Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Case Study: Tracking sales leads to positive ad info results



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We track internal and trade sales numbers closely, always keeping an eye out for upward trends, surprising returns, and low inventory.

Here’s an interesting example from our book Military Education Benefits for College:

Sales figures per month from January to June were steady. In July, the number of copies of the book that we sold through the trade increased dramatically. I thought maybe it was due to a summer month and people gearing up for another school year. Or perhaps an article about the book was recently published (although I hadn’t remembered seeing one come through on my Google Alerts recently). I emailed the authors to see if they had participated in an event recently that I was unaware of, or if they knew where this increase in sales might have stemmed from. Here is part of their response:

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We spent latter July and early August conducting experimental advertising on Facebook. It was working significantly well on the Facebook front, because it enabled us to increase our "likes" by about 70 in a week. I am confident this may have led to some of the spike in sales you noticed, coupled with appearances we made locally.

We decided to re-apply the same method for the end of August as well, and chose to use Saturday as our most aggressively budgeted day since that's when we saw the biggest spike in our user activity. This proved successful this weekend as we increased activity to the Facebook site again and added another 30 "likes" to our stable. We now hope to be over 500 by the middle of September at the latest. Our goal is to double that by November.

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We’ll track sales closely to see if this continues to pay off, and then urge other authors to replicate this on their Facebook pages. Do you have a similar success story, or an example of stagnant results using Facebook ads?

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