13: The Full Tracking Process (Wide)

IMPORTANT: The process below is a framework that you can follow, build upon, and tweak for your own books. It is not set in stone, nor is it the only approach to assessing the effectiveness of your ads. I simply want to demonstrate a streamlined approach you can take to more accurately evaluate your ads.

PROCESS (WIDE BACKLIST)

  1. Set a monthly budget
  2. Set up a tracking spreadsheet
  3. Start with your best performing series (80/20) by profitability, conversion, or RPS
  4. Calculate baseline if possible
  5. Calculate the revenue per sale (RPS) for the series if possible
  6. Run ads and determine the cost per sale (CPS). Compare to RPS. Also look at sales, rank, and net profit using the relative or relative + baseline methods weekly / monthly. Always confirm RPS projections with actual net profitability numbers.
  7. If RPS is greater than CPS, can continue running ads and iterating on ads (CPC) and conversion to improve profitability and/or potentially scale.
  8. If not, then isolate whether traffic (CPC), conversion, or profitability (sellthrough / series length) is the problem.  Test new ideas until profitable, or you determine series isn’t a good candidate for advertising.

IMPORTANT: if you cannot calculate RPS, then only use the relative or relative + baseline net profitability tracking. You can still use cost per sale (CPS) as a way to analyze if conversion rates and traffic costs are within reasonable bounds (e.g. $5 CPS would be solid for a full price Book 1, $25 wouldn’t).