Did the Ingram ID Program Work to Sell More Books?

Hello and happy August. Today we are talking about the Ingram ID program. We also have some news so some updates from the publishing industry. But earlier this year I did a video and it might even be the end of last year I did a video introducing a new program from IngramSpark called Ingram ID. And in a little bit I will get Angela to drop that in the comments, the link to that. But I have been promising and people have been asking for the follow up video from that in order to find out did it work, how did it go. So we're just going to do it live today because I kept kind of dragging my feet on producing an actual video for you with charts and graphs and all that fancy stuff. So we're going to dive into it. And we're also celebrating our seven year anniversary. So thank you. Darla. I saw before we went live that you were congratulating us on seven years at Book Launchers. So thank you for that. And if you've been here for other anniversaries, you know we always order special swag and we've done blankets and backpacks and hoodies in the past. I went for something a little more classic this year. I'll share that in a minute. But, but also, as if that's not enough, we're going to also have a few details on our author business accelerator, which we're also rolling out this month. So we've got a lot to cover. We're going to dive in, but this is our first live since our July break. So in case you're new or you're rusty because it's been a while, please say hello in the comments when you are here live. The more you comment, question, participate, the more likely you are to in fact win. And just trying to think if there's anything else I was going to say there is no deep dive in August, so you're not missing anything. But we do have one in September, I think it's the 21st of September. And all the details and the link to join that live free will be in our newsletter. So you need to be on our newsletter list which you can get on@book launchers.com newsletter and then you'll make sure that you are getting all the invites and all the things you need to know. Okay. Just checking my notes to see if I missed anything. Oh, Friday, Friday I'm gonna put out a special seven year anniversary video and I'm curious for you YouTube besties if you know all seven facts because I tried to put things in there that some of you will not know about the seven years at Book Launchers. So check that out on Friday and be sure to comment if there's anything in there you did not know or if you think there was something I should have included. Okay, I'm going to come back to news in a sec, but I want to say hello to the folks who have said hello already. Efren is here. Thank you. So good to see you, Efren, Brian and Renee and Kevin and Darla, thank you for being here to celebrate our seven year anniversary, which we're going to be celebrating all month. All month long. But without further ado, let's dive into the news. Okay, so the first big news this month is that KDP rolled out identity verification. So for those of you who have KDP accounts already, let me know if you have seen this. I saw it inside of my account the exact as soon as I heard about it. So I think they rolled it out on a Monday night and I checked my account on Tuesday and I had to verify my id. It was very simple. In some cases with new accounts, they're actually asking you to upload a government identification. In the case of my account, they asked me for full name, country, the address as it appears on my government id. So I couldn't use the office address, which I use for everything, including the Amazon account, but I had to use the address that's on my government id, which is my residence. And then I had to put my birthday and my phone number in there, and that was all I had to do. And it was, it was good to go. So check in. If you, if you have an account and you haven't logged in in a while, go look because you may have to identify yourself and not doing it. They should be emailing you to tell you that you need to do it, but I never got an email. But they should be emailing you to tell you that you need to do it. And if you don't comply with this in a timely manner, they could be terminating your account or putting it on hold until you do so. And then it sounds like all new accounts will require this identification. Identification. You know, uploading a government id. I am happy they're doing this because this just gives us further protection. You know, it's a world full of spam bots and spam issues and challenges, and this just protects those of us who are doing business, honestly. So, yes, it's a little hoop to jump through, but I, you know, I don't think it's a bad thing. I'm totally Fine with it. Now, where this could bite you in the bum is if you have in fact created two KDP accounts which is explicitly against their terms and conditions. If you have done that, I would make haste and delete one of those accounts before you have to identify yourself because you're going to be in hot water. I mean, you're lucky at this point if you weren't already in hot water over that, but you were going to be an even greater hot water. And so if you have questions on this, Angela is going to drop the link link to their information on this page. And, and again, I don't think there's too much to talk about here except just letting you know that if you have an account and you haven't logged in in a while, pop in