Not too long ago, I decided to go through the motions of placing an ad for my books on Facebook. I went through the clicking process, saw what was involved, learned a little, then closed out of it. FB, of course, tracked my clicks. A couple of weeks later I received an e-mail from FB, saying it looked like I had tried to place an ad, and giving me a $50.00 coupon for an ad campaign, with a deadline of April 16.

I let this sit there a few days, not really believing it, and not having time to go back and figure the creating an ad process all over again. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I put writing tasks aside and decided to get on with using the coupon. I clicked on the link provided in the e-mail, and an appropriate page came up.

I decided to advertise Operation Lotus Sunday, it being my latest and probably my best novel. I also planned to use some of the coupon to advertise Doctor Luke’s Assistant and The Candy Store Generation. I did OLS first. A few clicks, with the budget set at $20.00, and I had my ad for OLS. Then I saw I could have multiple images for it. So I started adding images to the ad. I went up to five, but did something wrong with three of them, and so had only two. That was fine with me. I had the front cover and the photo of the Stone Forest from the back cover. So I clicked to place the ad, had to wait a few minutes while FB approved it, then went to see what I had done.

Then I realized I had actually created two ads! Oh no, I thought, what have I done? Moreover, what have I done to my budget, which was $20 out of the $50 coupon? I couldn’t really tell. Since I had to enter credit card information, even though I was using a coupon, I figured the worst that would happen was I might use up $40 on OLS instead of $20. Again, no problem. So I went ahead to create an ad for DLA, using the other $10. It was fairly easy. I entered links and words, and clicked to go to the next page, which would be the budget information. Except, it didn’t go to the next page; instead it brought up the page that said thank you for placing the ad, it would be reviewed by FB within so many minutes. After those minutes the ad showed up with a budget of $20.

I thought “Now what have I done?” I figured the worst that could happen was I would be billed $10 over and above the coupon. So I decided to place the ad for OLS, and did so going through the same procedure. Again it didn’t ask me to set a budget, and the ad went live with a budget of $20.00. So was I potentially going to be out $30?

I went to the ad analytics page, and learned a few things. FB took the budget as an ad campaign budget, not for a single ad. And the two different images on the OLS ad were indeed considered two different ads. So in fact my budget was too low. I quickly changed my budget to $50 for the campaign.

So, my campaign is off, now in its third day. FB gives quite a few analytics to look through. So far I’ve spent $6.11, based on the number of clicks on the ad and click-through rate to the book pages at Amazon. At that rate my ads should run for eight or nine days. But I’m going to make a couple of changes. On the second OLS ad I’ll change the image from the Stone Forest photo to the entire book cover, front and back. And I’m going to add an ad for Documenting America. Might as well.

Alas, as of an hour ago the ads had resulted in no sales reported by Amazon. I sure hope something sells in the next eight or nine days.