Running effective ads requires the ability to pivot: You need to be ready to change your strategy or switch up your tactics based on the actual performance you see from your campaigns. But sometimes it’s not only your ads that change — your book can, too!
Author Lisa Linwood took her first foray into BookBub Ads with Beck, the first in a six-book hockey romance series that was scheduled for an upcoming rebrand. See how she navigated learning the platform, evaluated the results from her updated covers, and ultimately drove sales when the time came to run a limited-time discount.
Here’s what you can learn from Lisa:
- Take the time to identify relevant author targets: Narrow audiences typically drive higher engagement rates.
- Use all available data to assess your campaign results — CTR doesn’t always tell the whole story. If you have access to sales reporting, use it!
- Continue to iterate on the campaigns you run. Keep using what works well, and experiment with new or updated elements to improve results.
First tests
Lisa ran her first BookBub Ads campaign in November 2025. Her goal was twofold: Learn the BookBub Ads platform as a first-time user, and establish a baseline of ad performance that she could use as a yardstick against which to measure future campaign performance. With new covers scheduled to roll out in January, Lisa also wanted to understand how readers currently responded to Beck — which images resonated, which author targets converted — so she could measure the impact of the rebrand.
She followed a testing framework espoused by advertiser Matt Holmes: three images, three individual author targets, and a budget of $3 per day, per campaign. Altogether, Lisa created nine distinct BookBub Ads campaigns with a total maximum daily spend of $27. She used CPC (cost-per-click) bidding to keep her costs low and set her bid just above the low end of the range in the ads dashboard.
To design her images, Lisa pulled quotes from reader reviews, tropes, and blurbs for Beck and combined the text with imagery from the book cover. She emphasized the importance of creating a clear, unified look between each of her images and the book itself:
Branding is important. I make sure all my ads are cohesive, and all the fonts are either from the book covers or are compatible with the book covers.
She also included a Kindle Unlimited logo in each of her images. Although it’s not possible to target readers who subscribe to KU specifically, the logo is a visual indicator to those Amazon readers that they can access the book for free with a subscription.
Lisa identified targets by searching through related authors in the BookBub Ad creation form and also-boughts on the Amazon and Goodreads pages for her books and series.
I went to Beck‘s page on Amazon and wrote down the authors of the books ‘Customers also bought or read’ that were similar to Beck. Then I went to the series page and wrote down the similar authors at the bottom of the page under ‘Customers who bought from this series also bought.’ Then I went to Beck‘s Goodreads page and wrote down the authors for the books ‘Readers also enjoyed.’ After that, I logged into my BookBub Partner Dashboard and pretended to create an ad. I scrolled down to targeting and entered the authors’ names, one by one, and wrote down the number of readers for each author. I was looking for authors who had between 10,000 and 30,000 readers.
She identified three hockey romance authors with between 7,000 and 45,000 readers to use for this first round of testing. She then set up three ads for each author target, each using one of the three images she’d created, with identical bids and $3 per day budgets. Each campaign led to Beck’s Amazon US page using an attribution link so that she could track sales.
These campaigns were scheduled to run for just over two weeks. After just four days, Lisa checked her campaign stats and paused the ads with the fewest clicks. The three ads she left running, all of which used the same author target, continued for the remainder of the scheduled campaign window with a maximum total spend of $9 per day.
After this first round of ads, Lisa learned that she could create ads that drove more engagement on BookBub than she’d managed with Facebook ads — if she found the right authors to target:
I used one target author per ad, and one target author’s ads blew Facebook’s results out of the water. Targeting strategy is essential. That successful target had less than 10,000 readers, yet performed better than others with 10,000-30,000 readers.
Rebranding campaign
In January, Lisa rolled out the rebranded covers for the Blazers Hockey Romance series — making the change from model images to new illustrated versions.
With the baseline data from her first BookBub Ads campaigns in hand, Lisa had a new goal for this second round: learn how readers would react to Beck with its updated cover. She kept her campaign strategy consistent, setting up nine campaigns, each with a unique image and target audience combination, but the same budget and bid.
