Bookbub ads weirdness

[ingobernable]

Is anyone running Bookbub ads and getting lower than usual results today? I copied an ad that had about 7% CTR and today's CTR is less than 0.25% I know these things vary, but it usually doesn't go from great to abysmal, at least not in my experience. It might be my genre and summer thing, or the reporting might be off. I don't know what to think.  Anyone else seeing this?

[JRTomlin]

If I ever had an ad that had results better than abysmal, I could tell you. 

(I would love to figure out how people do it. I've tested and tweaked and tested and tweaked and am an utter failure at BB ads)

[dgcasey]

I copied an ad that had about 7% CTR and today's CTR is less than 0.25% I know these things vary, but it usually doesn't go from great to abysmal, at least not in my experience.

I'd give my eye teeth to get an ad with 7%. Most of mine have been well under 1%. The highest I think was around 0.85% which resulted in a massive four sales.

[ingobernable]

I have a lot of abysmal ads too, but I end those quickly. It bugs me why the ones that worked no longer do. I copied another one and again got worse results, although not as bad. In this case, the old one had 7,083 impressions, 397 clicks, 5.60% CTR, and the copied one got 391 impressions, 7 clicks, 1.79% CTR. Maybe I didn't let it run long enough, but I don't want it to eat my money either. I'll have to test one of my ads targeted at Apple or Kobo and not Amazon. Some of those have over 10% CTR when I promote a freebie.

[JRTomlin]

I could deal with having lots of abysmal ads if I could get even one that wasn't. 

[Tom Wood]

I subscribed to the BookBub daily email so I could observe their ads. I'm subscribed to the Science Fiction, Thriller, and Young Adult emails. I've been served three different versions of ads for this book, and each time it was served four days in a row:



We know that BookBub serves the same person each ad four times before moving on to the next email addresses. For CPC that's okay, but for CPM it seems a waste. To me, it seems like 75% of the CPM ads are wasted because if the recipient didn't click the first time, they aren't going to click the 2-4th time either. I asked David Gaughgran about repetitive CPM serving and he insisted it's a good thing. 

In any case, if that ad was simply swapping out images while running the same ad campaign, it would have skipped over me when serving the second and third versions because I would have already been targeted four times. But since I keep getting ads for a book I will never click on, that tells me the advertiser is starting a new ad each time with a new image. That also indicates that BookBub serves the ads from the beginning of their list of emails each time too, rather than randomizing the list.*

Which, it seems to me, means that if you keep starting over with new ads, those ads will start over at the beginning of the email list and be served to the same people who saw your earlier ad the first time. Which, theoretically, should drive your CTR to zero if you keep starting new ads for the same book and BookBub keeps starting them with the same initial targets. Or am I missing something here?

* It could also indicate that BookBub has a lot of excess capacity and ads like this are back-filling the open slots. Which would point to a low-bid strategy to see if your ads could run in those slots too.

ETA: Aaannd I just received today's BB email with this in the ad slot:



I'm glad I'm not paying for these ads!

[JRTomlin]

IF Bookbub is starting with the same people every time (and I don't know that they are) who quickly get tired of seeing ads for the same book, doesn't that wash down the loo the strategy of repeatedly testing ads for the same book?

It could explain some odd-seeming results that I've received.  I certainly don't know if it's the case, but it is definitely something to think about.

By the way, I bought David's book and used his method. I tweaked and re-tweaked and tested and retested with terrible results. So all I can say is that it didn't work for me, and cost a fair sum with all the testing to discover that it didn't work for me. That does NOT mean that it doesn't work for other people. Historical Fiction could be just particularly difficult or some other explanation.

So far, after testing on and off for a couple of years I haven't found anything that would give me results even close to 2% CTR.

[ingobernable]

Which, it seems to me, means that if you keep starting over with new ads, those ads will start over at the beginning of the email list and be served to the same people who saw your earlier ad the first time. Which, theoretically, should drive your CTR to zero if you keep starting new ads for the same book and BookBub keeps starting them with the same initial targets. Or am I missing something here?