now and again and just make sure that you are verifying it. Like I said, I never got an email telling me I had to do it. I just logged in out of curiosity the day after this announcement came out and lo and behold, I had to verify my identification. Not by uploading a government id, just by completing a simple form, but new accounts. You will have to upload your id. They say they're going to delete it right after it's been verified. Okay, I'm just checking if there's any other notes on that that I wanted. Yeah, the information's pretty straightforward and the instructions and details are in that link that Angela's dropping there. The other piece of news that I wanted to just touch on before we get into Ingram ID and how that worked or whether it did, is that Amazon Ads has let anyone advertising in other countries, Canada for my Canadians. But even if you are in the US and you are advertising to Canada or to France or Italy or Spain or the United Kingdom, Austria, Turkey, those countries, they are now, I think in some of the other countries they have been having to charge what they call a regulatory advertising fee for ads served to those countries for a while. But as of tomorrow. What's the date today? 13th as of Thursday. They are now going to have to issue that fee for Canadian ads as well. So if you're in Canada and you're running Amazon ads in Canada, this is definitely going to apply to you. If you are in any other country and you're running ads to those countries, this will apply to you. Angela again is going to drop a link in the comments so that you can check out the fees and what this accounts for. It's, it's not, it's not going to break the bank, but it's Just good to know when you're making your, when you're running your ads and you're factoring in overall, you know, was this a profit? You know, did this ad work? Every penny that gets, you know, that costs you. You have to factor in to make sure that you are, in fact getting an ROI on that ad that you ran. And speaking of ads, Ingram id, that's what we're here to talk about today. All right, so let's just see. I'm just checking. Angela's dropping those links in there for you. SD Houston is in the house suggesting everyone make friends with the like button. I like that. Thank you. Catherine is here saying happy anniversary. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so Ingram id, What is it? If you're not familiar, I did a video on it. I don't know when, but Angela's going to put the link in the comments as well. And, and basically Ingram ID is a program that IngramSpark rolled out end of last year, early this year. And it's a quick way for you to advertise your book through Facebook, Google Search, Google Display, and, you know, just really is another way to hopefully help you sell more books. And for me, I checked it out and I thought, let's, let's, let's test this out. Let's see if this works. And I already have a lot of Google Ads running, so I didn't test the Google stuff. I only tested the Facebook because I didn't want to mess with what we're already doing on the Google side. But, you know, Facebook, I don't, I've, I've yet to find success at Facebook with ads. And I've tried, I don't even know how many times now I've tried to find, to run a campaign that was successful at Facebook and I just haven't, I just haven't been able to do it. So I thought, great, this platform might, you know, it's got a curated audience of people that might be a good fit. So perhaps this is going to be the answer. According to Ingram id, specific to Facebook, their service offers you to quickly or allows you to quickly target all relevant, what they call verified reader audiences for your book. So you can choose to insert your book cover as the primary image or have some creative and create an image for that campaign. And in fact, you can go back and watch this video if you're curious, if you. It was so easy to set up. And so from a point of ease, I guess is a better best way to say it, it was exceptionally easy. It was less confusing, less daunting than actually going into Facebook and trying to run your own ads or Google Ads Manager. There were some things that, and I talked about this in the video that concerned me. One wasn't a concern, it was just weird. And the other thing concerned me, which was conversion tracking. They did not set up conversion tracking. So when you're doing this, you have to think about that yourself and figure out, you know, how are you going to know whether this ad is performing or not? Because the measures they give you, which is click through, rate and clicks. I'll show you the dashboard of the results in a minute. But what they show you is what I would call false metrics or you know, that you can, it makes the campaign look like, like it's doing well when it might not be in fact converting to your book sales or your opt ins or whatever your goal is for that particular campaign. All right, so the first test I ran was to sell my book. So I drove traffic to a landing page. I think I just drove it to self publish and succeed.com which was performing quite well. But we didn't at the time, we didn't have any ads running to that page. I was mentioning it on some videos. So it was possible my conversion would not be completely accurate when I did this. But. And actually I'll just bring this up on the screen for you to see the campaign. So one second here. And Stella, thanks for being here. Okay, so I'm just going