Ad Results September 2025: Major Changes!
Let’s take a look back at some ad results for September 2025.
First, the big changes: I am going to give Facebook ads a rest for a while. As I’ve mentioned before, Meta has been shoving all this Advantage+ AI stuff into Facebook ads, and it just doesn’t work. The key for online advertising, especially for books, is to narrow your target audience as much as possible, and the Advantage+ AI stuff goes for a broad audience.
To test that out, I didn’t advertise FROSTBORN with Facebook ads in August, but did advertise in September.
End result? I actually made $20 less from FROSTBORN in September than I did in August, but I also had the advertising expense in September, so I made less overall.
I also advertised CLOAK GAMES/MAGE in August, but not in September. End result? CLOAK GAMES/MAGE made about $200 less, but without the cost of advertising, that meant the profit was still higher.
So I’m not sure Facebook ads are effective any longer. Thanks, Generative AI!
But in the interests of full testing, I think in November I will try one ad campaign entirely with Advantage+ and see how it works. I don’t think it will accomplish anything, but it is worth the trying, and advertising is always a deductible expense.
Meanwhile, Amazon ads did a lot better. Here are some of the campaigns I ran. Remember, for an Amazon ad to be successful, it needs to generate a sale/complete KU readthrough for every 6-8 clicks.
DEMONSOULED OMNIBUS ONE: $2.44 for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 1.41 clicks.
HALF-ELVEN THIEF: $1.31 for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 2.48 clicks.
HALF-ELVEN THIEF OMNIBUS ONE (48% from the audiobook): $10.13 for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 1.26 clicks.
STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: CREATION: $24.01 for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 0.66 clicks.
CLOAK MAGE: OMNIBUS ONE: $3.64 for every $1 spent (65% of the profit coming from the audiobook), 1 sale for every 0.61 clicks.
SEVENFOLD SWORD: OMNIBUS ONE: $3.47 for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 2.42 clicks.
DRAGONTIARNA OMNIBUS ONE: $13.4 for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 1.2 clicks.
I only had one campaign that lost money, but it only lost a grand total of $1.48, so that was good.
So we can see that omnibus editions definitely do very well with Amazon Ads, especially if they have attached audiobooks. And it turns out finishing STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE made it a lot easier to advertise, who knew? 🙂
Though if I really want to kick up HALF-ELVEN THIEF, I need to write another book in the series, which I plan to do later this year.
I’m also running a variety of Bookbub Ads for my permafree books on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and Apple, and those consistently do very well since it’s a lot cheaper to get clicks for the non-Amazon stores for books.
So that’s where my ads are at for September 2025. I’ll test Facebook ads one more time in November, but I am most probably going to use them a lot less moving forward. So it’s time to think about other marketing ideas. I resisted using Facebook ads for like four years before I started experimenting with them in early 2020, so maybe it’s time after dragging my feet on the idea for five years to start playing with short-form video in 2026, since that’s where all the growth seems to be.
But we’ll see.
As always, thanks for reading, everyone!
-JM