BookBub Ads is a powerful tool that can help you achieve a wide variety of book marketing goals. It can also be a tricky platform to master!
It’s easy to fall into common pitfalls like targeting readers who don’t engage with your ads or spending too much of your budget on a campaign that doesn’t deliver the results you want. The best way to avoid these mistakes and ensure your campaign will meet your goals? Test your ads!
Why should you test your ads?
- To find a receptive audience. Reaching the right readers with your campaigns is crucial — to drive more sales, you need to reach readers who are likely to be interested in (and willing to buy!) your book.
- To optimize your creative image. Testing your image can help you figure out what design will attract the most clicks from the audience you’re reaching.
- To maximize the use of your advertising dollars. Running test ads with low budgets and figuring out what works lets you invest the majority of your advertising budget in campaigns you’re confident will deliver the results you’re looking for.
- To develop a strategy that works on BookBub. Our subscriber base is unique compared to other advertising platforms — and each author’s audience on BookBub may differ as well — so even advertisers who are experienced on other platforms should run tests on BookBub.
- To determine the most effective way to achieve your goals. Different goals call for different campaign setups. Learning how your campaign variables affect your results can help you create more successful ads.
- To make improvements to your overall marketing strategy. You can use ad tests to inform decisions about your book marketing beyond your BookBub Ads campaigns — like helping you choose between cover designs or marketing copy!
Setting up a BookBub Ads campaign is a straightforward process, and testing is as simple as creating multiple campaigns to run simultaneously. In this post, we’ll walk you through the best practices for testing and show you how to apply them to your campaigns to improve your results.
How to run tests
You can use a process called A/B testing (also known as split testing) on BookBub Ads. The basic steps are simple:
- Set up one campaign (the “A” version).
- Create a second campaign (the “B” version) identical to the first, then change just one element — that element is the variable you are testing.
- Run your campaigns simultaneously.
- Compare the results.
- Repeat as needed until you’re satisfied with the results.
You can use this process to test any of your campaign variables: your image, copy, targeting, and more. Multiple rounds of testing can help you improve your campaign results: by testing each element of your ad in isolation, you’ll be able to learn which specific elements contribute to your ads’ success. You can build off of those insights by continuing to tweak and test one part of your campaign at a time, improving your results as you go.
We’ll go into detail about how to run tests on different parts of your ad, but here are some best practices to keep in mind no matter what you’re testing:
- Set low budgets. $5-10 is usually enough to glean dependable results! Once you’re confident you’ve found a winning strategy, you can scale up to bigger campaigns with larger budgets. Just make sure your test budget will allow your ad to serve enough impressions for your results to be statistically significant.
- Bid high. Bid on the high end of the average range shown in the ad setup form, and set your test campaigns to use your budget as quickly as possible. This will help you win impressions — and therefore see results from your tests — fast. You can use either CPM or CPC bidding, as long as you use the same bid type and amount across all your test campaigns. CPM bidding will generally allow you to generate impressions and see results more quickly, while CPC bidding may be more cost-effective, since you’ll only pay for readers who click on your ads rather than all impressions.
- Only test one variable at a time. This lets you know exactly which element of your ad is driving the engagement you see on each test. For example, you may want to experiment with different messages and audiences. However, if you ran two campaigns whose ad copy and targeting were different from each other, you wouldn’t be able to tell which variable drove the increased engagement in your winning test.
- Run tests simultaneously. The conditions of the BookBub Ads auction change day to day (even hour to hour!) based on the emails we send to readers and other advertisers who are running campaigns at the same time you are. For the most reliable results, you should run the “A” and “B” versions of your campaign at the same time so you can eliminate auction conditions as a variable that affects your ad’s performance.
Testing your image
You only have seconds to hook a reader and get them to click when they see your ad, so designing an image that will engage your audience is key to your campaign’s success. With BookBub Ads, you have two options for creating your image:
- Use our built-in creative builder. The creative builder is a great option if you’re new to ads or don’t want to invest time into designing your own image! If you use this option, you’ll have just two elements to test: the text of your ad copy and your call-to-action button. You can learn more about testing the copy you use for your ads in the next section!
- Design and upload your own image. There are lots of free ad design tools, including Book Brush and Canva, that make it easy to create compelling ad images.
If you’re creating your own image from scratch, there are a couple of different directions you can take when you test, like trying completely different images or just swapping out smaller details. Some elements in your image that you may want to consider testing include:
- Call-to-action text
- Call-to-action format (button, banner, etc.)
- Font and size of text
- Background and foreground images
- Color scheme
- 3D vs 2D cover
- The copy (we’ll cover this in the next section!)
To start, create a couple of different images you want to try. Set up your first test ad (the “A” version) with the targeting, bid, budget, and pacing you intend to use for all your tests.
You can easily set up your “B” version by copying the “A” version. On the “Manage Ads” page, click Select Action next to the “A” test ad and click Copy Ad from the dropdown:
This will create a new ad with all the same setup details as the original. Then, you can upload your alternate image into the new campaign. Don’t forget to change the name of your ad, too! Each test should have a descriptive name that allows you to quickly distinguish them from each other in your dashboard.
You can repeat this copy and edit process as many times as you need — as long as you only change the image in each version, you can run as many different test versions at once as you want! When you’re done, you should have multiple test ads that are alike in every way but the image.
If this is your first round of testing, you may want to start by testing the biggest differences first (such as using two completely different images) — you’ll have a chance to do more fine-tuned testing later. This will ensure that you’re focusing on your most successful image rather than spending time testing the details of an image that, as a whole, isn’t as effective for your campaign.