to share my Ingram ID screen so you can see the dashboard. So just give me one second here. And if you're new or even if you're not, please do say hello because we do have our special swag. Sorry, it's not. Let me go here. Oh, I know why. Okay, hold on. I have the wrong screen open. But now we will be fine. Okay, so. Oh, I think it's on the. I don't want to, I don't want it to show that screen yet because I don't want you guys to see, see that particular one. So we're going to start with the test campaign. All right, so this was the campaign to sell books. So the objective of this particular campaign was to sell the book. So self publish and succeed live. And there it is. Okay, here we go. Okay, you guys can see that now. So this is the dashboard inside of Ingram id. And so this was the campaign I ran. The other weird thing, so I said the first weird thing was they didn't have conversion tracking set up. So you get to track your impressions, your clicks Your cost per click, your click through rate, but you don't actually know if any of these clicks led to somebody actually buying your book. So the total campaign, it made you prepay, which is very unusual. Most of the time you are going to have a daily budget and you're just going to have a credit card and you might set the campaign but you're going to be charged based on what gets clicked on. This basically forces you to set a duration and say how much you're going to spend. And the minimum per day was $15 per day. So my total campaign budget that was prepaid was $195. So when you look at this, you see that there was 38,476 impressions. We had 323 clicks and there was, it cost $0.60 per click, which is pretty decent. That's not a bad, that's not a bad cost per click. And, and click through rates a little low. You know, we like to see it somewhere between 1 and 2% is really my ideal click through rate. So not great. I would probably go back and tweak what was shown as far as the ad, what was shown and what was created like the creative. Because that's not a great click through rate. But anyways, that's beside the point of this. What do you think was the conversion? So how many people bought a book knowing there was 323 people that clicked on this ad? How many book sales do you think happened during that time? I'll give you guys a second to answer that and while I am waiting, let's go ahead and do one of our prizes. So while you guys are taking a guess at how many books sold with 323 clicks to this audience, which is verified reader audience and you could, you could specify the genre. And so to this verified reader audience, 323 clicks. Take your guess. And while that's happening, let's just go ahead and do a draw. So every Tuesday and Friday when a new video comes out, we enter your, your name into a draw and you get to win some prizes. It's frozen. Oh, there we go. You get to There we go. I was like, it's not moving. You will be entered to win prizes. And we always have our hashtag, no boring book. No boring books mug. We always have our oh so soft journal. And, and I think I just saw Scully come in the room just a second ago. We also give away copies of Self publish and Succeed and Self Promote and Succeed. So that's our standard giveaway. But today we've got our special seven year anniversary swag that we will be giving away. So Scully, I think you just arrived just in time to find out that you just won. All right, Here is your prize. It is a hand crafted stoneware mug, hashtag no boring books. It is a beautiful. So our normal mug for those of you who are new. Oops. Let's try and get that in there. We'll do a bigger view in a minute. But that's our normal mug. But this is the special seven year anniversary hashtag no boring books stoneware mug. And Scully pop, you just won. So email Angela@teamooklaunchers.com now if for some reason you don't want the mug, you can opt for our journal. Or self publish and succeed. Or self publish, promote and succeed. But why wouldn't you want our classic seven year anniversary mug? Now, if you are not in the United States, we are not able to ship this to you, I'm afraid. So if you win today, I'm sorry, but I'm so glad. See, Geez, I was just coming to say hey and look what happens. You win. So congratulations. All right, so I see a couple guesses in here. Stella thinks that 50, 50 books were sold from 323 clicks. And Kevin says 1 to 2%. So I'd say three to six books. South Dakota, Houston, 32, 2475. Nobody, nobody has guessed it. My friends. This many books sold. Yes, yes. If you can't see that, it is a big giant goose egg. Yeah. $195 spent to sell zero books. It makes me look at this and go, Was there really 323 clicks? Really? Because I'm with you. Who said it? The 1%. Who was. Who is that? Kevin? I would have expected from 323 clicks that there was at least three sales and that the numbers that we have seen with our Google Ads that we have run to this page in the past, that's about where we're at. So yeah, it's startling, right? So it makes me wonder. I have to go back. I didn't for this video. But as I'm talking, I kind of wish I would have gone back and checked my page stats because my page stats would have told me during this time period if there were in fact 323 clicks. So yeah, I thought, well, you know what? I've never been a proponent for selling books through ads. Like it's especially nonfiction, you know, it's just not something I've ever found to work really well. And so what I've always