The new ads she created featured imagery and branding from the new cover and also highlighted key tropes and review quotes, using much of the same language from her earlier images.
Lisa also reused the top-performing author target from her first test, and identified two new authors to target — both of whose books also have illustrated covers, and who had between 3,000 and 36,000 readers. Repeating one of the targets gave her a direct point of comparison to her previous tests while also looking to improve her results with relevant new targets.
She set these campaigns to run for seven days, and this time, all nine campaigns ran for the full scheduled advertising period.
For these new campaigns, Lisa found image and target combinations that drove stronger engagement, allowing her to reach readers more efficiently. She noted that the trial and error of setting up multiple campaigns with minor differences enabled her to learn what was driving her ad performance: By comparing engagement and conversions via her Amazon attribution links, she could isolate which image and audience combinations were most effective.
Kindle Countdown ads
Later in January, Lisa had scheduled a Kindle Countdown deal for Beck, which would be on sale at $0.99 for four days. Because BookBub readers love a deal, BookBub Ads was a great fit to advertise the limited-time discount, and Lisa aimed to drive sales of her discounted book by running campaigns during the discount period. Having identified her strongest-performing targets and images through two rounds of testing, she could now focus her budget on what she knew worked to sell more books.
Lisa used the same strategy of three images, three targets, and $3 per day for these campaigns, setting up a total of nine ads. For these ads, Lisa kept the same images she used to test ads for her rebranded covers, but added a bold $0.99 price sticker to make it clear to readers that Beck was on sale (replacing the KU logo in her previous images, since the discounted price applied to all Amazon readers, including non–KU subscribers).
For targeting, Lisa chose to keep the two strongest performers from her rebrand campaigns — one of which was also the strongest target from her first campaigns in November — and found one new author to add to the audience. These three authors made up the narrowest audience she had used yet: Each had between 1,000 and 7,500 readers.
These campaigns were set up to run for the full five days of her Kindle Countdown deal, and each ad ran for the entire scheduled period. While it can be a good idea to rotate through different author targets to avoid exhausting a narrow audience too quickly, Lisa’s strategy worked for her: Across all nine campaigns, Lisa estimates a roughly 14% conversion rate from readers who found Beck from BookBub Ads.
Lisa’s ad with the highest click-through rate also had an effective cost per click that was less than half of what she bid. She was able to keep costs low by using a bid within the suggested range while also targeting a very narrow audience, which allowed her ad to compete against other ads targeting those few readers without incurring the full bid amount.
Takeaways
Across three rounds of advertising and 27 total campaigns, Lisa’s ads ended up driving more than 700 clicks at $0.46 per click, with an average CTR of over 1.4%. But Lisa noted that engagement didn’t tell the whole story — instead, tracking sales was key to understanding how effective each ad was.
I was thrilled to see CTRs of over 4% until I checked the Amazon attribution and realized the CTR wasn’t converting to sales or page reads. The sales and page reads were coming from authors and images with CTRs of around 1%, which were ads I’d been tempted to pause in favor of the higher CTRs. So the lesson there is to always, always use Amazon attribution links and evaluate your ad results that way.
She also noted that nailing down her targeting was important. Although targeting authors with smaller audiences cut down on the available audience for her ad, she was able to reach hyper-specific readers who were much more likely to be a good fit for her book.
I was looking for authors who had readers between 10,000 and 30,000. But my most conversions came from an author who had about 7,500 readers.
Finally, she encouraged other advertisers not to give up! Lisa found that ads were a great fit for Countdown deals, and in the future, plans to use the same regimented, data-driven approach she did for Beck:
I’ll use BookBub Ads again and I already have ads running for preorders of First Shift [from pen name Lisa Linden]. I’m kind of flying blind with my targeting, though — my KDP Reports show me I received preorders for First Shift while running my BookBub Ads, and I wasn’t advertising the preorder anywhere else. What I can’t see is which ad was performing. As I continue to get data after the preorder period, I’ll be evaluating my targets and pivoting if necessary.