For example, you might run a first round with two images that have significantly different layouts, like the two below:
After determining which of these two is more successful, you could then move on to testing smaller changes in the winning image — such as font, background and button colors, and button copy or placement.
Since you’re using identical targeting and bids for each of your image test campaigns, you can attribute the different levels of engagement you see on each of these ads to the only element that varies between them: the image. Your CTR (click-through rate) is a good indication of how appealing your ad is to your audience, as it captures what percentage of them were driven to click.
Now you can use the highest-performing ad images in further rounds of testing!
Testing your ad copy
Whether you use BookBub’s creative builder or design your own image, you only have a limited amount of space available for your ad copy — so you need to make those words count! Depending on the content you’re advertising and the readers you’re targeting, certain elements might work better for your campaign than others. Some things you may want to consider testing in your copy include:
- Awards
- Bestseller status
- Quote from a publication or author
- Intriguing hook that shares your novel’s conflict (fiction)
- A question your book answers or a problem it solves (nonfiction)
- Popular trope from your genre
- Review count or star ratings
- Comparison to a similar author or book
Like with your image, if you’re in the early rounds of testing, start with the biggest differences between copy first — leave more granular, word-level changes for later tests. You can use the same copy and edit process here to edit your ads: Start with your “A” version, setting up the targeting, bid, and budget you plan to use for all of your tests, then copy that version into as many tests as you want with new copy.
Once you have your tests set up, you should have multiple campaigns that are identical in every way except for the copy in the images. Narrowing in on this one difference ensures that you can credit any variation in CTR to the differences in the ad copy. The higher the CTR is for a given ad, the more effective that copy was at engaging your audience.
Testing your targeting
Targeting can have a huge impact on the engagement you see on your campaign — reaching the readers who will be most excited about your book is an important factor in driving clicks. If your goal is to drive engagement with your campaign, we recommend that you use author targeting (either on its own, or combined with category targeting). This is because ads using author targeting consistently drive higher rates of engagement than those that use category targeting on its own.
Even when using author targeting, capturing the right audience can be a challenge for new and experienced advertisers alike. You may find that a seemingly obvious target just doesn’t generate the level of engagement you expected, while a more surprising author is getting you lots of clicks. Partners who have run successful ads on other auction-based platforms may discover the targets they’ve relied on for those platforms don’t deliver the same results on BookBub. This is why testing your targeting is key to making the most of your campaigns!
There are plenty of ways you can target custom audiences of readers with BookBub Ads. Some ideas include:
- Your existing fans on BookBub
- Readers who are fans of similar authors
- Fans of authors with whom you’ve run newsletter swaps or other promotions
- Fans of bestselling authors in your genre
- Readers who are subscribed to your book’s genre on BookBub
- Readers in the different countries BookBub supports
- Readers who have indicated preferences for certain retailers
- Any combination of the above
You’ll follow the same process to test your targeting that you did to test your copy. Use identical bids, budgets, pacing, and in this case, images, for each version you test. Since you’re specifically testing your audience, you want to ensure that readers in every campaign you run see the same content — that way, you can attribute whatever variance you see in CTR to the targeting you’re using in each test, rather than ad design.
To compare your targeting tests, look again at the different click-through rates each campaign generates.
Another metric to monitor is your eCPC (effective cost per click), which is how much you’re actually paying for each click on your ad. A lower eCPC means your budget is being spent more effectively — you’re spending less per reader who clicks on your ad. Checking your eCPC is important because some targets will cost more than others if many other advertisers are also targeting their fans — a target who delivers a high CTR may not be worth it if their eCPC is high, too. Authors who deliver high CTRs and low eCPCs for your ads are great targets: They generate engagement for cheap!
For the most fine-tuned test results, we recommend testing one individual author target at a time. However, if you add multiple author targets to a single campaign, you can also see the CTR and eCPC broken down for each individual target under the Aggregate Stats tab of your campaign’s Ad Details page. This way, you can easily compare their results:’
You can continue to run tests refining your targeting using the same methods until you reach a level of engagement and costs you’re happy with.
Next steps & scaling up
You can test the different elements of your ad in whatever order makes the most sense for your campaign. In fact, you may want to bounce between the elements you’re testing to ensure you’re optimizing your campaign for receptive audiences.
For example: start by testing some variations on ad copy, then drop the winning text into a few different image styles, and then use the winning copy-image combination to test your targeting. Once you’ve found a strong audience, go back and tweak your copy again to see if any changes help make your ad more engaging to that audience. Going back and forth between variables helps you continue to improve all elements of your campaign.
After a couple of rounds of testing one element, you still might not see the results you want — and that’s okay! If you test images for a couple of rounds and just aren’t getting your CTR as high as you’d hoped, you might consider skipping ahead to testing your targeting to see if there’s another author you haven’t found yet whose audience is more interested in your book.
Once you’ve honed in on an image and audience combination that delivers CTRs and eCPCs you’re happy with, you can start scaling up to larger campaigns in service of your marketing goals. Ramp up your overall budget if you’re pushing a large campaign to promote a new release, set up a long-running campaign with a fixed daily budget if you’re advertising a permafree book, or stack other promotional activities alongside your ads to hit a bestseller list.
No matter how you choose to run your rounds of testing, be sure to monitor your campaigns carefully, use your best performers as you move forward, and always keep your advertising goals in mind so you’re developing campaigns that will deliver the results you’re looking for!
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This post was originally published on May 15, 2019 and has been updated with the latest best practices.
