Hey,

The most obvious way that Facebook Ads go wrong is with crappy images or lame text – but authors generally get over that hump, albeit with some wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Targeting is trickier.

This is not anyone’s fault, except perhaps the interface designers who contrived to highlight all the wrong things.

Even when you sift through the morass of irrelevant options and find the actual bits of the ad creation interface which you should focus on, Facebook makes it difficult – near impossible for beginners – to know when you are doing it right.

Over the next two emails, we’ll look at the 10 most common errors I see with Facebook targeting – and how you can apply the correct settings instead, reach the right readers, and improve the performance of your ads.

And we'll kick things off right after a quick word from our sponsor.

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Targeting Misfires

It doesn’t matter how cool your ads are if they are showing to the wrong readers. Some kind of targeting error is probably the most common issue with misfiring ads – and Facebook’s Audience interface is so inaccessible that even grizzled pros can make these mistakes.

BTW, I'm assuming here that you have read some of my previous emails on Facebook Ads, or watched my video tutorial. If you want a more complete guide to ad creation, check the resources at The Email Archive.

1. Stay Interested

Facebook throws a curveball right when you hit the Audience section of ad creation – where you input your targeting and determine who might see your ads.

The interface immediately pushes you towards things like Custom Audiences and even Lookalike Audiences – which are higher level strategies that simply won’t work for beginners.

This is a puzzling design choice when interest targeting is what most of you need, and that’s helpfully buried behind a sub-menu further down the page. You have to click on “Detailed targeting” to see it, and once again Facebook super helpfully makes it look like something you can’t click.

I’ve highlighted what you need to click in the screenshot below.

Don’t be concerned that interest targeting is some inferior way to run Facebook Ads – that’s not true at all. Interest targeting remains the best way to sell books at scale with Facebook Ads, in my opinion, even for experts with large budgets.

Neither should more experienced authors look to leave interest targeting behind when they can begin playing with Custom Audiences or Lookalikes. Done right, they’ll remain the backbone of every campaign, the foundation for your fancier gambits.

You should stick with interest targeting to begin with and, in my opinion, shouldn’t even consider trying Custom Audiences until they have learned the ropes and accrued an audience of a few thousand readers on either their mailing list or Facebook Page (several thousand before attempting Lookalikes).

2. Know Your Country

Facebook will default to showing your ads to the country you reside in, but you can change this to target any county you like (or indeed any geographical area, should you desire).

This is fine if you are in the USA and want to target American readers – and targeting American readers who shop at the Kindle Store is where I recommend beginning, simply because there are additional challenges to targeting other retailers and countries; save that for when you know what you’re doing.

When you are ready to branch out, I recommend separate ads and campaigns for each retailer and country (indeed, for each retailer in each country you are targeting).

Some of this is personal preference – it keeps things simply and allows at-a-glance analysis. But it also reduces the chance for errors. For example, if you include the UK, you will be sending UK customers to the US Kindle Store, where they won’t be able to purchase your book. Sure, they could figure it out, and might if they want the book badly enough, but this will really tank the performance of your ad and really waste your money.

Always make sure you are using the correct retailer link for the country you are targeting – it’s easier to mess this up than you might think, especially when running multiple ads, and doubly so when stressed out during a launch, which is why I like to keep my account clean and organized.

3. Being Hyper Isn’t Cool

When I started using Facebook Ads I was thrown by just how much was different from Google Ads – a system I knew intimately as I worked there! But my experience enabled me to learn fast and soon I was hyper-targeting like a pro.

Hyper-targeting is the process where you use extremely niche targeting to find the exact subset of the audience who might respond best to your ads – and this used to be the path to success on Facebook.

However, the game has changed completely and that’s not the best strategy anymore. It can still work, if your niche interests still exist, but most advertisers get better results these days from doing opposite: going big and broad.

But how big?

How broad?

Ooof, these are the details that break you… or make you. Read on, pilgrim.

4. Broads Can Be Dangerous Too

I bet you’re dying for a digression on Facebook’s use of algorithms, AI, and machine learning.

The reason hyper-targeting worked so well before is that Facebook’s system was fairly “dumb” and mostly operated within the parameters we set – which is why strict parameters brought best results once you knew what you were doing.