recommended our authors do rather than try to run ads to sell a book is run an ad to get an opt in and then sell the book or your service or whatever it is on the back end. So build what's typically called a funnel. And you know, building your author platform, you can't go wrong anyways, right? So you, you know, having people who are interested in this enough to give you their email address and sign up. So you know what I did? I went back and I said fine, you know, that didn't work. But you know, I don't want to report to everybody that this was a complete stinker. So let me try again because you know, I'm one of those people who thinks it was probably me, right? Like I did something wrong. I could have done better creative. Maybe it's my landing page, you know, I'll go, okay, it's me. It's not Ingram. It's not Ingram. Id. So then I ran self promote and succeed opt in and I gave away the audiobook for free, which I've been doing a lot on this page, you know, so I'll give you the link to download it for free in a minute. So it's okay. You can still get it for free. But I tested it here and I used the book funnels page because I had read some articles that the book funnel page had actually performed incredibly well in Facebook ads for fiction authors. The test they had done was a fiction author test, but fiction author tests I should say. But it had performed incredibly well in fiction ads or sorry for Facebook ads. So I just ran the book funnel page and. And I spent $210. So same thing I had to prepay. So I set the. Basically what you do or what I did was I set the time frame that the ad was going to run at $15 a day and boom, it ended up being $210 for this particular campaign. So these are the numbers. Click click through rate. Much better. So the other click through rate, like I said, the creative was not strong enough because the click through rate was under 1%. I like the click through rate to be somewhere between one and two at a minimum. So anything over two is like that's crushing. So you know, 1.7. Not bad at all. I'm happy with that. Cost per click, 51 cents. That's not a bad number. I'm totally good with that. 411 clicks. My standard conversion for this particular page is 27%. That's all traffic that's ever gone to this page. From all different sources. It converts at 27%. So you know, if you want to do the math on that, I don't know, but that should have been over 100, right? Should have been over 100 opt ins based on the normal math for this particular page. So now tell me how many audiobook opt ins do you think I got? Was it more, was it less? You know, what's the number? Give me that number and we'll see if anybody can guess that number today. And so Quizmaster China says tighten up your keywords, offer free bonus content, check your ad copy. Yes. If you're running a normal ad campaign, I agree with that. However, with Ingram ID you don't the it is an easy, easy setup but you don't have any of that. So you don't even create a lot of copy. You can upload a single image and so it's very basic, very user friendly, very, very easy. But you can't tighten up your keywords, you can't offer free bonuses and you can't really check your ad copy. All you can do is make your landing page stronger. So that doesn't apply. And Google Ads versus Facebook ads. I haven't advertised on Google in 12 years. I haven't had success with Facebook. I only successfully advertise on Google. And as far as book launchers, not for books specifically, we do have, we do have book funnels running but you know, we, we, we give Google a lot of money. But Facebook, I have yet to find success with Facebook. And then quiz master China is talking about AM Omnison Big River. Okay, I don't know what Omnizon is, but anyways, okay. Checking to see if anybody has any numbers. Brian says 10. It's close. S.D. houston says four. Please don't say zero again. It was not zero. So there was enough people that were willing to pay the price of zero to get an audiobook version of Self Promote and Succeed for free. Oh, we got a winner. Catherine, you are right. 15. So you get a prize. And why not, why not make it one of our special mugs today if you are in the U.S. if you're not, then you can grab a journal or Self promote and succeed or self publish and succeed. But for those of you who maybe just joined in, this is our special seven year anniversary. Handcrafted Made in the usa. I think it even says that on the bottom. Handcrafted in the USA Stoneware mug. So it is fantastic. It is a really, really nice mug to celebrate our seven year anniversary. So you email teamoklaunchers.com say hello to Angela and let her know where she can ship it. Or if it's not a mug that she's shipping, you let her know what you would like and great guess. So yes, of the 411 clicks, which like I said, for all traffic going to this page, cold, warm, hot, 27% is my normal conversion on this particular page. And it was 15. And if you do the math, I don't have it in front of me, but I did the math at one point and I believe that's $14 an opt in. This is just an email, my friends. This is not a sale. And then I thought to myself, okay, well you know, what if One of those 15 became a client? Because this was back in April that I ran this campaign. I don't know if it says the date here, but I'm pretty sure this campaign was April. I thought, well, that's plenty of time for somebody to have become a client. Because if this maybe isn't a great avenue for opt ins, but