Biggest fuck up
As a self-published author, my biggest marketing/advertising fuckup without a doubt was advertising somebody else’s product on Facebook Ads. I got the advert landing page URLs mixed up and sent my (expensive) traffic to somebody else’s book. She was extremely happy. Me, not so much. I can kind of laugh about it now and admit to it. At the time, I was mortified and my ego took a major hit. Which taught me the lesson – always triple-check your ad details before hitting the publish button.
Rant
What pisses me off about the online advertising industry (Facebook and Amazon particularly) is the huge amount of AI they’re putting into it. They are acting like AI is the be all and end all of advertising. But they get extremely pissed off when you reject their AI features and insist on doing everything manually.
The worst part is that using Facebook’s AI actually makes the ads worse for me and my ROI goes into the toilet. But STILL they want to add music, “optimize my text”, make changes to the graphic (colors for example), add their own captions to the ads….all in the name of “AI says it will make it better, so there!”
I say no and their automated bots start getting in a hissy fit. So what needs to change? Stop shoving AI down people’s throats and give them a fricking choice to do it manually if they want. Not everything is better with AI (I should put that sentence on billboards).
Useful advice
A really useful piece of advice, apart from telling AI to take a hike?
One way to make an online advert better is to remember who else speaks the target language, other than the country you’re targeting. I aim my books at Germany but I was reminded (embarrassingly) that there are also German speakers all over Europe. Especially Austria, Switzerland, Poland, France, and the Netherlands. As soon as I targeted those countries too, my ROI and CPC shot through the freaking roof and blew it off. If you’re targeting French speakers, remember Canada as well as France. Lateral thinking. Pretty obvious advice isn’t it? But for 7 YEARS, it didn’t once occur to me. I know (facepalm).