Facebook ads: Are they worth it?

I'm going to share with you my experience with Facebook ads. There are a lot of variables here, of course, and I'd be interested to hear if anyone has had a different experience.

I set aside $10 a few weeks ago to run several ads on Facebook and see what happened with book sales. I let Facebook do the bidding for me, so it only took about four days and my money was all used up. However, it was enough time for me to collect some interesting data.

I created three ads with these titles: Young Adult Thriller, Suspense Novel, Mom Fulfills Dream.

Each ad had a brief sentence summing up the book. One had a sentence from a reviewer, one had a summary sentence, and one had a sentence about the history of the book. The book ads had a photo of my book, while the Mom ad had an author photo. Beneath the summary was the price of $2.99. If anyone clicked on the ad, it led them straight to the Amazon.com page for purchasing the ebook.

I had a few expectations. I designed the ads around different target groups, expecting only certain people to like certain ads. I expected them to attract people, though. I also expected that if people clicked on the ad, they would more than likely be interested in buying the book, and do so at the purchase page.

In reality, the book ads attracted very little attention, receiving only one click each. This could be because a) there are too many books available b) it just didn't look that interesting to people.

On the other hand, to my surprise, the Mom ad with the author photo and a one-line history of the book's publication process, received nearly 20 clicks. This surprised me. But here's the thing. The 20 clicks DID NOT EQUAL SALES. I sold the same amount of books that I usually do. Believe me, I would've noticed if there'd been so much as a ten-book sale increase. So why did these people click? I believe these were moms who saw the title "Mom Fulfills Dream" and thought for $2.99, I was going to divulge with them how to fulfill their dreams.

Either that, or they were men who thought my picture was pretty and were disappointed when the click took them to an Amazon.com page for a book.

My final consensus was that Facebook ads are not worth it. Even with my targeting parameters, I either didn't hit my target audience, or they just weren't interested. It's possible that if I'd run the ad for longer time, people might have clicked on it more, but I don't think so. I don't usually start paying attention to an ad because I've seen it so many times, I start ignoring it so that  I don't even notice it's there. I did not see a return of my $10 investment, which is quite sad.

If someone else has had luck with Facebook ads, please comment to know what could have been done differently. I won't try again, but someone else might.

For more details information of Facebook ads, check out this information here.