It’s been an interesting month. I have made quite a few changes since I started this case study. The biggest change has been a completely redesigned website. More on that later. I won’t have sales data for the first month of the campaign for several weeks. The early indications are that I will have sales in the neighborhood of 75 total books as compared to the normal 40 to 50. However, this could also be related to the holidays.
Here is the one month Adwords report:
You’ll notice two things right off the bat: a sharp rise in clicks on December 12 followed by a sharp drop off on December 21. The increase on the 12th was a result of my adding another campaign to the Unbroken campaign. While out Christmas shopping I had an epiphany. This next year is going to be huge for eBooks. Everywhere you look they are selling eReaders: Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Sears, bookstores. And that doesn’t even count online sales of eReaders. I sell way more eBooks than I do print books and I want to make sure that I am well positioned to get my book out in front of all those new eBook buyers. So I decided to expand my marketing efforts.
That’s also why I decided to redesign my website. I’ve been acquiring some new web design skills and thought I would put them to good use. But I ran into a slight technical problem that forced me to shut down the Adwords campaign until I can resolve my technical issues. The problem is with the image galleries. I won’t go into detail except to say that they’re not working properly, and they need to be if I’m going to pay people to visit my website. Here’s a sneak peek at the new site. Just know that if you visit the site that the image galleries are having issues.
Once I have the technical issues ironed out, I think the site will be a big improvement over the old site. I hope to have this resolved before Christmas so I can take advantage of all the people opening up their new eReaders.
So to expand my marketing efforts I decided to re-enable some display ads that I had been running previously. Here’s a screenshot of one of the ads.
This is a rich media ad with animation. I’m running five different variations of this ad. They will run on aviation sites and on Youtube next to aviation videos. They cost next to nothing to run. You can see by the chart above that the average CPC is just .31 cents a click.
The Unbroken campaign has had an impact on sales. I have had two eBook sales from Amazon UK that I feel pretty confident came as a result of the Unbroken campaign. My total cost for everything so far has been just $35. The best performing ad on the display network is this one.
This ad is also the best performing on the search campaign. Total impressions for the first month was 27, 846. Not bad for a $35 investment.
Part of running a campaign like this is to analyze the data and make adjustments accordingly. For example, the keyword or keyword phrase with the most impressions is “Unbroken.” But the keyword phrase that has gotten the highest number of clicks is “Louis Zamperini,” the person the book is written about. You can read my review of Unbroken here.
I had expected a bounce rate in the neighborhood of 80% to 90%. Here is the Analytics report for the first month of the campaign:
This shows the bounce rate at 88.51%. These are people who clicked on an ad and then left without going further into the site. My goal for the next and last month of the campaign will be to improve this figure, which I think will happen with the new website.
This next chart compares the site visits before and after the campaign.
This shows a 37% increase to the home page and a 110% increase to the order page. These are all positive indications.
I have been running the campaign on Microsoft Adcenter as well. Here are the results for this campaign so far.
This campaign hasn’t been running the entire period, but it shows 20 clicks for a total cost of $3.11 with an average CPC of .16 cents. If I were running this type of campaign for a new book or for a client, I would spend an equal amount of time analyzing the data and making adjustments.
So far I have not been able to get my book on the Amazon page for Unbroken. Though, the book does show up in my list for the Kindle. So this is still something I’ll be shooting for in the next month.
Lastly, I have made some progress in getting my ad to display on some major sites. I can’t show you any live examples because the campaign is paused, but I’ve had over 200 impressions on the USA Today online review page of Unbroken.
That’s it for this report. I hope to have my technical issues with my website resolved soon.