We hear a wide array of questions about BookBub Ads from partners in various stages of running ads on our self-serve platform. Some folks are first-time advertisers trying to figure out where to start, and others are looking for insights on how best to reach their goals. Because certain questions come up often, we compiled all the answers our partners have found most helpful in one place! We’ll also share additional resources where you can learn more.
If you can’t find the answer you’re looking for in this article or our support center, no need to worry! Feel free to reach out to partners@bookbub.com and we’ll be happy to answer your specific question.
1. How much do BookBub Ads cost?
Our advertising platform is self-serve, so you get to decide how much you want to spend on your ads. Pricing is determined by a real-time auction — instead of paying a flat fee for your ad, you bid against other advertisers to have your ad shown to readers. This means there’s a lot of variability in advertising costs, but you set the upper limit of what you’re willing to pay with your campaign bid.
If you have the highest bid of every advertiser targeting a particular reader, your ad will appear in that reader’s email or a BookBub webpage they open. Although your ad must have the highest bid in order to win the auction, you’ll usually pay less than your bid (the amount of the second-highest bid plus one cent).
As well as deciding your bid, which sets the rate you want to pay, you also choose the total amount you want to spend on your campaign. For a continuous campaign, you set a daily budget that establishes how much you’re willing to pay for ads each day the campaign runs, until it’s manually stopped. With fixed dates, you set the total amount you’re willing to pay for ads from the beginning to the end of the campaign, or until the budget is expended. You’re welcome to set your budget as low or as high as you like.
Learn more: Read about how the BookBub Ads auction model works in more detail.
2. How am I being billed for BookBub Ads?
BookBub Ads uses an automated billing system. When you are charged via automated billing, the payment method you save in your Partner Dashboard will be charged each time your outstanding balance exceeds your billing threshold amount, or on the first day of the month if you have an outstanding balance — whichever comes first.
You can view your outstanding ads balance and current billing threshold at any time on the Ads Billing page of your Partner Dashboard.
If you’re running a campaign with a total budget, your ad will automatically stop serving in the auction and accumulating charges once you max out your budget. On the other hand, continuous campaigns with daily budgets that renew each day can spend up to that daily amount every day until you manually stop them. Because our ads platform is entirely self-serve, advertisers are responsible for monitoring and managing their ad campaigns and budgets to ensure they’re comfortable with what they’re spending.
Learn more: Read about billing in more detail at our help center.
3. Where is my ad serving? I don’t see it anywhere!
BookBub Ads are eligible to serve to the readers you targeted when you set up your campaign, in a dedicated ad space in their daily emails and on the BookBub website. Because of the way BookBub Ads are served individually through a live auction each time a user opens their email or a webpage, you may never see your own ad appear, even if you fall into the audience of readers your ad is targeting — but that doesn’t mean it’s not serving! You can check your campaign stats in your ads dashboard to see how many impressions your ad has served.
To check how your ads appear to readers, go to your My Ads page. Click Select Action > View Details to the right of an ad campaign and navigate to the Ad Details tab to view a large preview of your ad image.
Learn more: Watch a video with more information on how BookBub Ads are served to readers.
4. My ad disappeared from the dashboard! Where can I find it?
Lost sight of your ad campaign? Click here to view all your ad campaigns on your My Ads page.
If you have a lot of campaigns, you can use the dark blue navigation bar to sort your ad campaigns by status:
- All: The full list of your ad campaigns
- Live: Ad campaigns that are currently running
- Draft: Ad campaigns that are still in draft form and have not yet launched or been scheduled
- Scheduled: Ad campaigns that have been confirmed and will go live on the start date you selected
- Completed: Ad campaigns that have reached their end date
- Paused: Ad campaigns that have been paused
You can also refine your search by date, or use the magnifying glass icon on the left of the navigation bar to search for a campaign by name.
Learn more: Follow this walk-through of the BookBub Ads dashboard and what all the stats mean.
5. How does the ad creative builder work?
You have two options for your ad creative: Use our built-in ad creative builder or upload a premade ad image. If you opt to use our builder, you’ll select BUILD NEW CREATIVE in the ad creation form.
