Facebook vs. Amazon Ads: What Works Best for Selling Books in 2024?

Resources mentioned

Almost Everything You Need to Know About Facebook Ads in 2024

Google Sheets Masterclass (if this is showing up as $200, wait until it’s “discounted” to $12 – $20; this is the regular price)

Recommendations

Both Facebook and Amazon Ads work. From running 7-figures plus in ads across a variety of genres, however, I have found that one platform or the other tends to work better, depending on the situation. Here’s a breakdown.

Important: these are not hard and fast rules, just general guidelines. There will be to what I’ve outlined below exceptions.

Focus on Facebook Ads if:

  • You have 3 books or fewer in your series. Because of the lower CPCs on Facebook, you can get a lower cost per unit (the cost of a sale or borrow of the book), which makes it more realistic to run the ads to shorter series. Facebook Ads are, of course, effective for longer series as well; it just isn’t a prerequisite to have a longer series for them to have a reasonable shot at working.
  • You write romance. For 9 out of 10 romance books, Facebook Ads will perform better due to the lower CPCs. Additionally, it’s easy to target and find a lot of romance readers on Facebook.
  • You write good blurbs and commission good covers. Your cover is just an ad image; your blurb is just a piece of ad copy. If you can execute these elements well, those skills will translate over to making effective Facebook creatives (ad images, copy, and headlines).
  • You’re spending $25/day or less on ads. It’s easier and cheaper to get enough clicks (I recommend 30 per creative) to determine whether an ad creative is effective on Facebook. At a $0.20 CPC, it will cost you around $6 to test each ad creative. On Amazon, I estimate it will cost $1 per click on an ASIN or keyword during the testing phase; I recommend 20 – 30 clicks to get a large enough sample size with the Amazon Ads (30 for romance and thriller / mystery / crime, 20 for other genres in the US; 20 in the UK; 15 for other regions like Germany, France, and Italy). This means testing each keyword or ASIN costs about $15 – $30.
  • You prefer to run high spend launches / promos. Facebook Ads are very effective for running ads to your backlist, but they shine the most when you need to spend a large amount of money in a short, concentrated timeframe. You can increase and decrease your Facebook Ad budget on a dime, which makes it easy to scale from $0 to $5000 (or anywhere in between) in hours.

Focus on Amazon Ads if:

  • You have 5 books or more in a series. This is essentially a prerequisite for running profitable Amazon Ads; there are exceptions, but the numbers tend to get dicey with fewer than 5 books. Note that even with a 5 book series, you may prefer to run Facebook Ads instead—Amazon Ads don’t necessarily perform better for longer series, they merely become a viable option at 5+ books.
  • You like spreadsheets and data analysis. Amazon Ads spit out a tremendous amount of data, which is useful for not just dialing in ad performance but also for learning more about your target readers, similar books, and genre. But this data is only useful if you can crunch through it. Doing this at scale, when you’ve tested hundreds of targets across your catalog, is impossible without solid spreadsheet skills.
  • You want to focus on backlist marketing. Amazon Ads can take awhile to get the spend and performance dialed in. But once you have things optimized, the performance can be remarkably steady for a year or longer, even at higher spends ($100 – $250+/day).

Add Another Ad Platform When:

  • You’ve tested 400+ keywords and ASINs (Amazon) or 400+ ad creatives (Facebook). Note that I don’t mean sloppily throw 400 keywords into a single ad, with most getting zero clicks, to check off an arbitrary box. I mean fully tested, where you’re tracking performance and getting enough clicks (15 – 30) to know whether the targets are working or not. Same with Facebook: if the creatives are sloppy and the tracking is nonexistent, then this is a waste. This will take 3 – 4 months, minimum, if you’re consistent with your testing each week. For most people, this volume of testing will take a year.
  • OR you hit six-figures a year in revenue. This is a good opportunity to diversify and mitigate the risk of running ads on just one platform (e.g., glitches, account shutdowns etc. impacting your ads). It’s worth noting, however, that you don’t have to add a new platform at this point; Amazon and Facebook are both large enough ad platforms that you can hit 7-figures running ads on just one of them.
  • OR you’ve focused on 1 platform for 90 days and nothing hits the benchmarks below. This assumes you’ve been testing consistently; testing 12 keywords on Amazon or 2 ads on Facebook and then saying “it’s not working” and switching after 3 months is not enough testing. However, if you’ve tried various things and you can’t gain traction, then switching to a different platform might be worthwhile.
  • Benchmarks for ads / targets that are working well:
    • Facebook: For a full price book, I want at least 1 ad to have a 2% conversion rate after 100 clicks. 5%+ for a 99c book.
    • Amazon: For a full price book, I want at least 5 keywords or ASINs to have a 10%+ conversion rate after 100 clicks. 15%+ for a 99c book.
    • Note that hitting these benchmarks doesn’t necessarily mean that your ads are profitable, just that 1) you can use that ad platform to sell that particular book and 2) the blurb / cover are generally good enough to sell books.

If any of these suggestions fly in the face of conventional recommendations, the truth is this: most authors struggle for years with ads, incinerate money, and never get beyond the beginner stage. Thus, the conventional approach, wherein people hop from marketing tactic to marketing tactic, looking for the hack of the month, is ineffective.

From my own experience learning the platforms, as well as teaching others, you will progress much faster, learn much more, and be far more confident in your ads if you focus on a single platform and really dive deep. Even if the platform ends up being unprofitable or a poor fit for your books, the knowledge and skill you build will transfer to other ad platforms / other forms of marketing, and you will level up much faster overall.