it's a great avenue to uncover a client or two for book launchers, great. It was $210 well spent to get 15 people. None of them are clients. None bought a book, at least not through our funnels. None have expressed interest in becoming a client. So this was a bomb. So anybody thinking of running an Ingram ID campaign? If you're nonfiction, I'm. I'm not recommending it, I think from a reporting or sorry, from an ease of use as I had set it up, I had sent it before, or sorry, when I filmed that video for you before which I'll get Angela to drop it in the comments again, just for those of you who are just joining now. But I mean, simple. Create a campaign. It's really easy. You name it, you know, it's promoting a physical book or you can't, you can promote one of the books that are in the Ingram catalog or you can create your own kind of campaign. It's really, really easy. And the setup, you know, the only thing I would say is you have to make sure you're setting up a trackable link so that you can track conversions, because they don't track conversions for you. So what I had to do was go back. I had created a separate book funnel link for this and I had to go into Book Funnel and review the metrics on that particular link. I just used the exact same page that I had been using, like I said, because I had 27% conversion on that page. So I thought this is a good Test. Yeah. So I don't recommend Ingram id. And this is why I didn't film a specific video for this because I didn't really know what to say except to say that for my two tests I it didn't work and I don't plan to give any more money to this plan in order to test more. So, you know, because that's always the answer I have to things is, oh, go test it. But at this point, you know, I know the ads I run elsewhere for that page are performing far better. So I'm not going to run ads through that. I would be more likely to go direct into Facebook where I can tweak things and, and have more control over the campaign. I'd be more likely to go back and test that book funnel page. I wouldn't test the physical book trying to sell it again at this point. So that's Ingram id. All right, what questions do you guys have for me today? I'm going to do participation. So all of you who are here today, if you haven't said hello, do say hello because we haven't done that. And I owe you one other prize for the Tuesday, Friday. But in the meantime, I wanted to let you know that we do have a brand new program. So we are launching, effective this month, our August. In August, celebrating our seven year anniversary, we have. Sorry, let's just get back to there. We have launched our Author Business Accelerator. And this program is so normally for those of you familiar or not familiar, Book Launchers is a full service self publishing company. So we have writers and writing coaches, we, we have a full team of editors, we have designers, and all along the way you're working with the book marketing team. They're going to do your keyword category pricing research. They're going to talk launch strategies, we'll evaluate your, your platform and if you want us to build a website, we can build a website. And then when your book is launching, we're pitching you for reviewers, podcasts, live appearances, media, running ads, doing book awards like we do it all. Of course, that is a fairly significant investment and there's been a lot of people over the years that are like, I just want you to do a consulting call with me or I want you guys to guide me. I don't need you to do it for me. And we haven't done anything until now. So Author Business Accelerator is a one year program. It's you can right now, just for August. We're doing a pre launch kind of rate. It's starting in September. So you can get 40% off. You have to book a call with us to talk about it because we do want to make sure we have good people and that it's a good fit for you. But there's going to be office hours. So I'll host office hours. There'll be a marketing expert hosting office hours. We're going to have a publishing person. So for people who are like, can you just walk me through how to upload this to KDP or I'm having trouble with this, my design file isn't working. We're going to have office hours from experts who can, you can, come on. There's going to, it's going to be a group setting but it's not, we don't expect there to be like 100 people on any of these calls. You can get on and screen share and go, okay, this is what I'm seeing, what's wrong? And you can get support, one on one support from my team on those office hours calls. You're also going to get access to all of our training materials we've ever created. So all the deep dives, all the client only trainings, all of the material behind the scenes that our full service clients have been using and templates, tools, all of that stuff. And I don't think anybody's going to realize how cool this is until they start using it. But I trained a bot, you can talk to her and I'm almost done the video training and, and so you'll be able to see me and interact with me but it's not me, it's Julie the book bot, not Julie the book broad. But man, she, I trained her with all the content I have ever created. So my books, all 680 videos on YouTube, all of our deep dives, all of our client only trainings and trying to think there's some other stuff I put in there. She is smart. So you can say, hey, I'm thinking of doing a book on this. What do you think? And