But there were limits to this approach because while Facebook has a lot of data on us, it doesn’t know everything – and it knows even less know after Apple blocked some of its data gathering last year. However, Facebook has been investing incredible amounts in machine learning – building systems which can crunch data and make decisions on the fly.

In simple terms, Facebook can now show your ads to people more likely to respond to them.

Looking for clicks? Facebook will basically show your ads to everyone identified as “most likely clickers on this type of thing.”

Want follows? Sign ups? Engagement? Video views? Facebook’s system can now adapt on the fly based on historical characteristics as well as the live performance of your new ad – which is kind of amazing.

In fact, it’s so powerful that today Facebook generally recommends what’s known as “broad targeting.”

And this is where authors can slip up because in the wider marketing world this means something different – basically just targeting everyone in a given country, and letting Facebook do the rest.

Marketers are happy to relinquish control to Facebook’s algorithms because it does clever things like showing your ad more frequently to certain demographic slices if it detects a higher response rate from them (and vice versa).

It generally works great… except when it doesn’t. And books are one of those cases where it doesn’t. Books are such niche products that you usually need to keep at least some parameters in place to keep things on track.

My tips:

• Target one country.
• Don’t target by age/sex/etc. unless you have a compelling reason.
• Target by interest(s) only and keep the resulting audience as big as possible. I recommend choosing a comp author or two, and if that’s not possible (it often isn’t on Facebook except for the biggest trad authors) then choose your genre. And if that’s not possible you must get creative and start looking at things like TV shows your readers might watch.
• Narrow the audience by “Amazon Kindle” and the “Kindle Store” interests to ensure you are reaching Amazon customers who purchase ebooks.
• Be very careful with interests like “ebooks” and “ereaders” as they generally include lots of non-Amazon customers (I’ll explain the danger below).
• Don’t throw in too many interests at once – you need to test things individually first to see what works.

In summary, don’t be afraid to go bigger and broader than before, but remember that books are weird products in marketing terms.

And as always, you will need to tailor this advice for your own circumstances and genre. Just one example, I’ve heard from countless romance authors that they will only show their ads to women because the comments and messages from men are just not worth the hassle - no matter how good Facebook's algorithms might be.

Aside from compelling reasons like that, though, I generally trust the algorithms to figure out which demographics to show my ad to – and find it makes better and faster decisions than I can.

5. The Boolean Girl

This newsletter is missing a controversial statement like “your ignorance of Boolean logic is ruining your Facebook Ads.”

Yeah that’s a sentence I wrote in 2023. One which might demand some explanation.

See those two interests in the top line there? The screenshot might be a little difficult to read, but I have inserted E.L. James and George R.R. Martin in the top level of interest targeting.

Many authors seem to think this will give them the overlap between the two audiences, but this actually tells Facebook to target both audiences, as you can see from the massively different audience numbers above. The size of the audience in the USA which likes both authors is approx. 400k. But the size of the audience which likes either is around 20 million.

Here is why that is important.

You need to make really, really sure that you are using this targeting interface correctly because here’s a mistake a see all the time: an author puts their main comp author in the top line – let’s say it’s E.L. James. And then they put the Kindle Store beside that, thinking it will target Kindle owners who like E.L. James – a reasonable assumption.

However, the system will instead target everyone who likes E.L. James OR owns a Kindle, which is not what you want at all, because you will then be targeting the millions of people who like E.L. James who don’t have a Kindle, and the tens of millions more who own a Kindle (and do not like E.L. James).

Confusion is understandable; the interface is a mess. What you need to do instead is to use narrowing.

I recommend putting Amazon Kindle in the top line – I always start with that to keep things neat and tidy, and to ensure I’m sending the right readers to the right retailer.

Then you need to hit that Narrow Audience button, and then put in E.L. James or whoever your comp author may be, or the genre if you can’t find a comp author, etc.

(FYI: it makes no difference if you start with E.L. James in the top line and then narrow by Amazon Kindle – as long as you use narrowing properly and keep them separate – this is just personal preference.)

Finally, just to really underline how finicky this entire interface, especially the mission critical parts, typing in “EL James” will not bring her up as a target, but “E.L. James” will – and there’s no consistency even with this. To contrast, “George RR Martin” and “George R.R. Martin” work equally well. You will have to try all variations when searching for interests.

More targeting landmines next time – five more, in fact, including one that is absolutely lethal!

Dave

P.S. Writing music this week is Barry Ryan with Eloise.