BookBub Ads is a powerful advertising tool for book marketers looking to connect directly with readers at the exact moment they’re looking for their next great read. And like any display advertising platform, getting BookBub Ads to work requires learning how to effectively start, evaluate, and adjust your campaigns.
To understand what this looks like, we asked successful advertisers how they run and refine their campaigns: how they’re assessing performance, making adjustments, and setting themselves up for success. To approach your next campaign with confidence, whether it’s your first time creating an ad or you’re coming back after a break, check out the advice these seasoned marketers had to share:
- On assessing performance
- On making adjustments
- On setting yourself up for success
- On knowing when to go back to the drawing board
On assessing performance
Check your results early and often.
Successful advertisers recommend keeping a close eye on your ad, especially in the early stages after launch. Decide what metrics you’re going to use to assess whether your ad is successful, and use that criteria every time you review your campaigns. Cut underperforming ads, and let the effective ones keep serving.
When I begin a campaign, I check the performance daily. If it’s performing well, I will check less frequently, to be sure it’s still performing. If it isn’t doing well in the first few days, I will pause it.
I check my ads almost daily. One of my mistakes over the years has been letting an ad run without watching it. That can waste lots of money.
During a release week campaign, I will check results several times a day… If my clicks are low, I often pause the campaign and try another.
When I first start a campaign, I check it every few days. Once it’s been running for a while and seems to be doing okay, I generally leave it for several months before checking again, because I’m time-poor and numbers and spreadsheets aren’t my strong suit.
For test ads, I bid CPM [cost per thousand impressions] and choose ‘fulfill as quickly as possible, which allows me to get to 1,000 impressions in a short period of time… After I get to about 1,000 impressions, if the CTR [click-through rate] is less than 1%, I stop the campaign.
Jillian David, author of Dr. Alaska
CTR is a useful metric — but don’t over-rely on it.
Your ad’s click-through rate is an excellent indicator of whether your ad is resonating with its audience: If the CTR is low, that means there’s a mismatch between the message in your image and the readers you’re targeting. But if your ultimate goal is to sell more books, keep an eye on your retailers’ sales dashboards, too (just be aware of any reporting delays).
Keep your eye on the prize. Click-through rate is sexy, cost per click is important, but sales are what matter… I use BookBub to sell books, and it works well for that purpose.
While front-end metrics like CTR and author-level performance are useful for optimization decisions, I ultimately rely on downstream purchase data to evaluate true campaign effectiveness. If a book is significantly underperforming relative to expected performance for comparable titles within the same genre, that’s often a signal that continued promotion may not be the best use of budget.
Mackenzie Kattwinkel, Paid Media Manager at Go Fish DigitalI look at the CTR, and I compare the results with the retailer. If my CTR is good, but I’m not seeing it correlate to sales on the retailers, I will give it a few days since I promote my free books. I want to give the sales time for readthrough to show. However, if I’m still not seeing my sales go up after a few weeks, I’ll stop the ad.
The main metric I look for is cost of sale. Considering the readthrough percentages from the other books in the series, the cost of sales becomes the key metric for me to see if the ad is making or losing money. I let my ad run for a few days, just enough to see if the ad is generating sales or page reads through my Amazon attribution link. These usually lag a few days to a week.
On making adjustments
Pay attention to what is working, and focus on that.
Your aggregate campaign stats only tell part of the story: Performance can vary depending on what author targets you’re using and what regions and retailers you’re reaching. Concentrate on what is working to get the most out of your advertising budget.
If a campaign isn’t working as I expected, i.e., the CTR is low, I will look at the individual markets. For example, Apple US could have a lot of impressions and few clicks. I will turn off that market. Often, that increases impressions in other markets with higher CTR.
I check ads daily to see which markets (US, Canada, Australia, or UK) seem to be successful on that ad. If a campaign is giving me less in the US and doing exceptionally well in another market (for some reason, certain ads have done really well in Australia), I am willing to keep it going for that.
Once I’ve determined that an ad is underperforming, I start by reviewing performance by author to understand which audiences are receiving impressions and how effectively they’re engaging with the ad. Based on that data, I’ll often remove consistently underperforming targets to concentrate spend on higher-quality traffic.
Mackenzie Kattwinkel, Paid Media Manager at Go Fish DigitalWhen an ad isn’t working, I go into the analytics and see which authors I’ve targeted who aren’t getting many clicks compared to the others. Some authors might have, say, a 1–4% click rate, whilst others might be under 1% and holding the ad back, lowering the overall performance. Generally, I take the underperforming authors out and see if that helps my ad win over the algorithm. If the analytics tell me none of the authors I’ve targeted are performing well, I know I need to find new ones.
Only change one thing at a time.
It can be tempting to overhaul your campaigns if you’re not seeing the results you were hoping for, but if you make too many changes at once, you won’t learn what’s driving your ad’s performance. Adjust one element at a time — whether it’s your image, targeting, or bid — and see how it affects your results.
With a BookBub advertisement, the most important factors are choosing genre, author, and creating an engaging graphic for the advertisement. I change my ad art creatives more often than I alter an author or genre. That tells you just how important the image is. Whatever you choose, change one thing at a time to compare different ads.
I’m most likely to adjust the creative while I’m testing. Once I have a creative that works, I tend to stick with it and test new author targets. While testing, I might also adjust the book blurb, or the hook.
