{"id":871,"date":"2019-04-11T18:10:31","date_gmt":"2019-04-11T10:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.haguepublishing.com\/?p=871"},"modified":"2019-04-11T18:11:38","modified_gmt":"2019-04-11T10:11:38","slug":"the-great-google-book-ad-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/the-great-google-book-ad-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Google Book Ad Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(aka Can a Google Ad Sell Books)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Week 1<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Cover<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I have previously blogged about the failure of online advertising to sell books. My most recent blog on this was in September 2015\u00a0 and entitled: \u201cDoes online advertising work for books?<\/a>\u201d This blog was based on an IBPA survey, and our own experience in 2014 with a series of blog-ads that cost us $330. For this we got 86,000 views, which gave us slightly over 43 click-throughs, and which in turn resulted in two sales. Given other examples quoted by the IBPA it was clear that online advertising doesn\u2019t<\/strong> work for books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About two weeks ago, however, I received a phonecall from an\nindividual working for Google to inform me that because I had registered Hague\nPublishing as a business on business.google.com  they would be providing technical and artistic\nassistance to me for three months to develop and tune a Google advertisement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That generated a conversation that went for 1.5 hours as John\nand I tried to work out what products Hague Publishing produced (Science Fiction\nand Fantasy books), and what type of advertisement might actually result in us\nselling more books (probably none). However, during that conversation it occurred\nto me that online advertising of non-Fiction books such as self-help and DIY\nmight result in some sales if the search terms were narrowly focussed on those areas\nthe books were about. And then flowing on from that perhaps people searching\nfor \u2018alternate history\u2019, which is a pretty niche genre, might be interested in an\nalternate history book. And so I agreed to advertise my most first book \u201cNightfall\u201d,\npublished by Zmok Books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first thing was to come up with the search terms that\nwould be used. This is set by a combination of the \u2018business\u2019 and the\nservices\/products being sold. This was the first problem as describing the\nbusiness as a \u2018publisher\u2019 gave terms that focussed on \u2018printing\u2019, not \u2018books\u2019.\nChanging the business to \u2018bookseller\u2019 created more useful categories, although\neven here terms such as \u2018new books for 2016\u2019 isn\u2019t going to get your ad in front\nof the right people. Luckily Google lets you turn search terms \u2018off\u2019 which\nresulted in me turning off all 221. It was more useful however when I listed\nthe services\/products as \u2018alternate history\u2019. This gave me 20, very specific search\nterms.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the advertisement links direct to the paperback listed on\nthe Hague Publishing site, and postage overseas is a real killer I set the\nadvertisement to initially only be offered in Australia. A further restriction\nis that the advertisement will only run Friday-Sunday, hopefully putting itself\nbefore people who are in the mood to whip out their credit cards. In an effort\nto increase conversion rates, however, I also updated the listing to include\nlinks to eBook distributors, including Kobo, Google, Apple, and Amazon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So will this advertisement actually appear before anyone,\nand if it does \u2013 will it result in any sales? I\u2019ll keep you informed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(aka Can a Google Ad Sell Books) Week 1 I have previously blogged about the failure of online advertising to sell books. My most recent blog on this was in September 2015\u00a0 and entitled: \u201cDoes online advertising work for books?\u201d … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,24],"tags":[261,262],"class_list":["post-871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writers","category-marketing-101-for-authors","tag-google-ad","tag-nightfall"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=871"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":874,"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions\/874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}