she'll ask you questions and then, and then give you suggestions of hey, a hook might be this. Have you considered going after this reader? Have you thought about who your reader should be? Oh, I don't think that reader sounds specific enough. It's scary but cool. So I think once they're inside, you'll realize how amazing it is to have Julie the book bot as your mentor. And you know, the good thing is she doesn't have a full calendar. She'll work for you 24 hours a day. She doesn't have to go pick up her son from school. So all of that's in the Author Business experience accelerator and, and some more stuff too. You can also get access to one of our courses. So we have Self Publish and Succeed live, which starts Oct. 21. And we have Book Marketing Magic, which starts, I think, October 8th. So you can have one of those courses included as well. So just email if you're interested. Angela has. You can just email teamoklaunchers.com and she'll make sure that you get directed to the right person to talk about the details and all those things. But, you know, for. For a very low investment compared to our normal service. I think you guys are going to be absolutely blown away. And I'm excited to have a way to help the author community beyond just our full service, you know, apply all the expertise that we've gained over seven years of service and 600 plus authors that we have worked with. All right, so question. Only question so far, and I think I answered this already, which was Google Ads versus Facebook ads, and I think I answered that already. And Stella, Julie the book broad is still going to be on the YouTube videos and these lives. But you know, truthfully, Julie the book bot, she knows stuff I forgot. So it's really cool. And she can even, you can ask her, hey, do you have a video on this? And she'll give you the YouTube link to it as well. So it's pretty, pretty cool to have this kind of technology available to access because in seven years, I have created a massive amount of content my team doesn't remember. I don't remember all the videos and all of the articles and everything that I've produced. But, you know, she does. So that's cool. So, yeah, that's it for questions. I'll give you guys another second while we do the prizes. So if you do have a question, now's your chance to get it in. But I'm gonna do our prizes for today. So Share screen, let's go to the Streamyard giveaway. So everybody that has said hello or commented so far today is entered to win. Where did it go? Oh, here it is. Okay, it's still on Ingram id. That's why. But just in one moment, I will switch it over and we'll do our prizes. Okay, so here we are. Okay. Only. Only 13 people. So you guys have good odds today. And Angela doesn't count, so it's actually 12. Not that Angela doesn't count. Angela is vital, but Angela doesn't win. Okay, Jewel, Elizabeth, congratulations and thank you. I think That's a first time winner here. So you can choose. You can have our special seven year anniversary mug or you can go for our oh so soft journal, which is this if you're unfamiliar. Or a copy of Self Publish and Succeed or Self Promote and Succeed. Oh and by the way, I promised the link to download Self Promote and Succeed, the audio version. If you want, you can download it for free@self promoteandsucceed.com forward/audiobook. I think that's right. Angela can drop the right link in there if it's not audiobook. It might be audio, but I think it's audiobook. Selfpruneandsucceed.com Audiobook all right, let's draw again. SD Houston. Congratulations. The same thing. You get those choice of prizes and email angelaeamooklaunchers.com and let her know where to find you and what you would like. So thank you so much for being here. All right, so last thing is I owe the oops the Tuesday Friday commenters a one more prize for Tuesday Friday. So here we go. Wow, it's slow today. It's stuck on Scully. I might have to stop sharing. Oh no, Here we go. MD Jones 7. So I don't think you're here today. If you are, congratulations. But if you're catching the live stream after in the replay, you can always say hello and then you get entered to win in two weeks from now. But oh and by the way, in two weeks we have Jason Jones will be coming on to join me and he's going to talk about getting local media to talk about your book. So he runs a PR firm with an angle towards Christian books, but he has helped authors of all kinds get local media to talk about their book. So he's going to come on and just talk a little bit about their process and what you can do as an author to get local media talking about your book. And Angela said you guys never could see the mug that clearly because I was always sharing screen. So there it is again. Made in the US Handcrafted stoneware. It's very nice. So email her if you won today@teamoklaunchers.com and you can get the mug the journal or Self Publish and Succeed or Self Promote and Succeed. Okay, so we'll see you guys back here. It doesn't look like there's any other questions. Oh, it was audio. Sorry. Self promote and succeed.com audio. So that's how you get the free audiobook version of Self Promote and Succeed. Thank you guys. Check out Friday's seven year anniversary video. It is a lot of fun. And I'm curious for those of you who've been around for almost those seven years, if there's a fact or two in there that you do not know. And we'll be back here in two weeks. I can't wait to see you then. Thanks so much. Bye.