So you’ve written your magnum opus and you want the world to beat a path to your door. You’ve heard so much about Google Ads and decide to try it for your book. This article shows you how.
First a Warning:
Running Google Ads is an activity that is fairly involved. If you don’t know what you are doing, you could land up spending a significant amount of money with little to show for it. I once ran a campaign with advice and help from experts for an online yoga course that I had co-created and spent over $2,000 before realizing that the campaign was not working. So be careful or get the help of a professional. Use this article simply as a method to understand what is involved in running Google Ads. Also, please don’t draw the conclusion that I’m recommending that you run Google ads. With all these things in mind, let’s get started!
Understand Why You Are Running an Ad Campaign on Google:
Ask yourself why you are running ads on Google. Is it to help with your book launch and perhaps break into a best seller list on Amazon? Is it to help build up a mailing list of users? Or is it simply to make money by selling more books? Whatever the reason, it is important for you to be clear about why you want to run ads. As Lewis Carroll said, “If you don’t know where you are going, every road will take you there.”
Do the Math:
The idea behind every campaign is simple. To get more dollars than you are putting into the campaign. In other words, if you are spending $100 on ads, ideally you want to get at least $101 for the campaign to make financial sense. With this in mind, ask yourself a few questions:
- How much is the cost of my book? What is the proportion of money I make with each book I sell after paying my publisher, my agent and Amazon?
- What percentage of my visitors do I expect to purchase my book (the “conversion rate”)?
- What is the cost of running ads to bring in one person to my book page?
Fix a Budget:
Even before you run the experiment with Google ads, set up a budget. Know how much you are going to spend and set your expectations for the ad campaign realistically.
Have a Landing Page Ready
A landing page is where your visitor lands when she clicks on an ad. There is evidence to support the argument that a landing page with a single call to action (such as “Buy the Book” or “Sign-up for my Newsletter“) is better than a busy page with too many things for the visitor to do.
When visitors click on your ad, think about where you want to take them. Do you want to take them to a specific blog post (where you talk about your new book) or a page on your author site. Make sure that the place where your visitors arrive after clicking on the ad is clear, well thought-out and most important, has a call to action as described above. You may even want to experiment
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