Advertising Results For August 2025
I haven’t posted an ad results roundup for a couple of months, partly because it’s been a really busy summer, and partly because I’ve been adjusting some things and waiting to see the results. I’ll explain more later in the post, but the short version is that I’m losing confidence in the effectiveness of Facebook ads.
But first, let’s see some advertising results for August 2025!
Let’s start with Facebook ads, where I advertised THE GHOSTS, CLOAK GAMES/MAGE, and the FROSTBORN series.
THE GHOSTS $8,40 back for every $1 spent, with 6% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. This one was likely a bit of an anomaly, because GHOST IN THE SIEGE did a lot of heavy lifting for the series.
CLOAK GAMES/MAGE: $2.70 back for every $1 spent, with 12% of the revenue coming from the audiobooks.
FROSTBORN: $2.83 for every $1 spent, with 30% of the revenue coming from the audiobooks.
Now on to Amazon ads. Remember, for an Amazon ad to be profitable, it needs to generate at least one sale/complete KU readthrough for every 6-8 clicks.
DEMONSOULED OMNIBUS ONE: $5 back for every $1 spent, with a sale for every 0.82 clicks.
HALF-ELVEN THIEF: $1.22 for every $1 spent, with a sale for every 2.47 clicks.
DRAGONSKULL OMNIBUS ONE: $28.75 for every $1 spent, with 65% of the profit coming from the audiobook, with a sale for every 0.11 clicks
Obviously these numbers require some explanation. The profit margin on HALF-ELVEN THIEF is narrow, but the entire series made up for it, so that’s okay, and it will get better when I start writing more books in the series later this year. The numbers for DRAGONSKULL OMNIBUS ONE was so high because the ebook is $0.99, but the audiobook brings in a lot more than the ebook.
Bookbub ads do quite well with Google Play and Barnes & Noble. The numbers are too long to quote here but they did quite well.
All that said, the reason I am losing confidence in Facebook ads is a combination of the loss of granular targeting and over-reliance on AI targeting. One of the paradoxes of online advertising is that the smaller and more granular your audience, the more likely your ad is to convert to sales. Narrow, targeted advertising is a lot better than broad targeting. Unfortunately, Facebook has been slowly removing the more granular targeting options in favor of broader categories that don’t work as well. Like, you used to be able to target dozens of fantasy authors as “interests” for Facebook users, now you can only target “epic fantasy” and maybe JRR Tolkien. You can’t even target Brandon Sanderson as an interest, and he’s probably the most popular epic fantasy author today!
To take its place, Facebook has introduced AI assisted targeting, which they call Advantage+. There’s no beating around the bush – Advantage isn’t very good. It can garner a reasonable number of clicks on an ad, but those clicks don’t convert. Even with ads that don’t use Advantage, Facebook still sneaks it in, so the effectiveness of Facebook ads has been declining.
Like, I turned off Facebook ads for the DEMONSOULED series entirely, and my results actually improved a good bit.
So I’m going to test another series with no Facebook ads for September, and we’ll see how much the results vary. Specifically, I think I will turn off Facebook ads for CLOAK GAMES/MAGE, leave them on for FROSTBORN, and see if it makes any difference.
On the plus side, I didn’t lose any money on any of my ads this month, and they all turned a profit.
As always, thanks for reading and listening, everyone!
-JM