Hmm, I didn't consider they might start with the same people or that the same people would open Bookbub's emails every time, especially if the author I'm targeting has a lot of followers/people interested in their books, but that might be it. Although, I used to copy ads a lot in the past too and they usually had good results. I knew when I used them up based on the number of sales/downloads I got. Next time, I will try restarting the old ad to see if that changes anything.

I can't figure out CPC ads. They either want to charge me too much per click or I don't get any impressions at all. Even when it seems to work, the ad just dies very quickly. 

[Tom Wood]

I don't know for a fact that they keep serving from the start of an email list, but it seems statistically improbable for me to keep getting these same ads if my email is being randomly selected from the millions that they have. Sign up for some of the lists and see what they serve you!

[JRTomlin]

I don't know for a fact that they keep serving from the start of an email list, but it seems statistically improbable for me to keep getting these same ads if my email is being randomly selected from the millions that they have. Sign up for some of the lists and see what they serve you!

Ads don't go out to millions of people though. They are targetted often by author. With my 5500 or so followers, there is a pretty good chance if someone runs a bunch of ads with my followers targetted, they will see several of them, possibly several times.

ETA: I think they go out to more people than the 5500 though. I understand they also go out to 'readers', which BB considers people who have checked out my profile or my books on their website. That is around 35,000 but still way short of millions. 

[ingobernable]

I don't know for a fact that they keep serving from the start of an email list, but it seems statistically improbable for me to keep getting these same ads if my email is being randomly selected from the millions that they have. Sign up for some of the lists and see what they serve you!

It's hard to say without knowing how many ads the author is running. I usually create more than one ad, each one targeting a different author, so if one person happens to be interested in all those authors, they might be getting my ad over and over again.  I sometimes see an ad more than once, but I always assumed that's because the author is running a lot of ads.

[Tom Wood]

I don't know for a fact that they keep serving from the start of an email list, but it seems statistically improbable for me to keep getting these same ads if my email is being randomly selected from the millions that they have. Sign up for some of the lists and see what they serve you!

Ads don't go out to millions of people though. They are targetted often by author. With my 5500 or so followers, there is a pretty good chance if someone runs a bunch of ads with my followers targetted, they will see several of them, possibly several times.

ETA: I think they go out to more people than the 5500 though. I understand they also go out to 'readers', which BB considers people who have checked out my profile or my books on their website. That is around 35,000 but still way short of millions. 

  Doh! You're right! Which means there will be a natural 'decay' of the CTR if an ad runs for a while and cycles through all the potential recipients.

[JRTomlin]

Even if I have an ad doing better than usual (I recently had an ad for a new novel that was only 1.4% CTR but was generating enough sales to justify running it), I saw a decay pretty quickly. If the author has 100,000+ followers the decay would happen slower, obviously but yes, I'm convinced decay is a factor.

I only run them sporadically partially for that exact reason. I've stopped mine until I run one for a freebie in about a week. Not that I'm an expert on what to do since I don't do well with them at best.

[Tom Wood]

Even if I have an ad doing better than usual (I had an ad for a new novel that was only 1.4% CTR but was generating enough sales to justify running it), I saw a decay pretty quickly. If the author has 100,000+ followers the decay would happen slower, obviously but yes, I'm convinced decay is a factor.

I only run them sporadically partially for that exact reason. I've stopped mine until I run one for a freebie in about a week. Not that I'm an expert on what to do since I don't do well with them at best.

Rather than stopping them and starting with a new ad, might it be a better strategy to reduce the bid so it never serves for a while? Then when you increase the bid to get impressions, BookBub will start (hopefully) serving that ad to the remaining 'readers' email addresses instead of serving them to people who have already seen an ad from you. I don't know if that is how it works, but it might save serving your ads to people who have already seen them if a new ad re-starts the email list.

