Limited-time discounts are among the most popular types of promotions authors advertise. This is a strategy we often encourage our partners to try — BookBub Ads is a great platform for reaching readers specifically looking for deals!
In this post, we explore how to use BookBub Ads to promote free discounts, and we’re happy to share the expertise of romance author Cindy Kirk. Cindy has been using BookBub Ads since 2018 — largely to promote limited-time discounts on books in several of her series — and over the years, she’s discovered that pricing her books for free results in more clicks on her ads for the money spent. In a recent campaign promoting Second Chance Family, the fourth book in her Jackson Hole series, she drove hundreds of clicks at click-through rates (CTRs) of up to 6% and increased free downloads during the sale. Let’s see how she did it!
Discounting strategy and campaign goals
Cindy uses Kindle’s five-day free period to discount books in her series to help bring new readers to those series, with the goal of increasing overall sales of her books. She runs ads to alert readers to this promotional pricing, and finds that the urgency of a limited-time offer encourages clicks.
I have found that the five-day free period is the right amount of time for sales on my books. It allows me to have a defined sale period, yet allows several days to promote the sale, and allows multiple days for potential readers to click on and download the books. I have found BookBub Ads tend to work well during sales of my book, so I always run them during these sale periods.
Although she often discounts her first-in-series titles to free — a great strategy for driving sell-through to later books in the series — for a campaign in April this year, Cindy chose to discount and promote the fourth book in her Jackson Hole series.
Second Chance Family has always been a book that I feel has an intriguing plot and appeals to a variety of readers. That being said, If I were promoting a series that needed to be read in order, I would always promote the first in series.
This promotion was one of many Cindy has run with BookBub Ads that successfully met both goals of bringing readers to her series and increasing sales. Over time, she’s learned how to design, target, and budget her ads to get the most clicks.
Campaign set-up and execution
Creative
It’s important to test your ad creative to figure out what design will attract the most clicks from your audience, and many authors run these tests before the promotional period so they’re ready to launch full speed ahead. Thanks to previous testing, Cindy was able to launch this five-day free promotion with a template she knew worked well. She’s learned that the images that get the most clicks are often the simplest.
I’ve learned that for my promos, the book cover in a simple, easy-to-read ad with an intriguing quote or message, and the promo price in large letters works best for a high click-through rate.
Knowing she could rely on this format, all Cindy needed to do was share the ad with the most engaged audiences she has found on BookBub — also through lots of testing!
Targeting
With BookBub Ads, you can target your ads to only show to readers interested in particular genres (category targeting) or specific authors on BookBub (author targeting). We consistently see higher engagement from campaigns that use author targets, which Cindy tests and keeps track of across campaigns to replicate her success.
When deciding which authors to target, I try to evaluate authors with books similar to mine (the Amazon ‘also bought’ recommendations are helpful to start this process). Once I’ve decided on new targets, I target that author over several different book promotions to see if their BookBub fans are likely to click on my ads. Targeting myself as an author target is also very beneficial and tends to have a high CTR, so definitely don’t forget to target yourself!
Cindy also knows that authors with smaller numbers of readers often deliver higher CTRs. She takes advantage of this by increasing the number of author targets she adds to a campaign, so she can get the benefit of these higher CTRs while still reaching a larger audience. Once she’s tested individual authors and found ones that consistently work well for her, she combines them into a single campaign, and saves these audiences for the future.
For this promotion of Second Chance Family, she created ten versions of her ad: nine of them targeting individual authors she’d already battle-tested, including herself, and one of them targeting eight authors with smaller audiences. She targeted the ads by category, too, to Contemporary Romance. To reach the most relevant audience, you can use both targeting types to reach readers who are interested in both a genre and specific authors in that genre.
Timing, Budget, and Bid
Cindy pushed all ten versions of her ad live on the first day of the sale. The next day, she paused any ads receiving CTRs of less than 2% and left the rest running, in order to use her budget most effectively. She set these up as continuous campaigns with daily budgets to better control her spend.
Although my budget varies depending on the book and series, I prefer to set a daily spend goal rather than a goal for the entire campaign. This allows me to watch and cancel campaigns that aren’t converting to clicks well. It also allows me to spend more on author targets that are doing well. I often will start my daily spend goal for targeting an author and category interest that best fits my book at $5 per day, then increase my daily spend for targets doing well and watch or cancel ones that aren’t performing.
Cindy uses CPM bidding — which she prefers to CPC for a short-term sale, since CPM allows the ad to be shown to a large number of readers quickly — and chooses a bid at the middle-to-lower end of the recommended range in the ad creation form.
Because I’m not initially setting my bid amount very high for each author target, this allows me to avoid burning through all of my budget first thing in the morning. That being said, I have found over time that setting my CPM bid a little closer to the middle of the recommended amount usually gives me a better click-through than when I set it too close to the bottom of the range.
Results and takeaways
The author targets that did best in this promotion generated CTRs between 2% and 6%! This led to an increase in downloads of Cindy’s free book. She also evaluates the success of her campaigns by increases in reviews, which she saw for this promotion.
For other authors advertising discounts, Cindy advises sticking to what works for you — and spending more conservatively when you try something new.
From my experience, free tends to be the only promo that has worked consistently. If I try promoting new releases or promo prices other than free, I set my daily spend low in case the CTR ends up being lower than is worth the money spent. For me, targeting the lower end of the recommended winning bid amount works well if your ad spend isn’t as high.
She also recommends taking the time to test and find which author targets work for your books. You might be surprised!
There have been authors that I felt had a very similar writing style and reader audience, however some of those that I thought would convert well didn’t. Targeting one author and a category target that is appropriate for your book (for me that’s romance and women’s fiction) really helps to only show ads to readers that may be interested. I increase my spend when an author target is doing well. That tends to equal an even better CTR over time.
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