If you select your ebook in the Choose a Book step, we’ll automatically pull your book cover into the creative builder image. Then, all you need to do is:
- Choose a template
- Type in ad copy
- Type in text for a call-to-action button, if you’ve selected a template that includes a button
- Choose a background color for your ad creative
If you don’t see your book in the Choose a Book step, you can add the missing ebook to our system through your My Books page. You can learn more about this process here. If you don’t select a book in the Choose a Book step to associate with the ad, you can upload the book cover manually. Uploaded covers must have dimensions in a standard 6:9 ratio.
Learn more: Look at examples of how successful advertisers used our creative builder for design inspiration.
6. How do I create my own image?
If you decide to upload a premade ad image, you’ll need to create your image with an external tool such as Canva or Book Brush. This option is labeled UPLOAD EXISTING CREATIVE in the ad creation form. BookBub Ads must be 300 pixels wide x 250 pixels high, in .PNG, .JPEG, or .JPG file format.
For the best image resolution, we suggest designing your image on a canvas that’s larger than 300 pixels x 250 pixels, but still proportional to those dimensions; for example, 1200 pixels x 1000 pixels. We also encourage you to set the resolution to 300 PPI (pixels per inch) before you start. From there, you can resize the image you’ve designed to 300 pixels x 250 pixels so that it’s compatible with our system.
In general, we encourage advertisers to tailor their ad creative to the specific audience they’re targeting, and to make sure the image is uncluttered and easy to read. You’re always welcome to send your image to us at partners@bookbub.com for resizing help or feedback!
Learn more: Compare some of our favorite ad design tools and read more about creating well-designed ads.
7. How do I set my ad campaign to go live?
When you complete the ad creation form in your Partner Dashboard, you can choose to make your ad live by launching or scheduling it immediately, or save the ad as a draft to edit later.
If you’ve already saved your campaign as a draft, follow these steps to finish scheduling or launching it:
- Find your ad campaign on your My Ads page and click Select Action > Edit Ad.
- Click the green Continue button at the bottom of the ad creation page.
- If you don’t yet have a payment method saved to your dashboard, enter the info for your preferred payment method in the window that appears.
- On the Confirm Ad Details page, review the information for your ad to ensure that all of the settings are to your liking. We recommend double-checking the schedule and budget of your campaign.
- Check the box to confirm you’ve read our advertising policies.
- Click the green Create Ad button.
You can then check the status of your ad campaign on the My Ads page. If your ad is scheduled to start on a date in the future, it will appear under the Scheduled tab. If your ad is scheduled to start that day, or you chose a continuous ad schedule, it will appear under the Live tab and be eligible to start winning impressions right away. Once your ad is live, stats will update in your dashboard on an hourly basis.
Learn more: Watch our step-by-step tutorial on how to set up a BookBub Ads campaign.
8. I write in a niche genre. How can I find an audience to target?
If you want to reach a very specific audience of readers, we recommend focusing on your author and category targeting. When you use both author and category targeting, your ad will only serve to users who’ve indicated an interest in at least one of your author targets and one of your category targets, so using both targeting types can be a great way to narrow in on specific readers.
One tip for deciding which authors to target is to look through the “Also Bought” section on your book’s retailer sites — readers who are already fans of authors similar to you will likely be fans of yours, too! Additionally, try browsing the featured books on BookBub to find authors who write similar books to yours and have engaged audiences of readers on our platform.
Once you’ve selected your targets, make sure to clearly signal your book’s genre and tone in your ad image so that your ideal readers can recognize your book as something they’ll be interested in!
Learn more: Read more tips for choosing effective author targets.
9. Can I use BookBub Ads to direct readers to my online store?
You’re welcome to use BookBub Ads to promote books sold directly on your website or personal storefront! BookBub readers love a good deal, so as with any book you promote using BookBub Ads, drawing attention to discounts in your ad images can be a great way to drive direct sales traffic.
To set up your ad to drive readers to your store, just input the URL of the book page on your site as a custom link in the Click-Through Links & Retailer Targeting step of the ad creation form.
Before you launch into selling direct with BookBub Ads, check that any linked web pages comply with our advertising policies — particularly our lead generation policy, which disallows any pop-ups or prominent requests for users’ email addresses.
Learn more: Discover how one author used BookBub Ads to drive book downloads through her website.