If an ad is losing money I switch it off and try another image or creative, especially if I am targeting an author that has performed well in the past. I would try the same author, but a different blurb, or a completely new image.
I know a campaign isn’t performing how I’d hoped immediately if the clicks are low, but the impressions are high. This tells me that the people I’m asking BookBub to place my campaign in front of are not interested in what I’m advertising. From here, I would need to assess whether I want to change the image in my campaign or whether I need to change my targeting. However, if the clicks are quite steady at the start of the campaign but seem to tail off quite quickly, I don’t always take this to mean the campaign is no longer working, but rather the audience I had initially selected is too small for the budget I’m using and I need to target more broadly.
Gemma Carr, Senior Marketing Executive at Joffe BooksWhen I look at an ad and see that it doesn’t have many clicks, I will often pause the ad. Sometimes I try a new graphic or new quote, and if that doesn’t show improvement, I will adjust the chosen authors.
Adjust your bids based on performance and timing.
Your bidding strategy affects the rate you’ll pay to reach readers, as well as how effective your ad is at reaching your target audience. Pay attention to how your ad is serving and determine if adjusting your bid might help you reach your goals.
Sometimes the bid has to be increased for visibility, particularly in the Amazon US market where bids are higher. It depends on timing, holidays, the direction of the wind, etc. But generally, you can get a sense by click rate whether you need to make adjustments. If the ad is getting decent attention, but not enough, I’ll adjust it.
I bid CPM for test ads, and once I decide which ad of the CPM test is best, I turn those ads off and convert the high-performing ads to cost-per-click ads, which seems to be more budget-friendly over time.
If you have a good click-through rate but lower impressions, you may want to up your bid so you get more impressions. Since I bid low, my remaining balance often lasts most of the day. Once others have spent their balance, my ads start to spend more.
On setting yourself up for success
Plan your testing around your budget.
Running and troubleshooting campaigns come with a cost. Keep that in mind when setting your budget, and don’t plan on more than you’re willing to spend.
Start slow. Experiment and know what budget you are willing to gamble because learning means an output of some money as you figure the system out. Setting an ad to ‘fulfill as quickly as possible’ is great for testing, but not so great for campaigns over a longer period of time, as it goes through the money too quickly. It is very easy to burn through money when testing campaigns (I’ve made that mistake), so set a budget and stick to it.
Start with low dollar spend and track CTR. If your ad is performing at 1% or higher, increase your spend.
Choose your book strategically.
Understanding your audience is key to advertising. A discount can be an effective way to hook new readers — especially on BookBub, where readers sign up to get deals on ebooks. But don’t forget about sell-through revenue when calculating whether your advertising efforts are worthwhile; sales from a series can help you recoup advertising costs.
Books on sale are easier to promote and get better campaign results. Start with this first. I have far better results with promoting my series, as I have a high buy-through that helps me in terms of ROI.
Sometimes it’s good to have a discounted ‘loss leader.’ Meaning, you’re willing to accept a negative ROI for the first book, knowing that you’ll get buy-through to subsequent regularly-priced books. This strategy requires knowing your series’ typical buy-through percentages and using that secondary data to calculate whether your ad for the discounted book will provide ROI for the series as a whole. In this loss-leader situation, the number of books in the series (three books minimum is recommended) and a solid buy-through for all books are the keys to success.
Let your past performance guide you — but remember it’s not guaranteed.
If you’ve run BookBub Ads before, your past performance can be a helpful guide to the strategies, targets, and creatives that resonate with readers. Just remember that market conditions change month to month, week to week, and even day to day — so don’t rely on an ad performing exactly the way it did last time.
When selecting which authors to target, you may see a CTR percentage next to the author’s name if you used them before. That number can be helpful for targeting new campaigns.
If it is an author I’ve tested before and they did okay to good, but this time they aren’t doing as well, I’ll probably shelf them again and run another ad with them when I’m doing a sale.
I’ve also restarted old ads with some success.
I create wrap-up reports for every BookBub campaign. These reports document all in-flight optimizations, along with their impact on performance. Over time, this has become a valuable reference for identifying patterns and informing strategy on future campaigns.
Mackenzie Kattwinkel, Paid Media Manager at Go Fish DigitalOn knowing when to go back to the drawing board
With complete control over your ad’s budget, bids, image, and audience, there are infinite ways you can test and tweak an ad to try to improve its performance. But successful advertisers know that sometimes it’s better to start fresh, rather than continuing to spend money on a campaign that isn’t working.
Even with a great ad and nice visibility, you might have to archive the campaign if it’s not producing sales.
If I’ve removed most of the author targets from an ad within a campaign, and CTR hasn’t increased significantly, I’ll turn that ad off. If I have several ads within a campaign that use the same ad image, and none of them achieve a good CTR, I’ll take that to mean the ad image is ineffective. That’s when I’ll go back to try something different.
I’ve had a few campaigns run a 4–5% CTR. Those ads are generally the most tightly targeted (one to two authors plus one retailer) and ads that I dialed in over previous CPM tests. If ad performance drops under 1% CTR on a highly targeted CPC campaign, I dump them all and start over.
I may change out the image if the campaign isn’t doing well — lots of impressions but no clicks — but usually I just start over. I do increase the spend if the campaign is doing well and I’m seeing sales on that retailer.