ETA: Sorry for all the questions/comments, but I've just spent some time with the BB and Facebook ads systems and I want to get it right!

[LilyBLily]

Even if I have an ad doing better than usual (I had an ad for a new novel that was only 1.4% CTR but was generating enough sales to justify running it), I saw a decay pretty quickly. If the author has 100,000+ followers the decay would happen slower, obviously but yes, I'm convinced decay is a factor.

I only run them sporadically partially for that exact reason. I've stopped mine until I run one for a freebie in about a week. Not that I'm an expert on what to do since I don't do well with them at best.

Rather than stopping them and starting with a new ad, might it be a better strategy to reduce the bid so it never serves for a while? Then when you increase the bid to get impressions, BookBub will start (hopefully) serving that ad to the remaining 'readers' email addresses instead of serving them to people who have already seen an ad from you. I don't know if that is how it works, but it might save serving your ads to people who have already seen them if a new ad re-starts the email list.

ETA: Sorry for all the questions/comments, but I've just spent some time with the BB and Facebook ads systems and I want to get it right!

I don't believe I was able to reduce a bid on a BB ad. This was months ago. Has anyone got recent evidence that one can?

[JRTomlin]

Even if I have an ad doing better than usual (I had an ad for a new novel that was only 1.4% CTR but was generating enough sales to justify running it), I saw a decay pretty quickly. If the author has 100,000+ followers the decay would happen slower, obviously but yes, I'm convinced decay is a factor.

I only run them sporadically partially for that exact reason. I've stopped mine until I run one for a freebie in about a week. Not that I'm an expert on what to do since I don't do well with them at best.

Rather than stopping them and starting with a new ad, might it be a better strategy to reduce the bid so it never serves for a while? Then when you increase the bid to get impressions, BookBub will start (hopefully) serving that ad to the remaining 'readers' email addresses instead of serving them to people who have already seen an ad from you. I don't know if that is how it works, but it might save serving your ads to people who have already seen them if a new ad re-starts the email list.

ETA: Sorry for all the questions/comments, but I've just spent some time with the BB and Facebook ads systems and I want to get it right!

You can just pause it and then when you restart it, starts back up in the same place. One advantage of doing it that way instead of starting a whole new ad is that BB only allows someone to see the same ad 4 times. Pause is on the dropdown menu when you have a live ad.



ETA: Questions are no problem. BB is so radically different than FB and Amazon ads that it's worth asking.

Even if I have an ad doing better than usual (I had an ad for a new novel that was only 1.4% CTR but was generating enough sales to justify running it), I saw a decay pretty quickly. If the author has 100,000+ followers the decay would happen slower, obviously but yes, I'm convinced decay is a factor.

I only run them sporadically partially for that exact reason. I've stopped mine until I run one for a freebie in about a week. Not that I'm an expert on what to do since I don't do well with them at best.

Rather than stopping them and starting with a new ad, might it be a better strategy to reduce the bid so it never serves for a while? Then when you increase the bid to get impressions, BookBub will start (hopefully) serving that ad to the remaining 'readers' email addresses instead of serving them to people who have already seen an ad from you. I don't know if that is how it works, but it might save serving your ads to people who have already seen them if a new ad re-starts the email list.

ETA: Sorry for all the questions/comments, but I've just spent some time with the BB and Facebook ads systems and I want to get it right!

I don't believe I was able to reduce a bid on a BB ad. This was months ago. Has anyone got recent evidence that one can?

I recently changed a bid on an ad. It was a CPC one. I can't say for sure on CPM.

[ingobernable]

Bookbub just showed me my own ad.    I have to be careful not to accidentally click on it because it's a CPC one. 

[dgcasey]

Bookbub just showed me my own ad.    I have to be careful not to accidentally click on it because it's a CPC one. 

That's one I've never seen.