10. Should I use CPC or CPM bidding?
Our auction-based platform provides two bidding options: you can choose to bid per every 1,000 impressions your ad serves (CPM) or you can bid per click your ad receives (CPC).
As for which bidding strategy to choose, it really depends on your advertising goals. If you’re trying to serve a lot of impressions quickly, such as with a short-term campaign, you might bid CPM. If you want to control your costs or achieve a positive ROI with a lower click-through rate (CTR), we typically recommend bidding CPC.
Learn more: Dive deeper into the different scenarios when one bidding strategy makes sense over another.
11. What’s a good CTR? What’s a good number of impressions to serve?
While we don’t have a specific benchmark we recommend, many advertisers have told us they aim for a CTR of 1–2%. Ultimately, it’s important to keep in mind that there’s no one-size-fits-all CTR that indicates a successful campaign, since everyone’s advertising goals vary. For example, you might be less concerned with CTR than with driving a high volume of impressions or clicks. We encourage partners to set up each campaign to accomplish a particular goal, so when you review your results, you can decide whether or not the campaign was successful based on what you wanted it to achieve.
Similarly, there isn’t a straightforward “good” or “bad” amount of impressions to serve, though we recommend gaining at least a couple hundred impressions to have enough data to evaluate an ad’s performance.
Factors like audience size, bid, and competition from the other advertisers targeting the same audience at the same time can all affect the number of impressions you’re able to win. Natural fluctuations can occur for a single campaign as other advertisers enter and exit the auction.
Learn more: Read our guide to BookBub Ads campaign stats and when it makes sense to focus on CTR or impressions.
12. I got notified that my campaign isn’t winning many impressions. What can I do to fix this?
One of the biggest benefits of CPC bidding is that our CPC auction rewards ads with a higher CTR by serving more impressions — but on the flip side, CPC ads that aren’t generating many clicks will be increasingly less likely to win new impressions.
If you’ve received this email, it means your ad isn’t getting enough engagement from your target audience to compete effectively in the auction. To address this, you should create a new campaign and update your image, targeting, or both to try to generate more clicks.
We know it can be tough to figure out how to make your ad more appealing, but we’re here to help! You can always reach out to us at partners@bookbub.com for guidance.
Learn more: See more tips on how to increase the CTR of a BookBub Ads campaign.
13. I’m not getting sales. How can I increase my conversion rate?
While we can’t access retailer sales data or offer specific insights into reader behavior once they click away from your ad, we do suggest linking directly to your book on retailers to decrease the number of steps a user takes to purchase. Similarly, adjustments such as aligning the tone of your ad copy with the description on your retailer page or adding your book’s price to your ad image can help set readers’ expectations. Lastly, make sure you’re targeting an audience who is highly likely to be interested in the type of book you’re promoting.
All that said, increasing the number of clicks on your ad can mean more opportunities to convert traffic into sales.
Learn more: Get tips on what to do if your ad isn’t generating enough clicks.
14. How do I spend my unused budget?
The budget you set when you create your campaign is the maximum amount your ad can spend before it stops serving impressions to readers, but you aren’t actually charged anything at the time you set up your ad. You’re only charged for the results your ad generates — that is, at a rate per every 1,000 impressions if you’re running a CPM campaign, or for every click if it’s a CPC campaign.
You can track a campaign’s accrued charges in the Budget Spent column on your My Ads page. Any amount leftover in the Remaining Budget column when your campaign ends was never actually charged to you, so you’re not losing out on any money if your campaign doesn’t spend through its entire budget before you stop it or its scheduled run ends.
Learn more: Review our glossary of BookBub Ads campaign stats.
15. Why did my ad get deactivated?
If an ad campaign violates our advertising policies or is reported by readers, we may need to deactivate the entire campaign or particular links within a campaign.
The most common reasons for this include:
- Lead generation: The ad contains a link to a web page that prominently requests users’ email addresses or asks users to sign up for a newsletter or mailing list.
- Invalid links: These include broken URLs, links to books that aren’t available at the advertised price, or links that don’t lead to the book being advertised.
If you ever have questions about why your ad was deactivated or would like instructions on how to fix it, you’re welcome to reach out to us at partners@bookbub.com for more information!
Learn more: Review our advertising policies.
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