The power of good targeting

A not insignificant part of my business is doing book marketing for authors. The vast majority of this work comes in the form of viral giveaways that I run 1-2 times a month.

These giveaways are heavily targeted to specific fandoms, like Supernatural, Buffy, Harry Potter, etc.

I am exceedingly good at this form of marketing, but this is a story of a pretty big mistake I made recently. A word of caution, this is a very technical post, but it leads to a very important lesson at the end.

Because I have run so many of these giveaways, I usually start the ad process by cloning a previously successful campaign and then tweaking the targeting. For instance, in 2017 I ran a campaign for Harry Potter, which collected over 7,000 new emails in the course of 10 days.

When I eventually ran a giveaway targeted to Supernatural fans, I duplicated that ad campaign, and tweaked the targeting from Harry Potter fans to Supernatural fans, along with tweaking the ad copy and images.

It's very important to do al…