Here at BookBub, we’re constantly iterating on our platform and promotional tools to make them more effective and easier for our partners to use. We wanted to share some of the improvements we made to the BookBub Ads platform over the past year that you may have missed and highlight a few other features you may not know about.
Whether you frequently run ad campaigns or have only tried a few, we hope these features will help make it easier for you to run successful BookBub Ads campaigns!
1. New creative builder templates and color schemes
Our in-form creative builder offers a quick and easy way to design simple ad images. We used to have a single template, but now offer four templates with different layouts and three additional options for background colors.
We hope these additional customization options make this tool more effective for a greater number of books. For inspiration, check out some of the top BookBub Ads made using the creative builder! For advertisers who want even more customization options and room for creativity, read about six tools you can use to design custom ad images.
2. Browse “Related Authors” for your author targets
For many advertisers, choosing author targets is a critical part of creating successful ad campaigns. To help make it easier for advertisers to discover author targets with large audiences on BookBub, we added a tab to the author targeting module of the ad creation form to surface “Related Authors.”
After you select at least one author target for a campaign, we’ll generate a list of other authors who share readers with the author(s) you’ve already selected. Of course, you should always test your targets to determine which will be the most effective for your particular books and campaigns, but we hope this will help you find new audiences to test out!
3. View improved stats for individual author targets
When you’ve added more than one author target to a campaign, you can view the impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and cost-per-click for each target under the “Aggregate Stats” tab. These stats are now visible for each target as soon as your ad starts serving impressions.
We recommend waiting to draw conclusions about an author target’s effectiveness until you have at least a few hundred impressions. The more data you have, the more reliable the results.
Note that many of our readers fall into the targetable ad audiences of multiple authors. If a reader who sees an impression of your ad falls into the audience of more than one of the authors your ad is targeting, we include the stats from that impression under each of those authors. This may help you collect data more efficiently than if you were to target each of those authors’ audiences with separate ad campaigns.
4. See more campaign details at a glance
On the BookBub Ads dashboard, we can only squeeze a limited amount of information onto the “My Ads” page, but there’s a quick and easy way to see more campaign details! Just hover your mouse over the “info” icon next to a campaign name to view the ad creative, bid amount, and targeting. This is especially useful if you’re trying to identify a particular ad or determine what sets two similar campaigns apart.
5. Implemented a “recency cap”
Our recency cap prevents unique campaigns from serving impressions to the same reader more than once every few days. This ensures readers don’t see the same ad campaign multiple times in a row when browsing our website or opening back-to-back emails from BookBub (e.g. a Featured Deal email and New Release Alert email received on the same day).
Note that this rule applies to unique ad campaigns, not ad creative. If you are running multiple ad campaigns with the same ad creative, a single reader may see that image more frequently if they fall into the audience of two or more of those separate campaigns.
6. Quickly view aggregate data from all campaigns
Use the “Aggregate Stats” page to get a quick snapshot of high-level stats like how much you’ve spent across all of your campaigns. You can filter this page by date to view spend, clicks, or impressions for a particular time window, such as the past week or the past month.
Note that we only display data from the past six months, so we recommend exporting CSVs of your ads data if you’d like to keep records of your campaign information for longer than that. There’s a button to export data at the bottom of all ads reporting pages.
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Click to tweet: Authors! Do you run @BookBub Ads campaigns? Here are some features you might not know about. https://bit.ly/2YFOvTf
Click to tweet: Some @BookBub Ads features you might not know about:
🎨 New creative builder templates
✍️ Browse “related authors”
📊 Improved stats for author targets
👀 See more campaign details at a glance
📈 Aggregate data
See more here! https://bit.ly/2YFOvTf
