Getting Analytical A Guide to Better Results for the Number-challenged Courtney Milan NINC conference, October 2, 2015

What I am A former lawyer, and before that, scientist who did statistical chemistry. I like numbers! I usually know what they say, and what they don’t say! I love excuses not to do things I don’t want to do. What I am not: A marketing person. A person who nods and accepts as gospel whatever marketing people say.

BLANKET PERMISSION

Ways that authors waste time and money Sympathetic magic fantasy: “If I spent money on it, the universe will reward me.” This plays out as: Advertisements in trade journals, sometimes at great expense. Expensive swag. Hiring publicists without a concrete objective

Goal of the workshop Help you identify the sympathetic magic fantasy Give you concrete ways to identify your objectives; measure them; and act on them Give you tools you can use to obtain numbers Help you interpret those numbers I’m going to use examples.

“What works?” If you get nothing else from this workshop, I want you to get a quick and dirty method for determining WHAT WORKS AT SELLING BOOKS. Basic question: “Where do I sell more books: Facebook or Twitter?” (Can generalize to: “Does my Facebook page or my Facebook group sell more books?” or “Did this ad work?”

General approach 1. Identify what you want to do. (Sell books.) 2. Figure out how to measure sales and/or clicks separately.

How to measure clicks separately TOOL: USE A URL SHORTENER. Most URL shorteners collect statistics on clicks. If you have an account on bit.ly, for instance, you can sign in and get statistics on how often and when a link was clicked, and where that person clicked the link. Use one shortened link for Facebook, a different one for twitter.

How to measure sales separately TOOL: USE AFFILIATE ACCOUNTS. “But Courtney, I do that. How do I separate out results?”

Even easier for Apple Affiliates Sign up: (No need to preregister)

Shows up on main dashboard

Getting slower and dirtier There are about 10,000,000,000 other things that authors can optimize. How can you tell what works? Also, you can be relatively lazy about it.

Basic example: this workshop Imagine that I am going to be giving this workshop multiple times. What might I want to do with this workshop? How am I going to accomplish this? Where should I start? Where do I go on? How do I measure it?

Step One: Identify your goal I want to increase attendance! How do I measure this goal? Count the people who come to my workshop! This is “conversion”: How many people did what you wanted them to do? What is the laziest thing I can do to alter attendance for this workshop?

Change the title! A “NUMBERS, NUMBERS, NUMBERS, NUMBERS! HOW TO USE STATISTICS AND T- TESTS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR CONVERSION RATES.” B “GETTING ANALYTICAL: A GUIDE TO BETTER RESULTS FOR THE NUMBERS CHALLENGED.”

Which title will perform better? How could we figure it out? TOOL: A/B TESTING. Divide the audience in two. Give half your audience Title A, half Title B See if there’s a difference in attendance rates based on which program they received. Most of us do this on a rudimentary level: If we have two potential titles for a book, we’ll ask our friends which they prefer.

Statistical Significance I’m just going to throw in a mention of this really briefly. If you don’t want to hear this part, la la la la. Unless you have a LOT of friends, their preference is not likely to be statistically significant. (Don’t think we have enough people at this conference to get a statistically significant result.) As authors, it’s going to be hard to get statistically significant results. For super-dorks: illusory/ illusory/ Note: pickfu (allows you to show results & get responses) Almost none of these are statistically significant. And they’re not in your genre.

Confounding factors Are your test branches both the same as your target audience? Are there other differences between your test audiences, and will these have an effect?

Optimizing your website Identify a goal: Reader lands on your website, what do you want that person to do? Buy a book Sign up for your newsletter Etc etc

Newsletter signups Ask yourself, “What are things that might possibly effect newsletter signups?” Placement of link How you draw attention to it (color, whitespace, et cetera) Language used to describe your newsletter Think about ONE of those things at a time

How to separate groups If your site is WordPress, there are MULTIPLE WordPress plugins that will do automatic A/B testing for you. There are separate analytical tools that do this. (Google; I don’t know what will work with your website) You can do a poor man’s version by having version 1 on one day, version 2 on another and swapping back and forth, but be sure to count how many people visit.

How to measure results Your newsletter host likely gives you ways to track who signs up. Vertical Response allows you to set up different “campaigns”; You can track A entry point and B entry point, so you can see which is more effective. If you don’t know how it works: Google; Search help; Ask

How to optimize back / front matter What do you want to accomplish? Increase newsletter signups See whether different kinds of front matter make people more likely to read your book Preorder your next book Test different back cover copy

Segmenting book downloads NOT EASY: You need to be able to segment readers to Group A or Group B Need to be able to track how many downloads of Group A there are versus Group B Need a reasonable # in Group A versus Group B (ideally: 1000s per branch; less ideally, at least 100s per branch)

My best shot at it thus far Do it on Apple. Once your book is approved for the first time on Apple, changes go through VERY QUICKLY. Time those changes to 12 AM PDT to get sales data. Do week versus week comparisons. Separate links; separate. AVOID CONFOUNDING FACTORS AS BEST AS YOU CAN (time introduces a lot of these things)

Testing/Measuring for these things Increase newsletter signups: Check as you would for your website See whether different kinds of front matter make people more likely to read your book How to tell if someone has read your book? Proxy: Assume some percentage of those who read your book will click on a link at the end. Use different link shorteners for those. Preorder your next book Different affiliate IDs (again, Apple makes this very easy) Test different back cover copy Which version gets the most clicks/preorders?