I said, “positively”.
I am getting a fantastic response from the Twitter Ads campaign. Since it began in mid-December I have had almost 119,000 impressions generated with a clickthrough rate of 6.72%. That translates into almost 8,000 clicks.
Things really began to takeoff when tweets featuring the Kirkus Review were sent out, with the review page being the landing site. Roughly half of the total clicks were related to this tweet.
Last week, I changed the campaign to include tweets featuring snippets from all of the reviews. I also changed the landing page to the Amazon paperback sales page, now that those reviews are featured on it. That way, someone clicking through to the Amazon page can still read the reviews in full and also get an author’s bio as well.
Since making the change, 54,000 of the impressions have been generated by these tweets, with a slightly lower clickthrough rate of 2,800. I’m not worried about this because as the other campaign gained steam the clickthrough percentage increased to almost 10% per day.
I’m getting 450-500 clickthroughs a day.
To date, the entire campaign has cost me a little more than $500 CDN, or around six cents per click. I am extremely pleased with all of this- who wouldn’t be?
Now if I can just find out if I’ve sold a few books.
As an ancient sales and marketing guy, The rule used to be 1% of cold calls converted into a sale. Using this measure, I should have sold around 1,200 books so far. Using another ancient gauge of ten percent of those going through the door, I should be somewhere around 800 copies. Even if I go to one percent of the clickthroughs, the absolute worst I should be doing is 80 copies sold.
I have no way of knowing, and that may hold true for another month or two. That’s because of the way I chose to publish- through iUniverse. It’s put me in a bit of a Catch-22; because I am not direct with Amazon, I can’t get up to the minute results from Amazon, especially for Kindle sales. Their BookScan system shows that I have sold one book (even iUniverse shows two) since October 31st, a number I know to be impossible.
Kindle results also aren’t available, due to my arms length status. This is the true rub- I am sure that the majority of my Twitter clickthroughs are from phones and pads with a predisposition to ordering the ebook.
Amazon reports their results to iUniverse either every four weeks or quarterly, it’s hard to get a clear picture on that from either. So, hard results are going to be coming in either in February or April.
That’s a long time to hold your breath.
Coming up- an iUniverse sponsored program to send out 4 million impressions of the review blurbs on Facebook and Instagram. The good news here is that iUniverse will be reporting these potential sales within 72 hours. The bad news- these impressions have absolutely no direction when it comes to demographic they go out to anyone who can fog a mirror. This is in keeping with the iUniverse experience- they are all about “fulfillment”.
There is another benefit to this- my Twitter following has grown exponentially since the beginning of the campaign. Seriously, a month ago I had fewer than ten followers. This morning, I hit one hundred fifty, most of them human. I can only assume this is because people are seeing the advertised tweets and choose to follow me as a residual.
I’m therefore going to conduct a scientific poll among the Twitter gang. If you bought a copy of The Host Rises in the past month, drop me a line and let me know. You would have both my gratitude for the purchase and my appreciation for the information.
In the meantime, call me “blueboy”, because that’s the color I’m turning holding my breath.