the areas you need it to avoid).

But there are other solutions too — some of which may suit your business or mindset better — such as switching to Sales campaigns and using an intermediary page on your site.

This is an approach I’ve tested before, but it was never as profitable as sending people direct — that extra step, that extra click was often where I lost people. But with all the Advantage/AI stuff really helping Sales campaigns (and screwing Traffic ones), this question is worth revisiting and I know some authors are seeing good results from it.

Of course, you can always take it a step further and sell direct too. Not a trivial undertaking by any means, but if you are heading in the direction of Sales campaigns anyway and doing all this optimizing on your site to make that work, well, it’s a natural progression.

I’ve covered this topic before in a newsletter, but it’s worth a revisit with the more recent changes and is certainly worth a short video guide.

(ii) Campaign Creation Tutorial

I am totally planning to update my Facebook Ad Creation tutorial on YouTube for 2024 — it’s from 2022 and has dated a little. You can still muddle through with it, with the knowledge that you just avoid Advantage stuff wherever possible, but a proper update is coming soon to your eyeholes.

This will be a longer video tutorial, covering Facebook Ads campaign creation from start to finish, over-the-shoulder style.

(iii) Image Workshop

I’m going to make you look fabulous.

Sorry, I misread the script. I’m going to make your ads look fabulous.

This will also be a visual exercise, as you might have guessed, but we will probably cover the highlights here in the newsletter too.

I want to show you how easy it is to make an effective Facebook ad using just your book cover, but also how to use stock photos instead when your book cover design doesn’t lend itself to the first process.

I’ll do it all using free tools like Canva (with the exception of stock photos in some cases, which are of minimal cost anyway).

I have done YouTube tutorials before where I created ads for some author friends, live, on Canva, and I’d like to repeat the exercise with the Decoders crew — i.e. you.

Want to participate? Here’s what you need to send me:

• your book cover (in the highest res you have)
• your book cover without lettering — i.e. just the art — which your designer should be able to provide
• the genre
• a link to your book on Amazon

Simply hit Reply to this email and attach everything to that reply, which should also contain the link and the genre.

I’m going to repeat that your reply should contain the genre of the book because I know what writers are like. Don’t make me figure it out! My brain is tired and sore.

I’ll only be able to pick a few out, but maybe I’ll repeat the exercise a few times because it’s fun and I drink beer.

(iv) Ad Text Flex

Wooooooords, don’t come eeeeeasyyyyy tooo meeeeee...

Yeah, we’re all writers, and most of us struggle with the switch into writing ad copy — but once you can first make the switch, it gets a lot easier after that, trust me.

I have a pretty simple formula I use for writing effective ad copy, and I’ll share it with you, showing you how I use it to write ad copy which converts in a range of genres.

This will be a newsletter, as you might have guessed!

(v) How to Scale

With all those basics down, there’s only one direction to go: up!

I see a lot of weird advice around scaling Facebook Ads — I engage in a lot of scaling all the time, and also regularly start campaigns very hot indeed, i.e. with huge daily budgets, which get spent, this isn’t some gimmick.

I often ignore the advice to only raise daily budgets by a certain amount — I understand why the advice is given by nearly everyone, including Facebook, but if I know the ads are really good then I’m not scared of going back into Learning Mode and I also know I’ll exit it very quickly with performance remaining consistent.

But there are dangers too, so we’ll really get into the topic in detail.

I really like this topic and can see it being covered a few different ways.

(vi) ...and more too.

I've more in the pipeline too - e.g. almost certainly something on targeting, and really getting into where targeting is going on Facebook and how we should manage that, definitely something on Custom Audiences, and probably a bit on Lookalikes as well. There's... lots.

Meta Power Redux

It’s kind of funny to spend most of an S-tier email talking about all the negatives but I want this to be as helpful as possible.

I could brag about running ads with $1,000 a day budgets, but I don’t think that’s very useful. You all know the potential power of Facebook, or you wouldn’t have read this far.

I just wanted to remind you that it’s easy to assume a platform doesn’t work or that “everyone’s leaving” when you see a few people posting those sentiments. That doesn’t necessarily reflect the overall picture.

Because I saw these changes coming, I was prepared and I have been able to continue creating new Facebook campaigns which are performing at a high level — and I’m confident that almost everyone can work around these new problems just by running down the angles.

If I was feeling cheeky, I’d even mention that ads are performing a touch better now; that’s the nature of an ad auction, bads ads subsidize good ones.

That’s not a jab at anyone struggling, I’ve been on that side of a change and I will be again — no doubt whatsoever.

I’m here to say there are solutions, and more help is coming. And Facebook most certainly still is an S-Tier marketing option.

But... I hate Facebook

I’m not under the illusions that all the above — and all the incoming resources — will solve everything for everyone.

What if you just... hate Facebook, for whatever reason? What if your readers really aren’t there, even if half the planet is? What if Facebook removed the one targeting option that really worked for you and nothing else will work?

Don’t panic, you have other options.

The basic book marketing formula is simple.

(a) You need a book (duh) which is packaged in a way that genre readers respond to.

(b) You need traffic — a pipeline of readers to your book’s page on Amazon or wherever else.

(c) You need a way to keep readers engaged inbetween launches.

That’s all you need. And if Facebook Ads simply can’t do (b) for you then just find your traffic elsewhere, whether that’s Amazon Ads, BookBub Ads, or something else altogether.

Promo sites can even fill the roll of (b) instead until you wrap your head around what your truly scaleable traffic source will be.

For me, that’s Facebook — no question. For you... it might be something else.

OK, that’s it folks, we got through this email without dying of old age.

Go us.

We have one final S-Tier marketing option to examine under our withering spotlight: the author newsletter. See you next time,

Dave

P.S. Writing music this week is Macbeth the Great with Buy Me A Zeppelin.