We’re always looking for new ways to help our partners connect with readers, so today, we’re excited to announce a new targeting option for the BookBub Ads platform that we’ve been working on for the past several months — you can now directly target Chirp members and other audiobook listeners with your ad campaigns.
Launched last year, our audiobook retailer, Chirp, is growing quickly and already has an active, engaged audience of listeners who use Chirp to find new audiobooks every day. You can now reach these audiobook listeners via BookBub Ads to drive sales for your own Chirp audiobooks at any time. Many of our early test partners of this new feature have had success promoting discounted Chirp books, introducing new readers to a series, and more.
New to the BookBub Ads platform? Start here for a tutorial on how to use this tool to promote your books.
How It Works
1. Create a new ad and select “Audiobook listeners” in the reading format section
Start by creating a new ad in your Partner Dashboard as usual. We’ve added a new section to the ad creation form that allows you to narrow your audience by reading format preference:
2. Search for your audiobook
If your book is available for sale on Chirp, you can search for and select it in the Choose a Book section. This will automatically add your Chirp URL to the click-through link section later in the form.
If you don’t have audiobooks on Chirp yet, learn how to add your titles to our catalog here. Please note that only books with US availability can be added to Chirp at this time.
3. Create an ad image
As with campaigns for ebooks, you can design and upload your own ad image, or you can quickly generate a simple image using our in-form creative builder or Chirp’s Promo Image Generator.
Here are a few best practices we’ve discovered so far for ad images promoting Chirp books:
- Include a deal price to increase conversion rates. Deal prices are excellent for hooking new readers, and ads for Chirp audiobooks priced below $5.99 convert at higher rates than ads for higher-priced titles.
- Mention any audio-specific awards. If your audiobook or your narrator has won an Audie or other audiobook-specific award our listeners will recognize, mention it in your ad image.
- Make sure it’s obvious you’re promoting an audiobook. Include a call-to-action like “Listen now,” icons or images of headphones, a Chirp logo, or other clear signals of the book format.
- Follow our other ad image design best practices. Many of the same principles for designing clickable ads apply regardless of the book format! Find examples of some successful BookBub Ads images here.
If you want to incorporate the Chirp logo in your ad design, you can download these images:
4. Enter a Chirp URL to target Chirp members
Next, enter the click-through links for your ad. If you added a Chirp book in step 2, we’ll automatically pull in your Chirp URL for you. You can also search chirpbooks.com to find the URLs for the titles you want to promote.
As with ads for ebooks, we use your click-through links to automatically target members of our audience based on their retailer preferences. When running audiobook ads, you have to enter a Chirp URL for your campaign to target Chirp members and compete for impressions in our daily Chirp emails.
Note: If you have audiobooks available on other retailers, you can promote them with BookBub Ads, too: Select “audiobook listeners” in the reading format section and enter a click-through URL for another audiobook retailer (Audible, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google, or Kobo) to automatically target BookBub members who purchase audiobooks from that retailer. These ads will not be eligible to appear in Chirp emails, so they’ll compete for the same impressions as BookBub Ads for ebooks.
5. Refine your audience by author interest or category interest
Ads targeting Chirp members by author interest have nearly 3x higher click-through rates than ads targeting by category interest alone, so we encourage you to target the listeners of similar authors to maximize engagement with your ad. Find tips from successful advertisers on choosing author targets here. (These tips are from their ebook campaigns, but many of the same principles apply to audiobook ad targeting.)
Keep an eye out for Chirp deals on similar audiobooks to the one you’re promoting — when you target listeners interested in one of those authors, you’ll be able to reach the Chirp members who clicked on their deal, as well as any other Chirp members who have expressed interest in that author on either Chirp or BookBub!
6. Set your schedule, budget, and bid
Setting up your schedule, budget, and bid is the same for audiobook ads as for ebook ads. However, because ads targeting Chirp members are competing for impressions in Chirp emails rather than BookBub emails, you may find that you need to use different bidding strategies for your ads promoting Chirp books.
You can find more guidance on choosing ad schedules, budgets, and bids in our BookBub Ads tutorial and guide to ads bidding.
Tips for Running Ads for Chirp Audiobooks
Promote a discounted audiobook
Ads for Chirp books priced under $5.99 have higher click-to-sale purchase rates than higher-priced books, so deals are your best bet for high ad conversions. You can run ads for books selected for Chirp featured deals or set up your own limited-time price promotions through your distributor. If you’re not sure how to set up temporary promotional pricing on Chirp, reach out to partners@chirpbooks.com.
Here are some ideas for promoting discounted audiobooks:
- Discount the first book in a series to introduce new readers to that series
- Discount a box set to boost sales and revenue
- Run ads to continue promoting a Chirp Audiobook Deal throughout the month the deal is live
- After a Chirp deal, run ads for the next book in the series to drive follow-on sales; target the author to reach Chirp members who clicked on the Chirp deal
If you’re promoting a higher-priced audiobook, we’d encourage you to use CPC bidding to keep costs down.
Test, test, test!
As with any ad campaign, testing is a critical part of creating a successful ad. Don’t forget to start with small budgets ($10 or $20 is enough to compare results) and run tests to figure out what will work best for this new audience! It’s possible that what works for your ebook ads may not carry over to your ads for Chirp audiobooks. Learn more about running tests to improve your BookBub Ads results here.
Ask for help
Our team is always available to chat with you about your ad campaigns! Email us at partners@bookbub.com with any questions about your ads (you can also refer to our most commonly asked questions here). We’d also love to hear your feedback on this new targeting option, so please don’t hesitate to reach out if there are ways we could improve the ads platform to make it even easier for you to promote your audiobooks.
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