What targeting options are available for BookBub Ads?
There are five ways to refine the audience your ad campaign targets: reading format preference (ebooks or audiobooks), retailer preference, region, author interest, and category interest. You can use any combination of these targeting options on a single campaign.
Identifying the right audience for your books is an essential part of running effective ad campaigns. If you’re not sure who the audience is for your books, or you’d like a refresher on how to define your target audience, click here.
Reading Format preference
You can specify whether you want your ad to reach ebook readers or audiobook listeners. Campaigns targeting ebook readers will reach BookBub members only. Campaigns targeting audiobook listeners may reach either BookBub members or Chirp members, depending on your retailer targeting.
Retailer & Region preference
We use your click-through links to automatically target members of our audience based on their retailer and region preferences. For example, if you enter a URL for an ebook on the Kobo Canada website, your ad would be eligible to reach any BookBub member based in Canada who uses Kobo to purchase their ebooks.
If you enter a URL that does not specify a region or retailer, like a link to an author website, you will have the chance to select which regions and retailers you want to include in your campaign.
If you are targeting audiobook listeners, you have to enter a Chirp URL if you want your campaign to target Chirp members and compete for impressions in our daily Chirp emails. All other URLs, whether for ebook retailers, audiobook retailers, or other websites, will target BookBub members and compete for impressions in our BookBub emails and on the BookBub website. Read more about running ads for Chirp books here.
Author & Category interests
Narrowing your ad’s audience by author or category interests allows you to reach only the most relevant and engaged readers. Targeting by author interest lets you reach any reader who has expressed interest in an author on our platform, including readers who follow an author or who have clicked on a Featured Deal for one of the author’s books. Targeting by category interest lets you reach any reader subscribed to receive updates about books in a particular category or genres.
If you target by both author and category interest, you’ll reach readers who have expressed interest in at least one of the authors AND at least one of the categories you’ve selected.
We strongly encourage you to use author targeting if you’re interested in increasing your click-through-rate and driving a positive return on investment. If you’re more focused on reaching a broad audience and maximizing exposure of your ad, then category targeting may be a better choice.
Choosing author targets
Targeting by author interest can help you reach very specific and unique audiences of readers. Here are some resources to help guide your decisions about which authors’ fans to target:
- 10 Successful Advertisers’ Tips for Targeting Readers with BookBub Ads
- 8 Ways to Target Readers Using BookBub Ads
Our “Related Authors” feature can help give you new ideas for author targets to test. After you select author targets to add to your campaign, you’ll see a tab titled “Related Authors” appear on the “Select Authors for Targeting” screen. This list is automatically generated and includes authors whose audiences overlap with the authors you’ve already selected. Note that we’ve excluded some of the most popular authors on our platform from this list, as we’ve found that those targets rarely generate high click-through rates for the majority of our advertisers.
The best way to determine which authors will be the most effective targets for your campaigns is to run tests and compare the results. Learn more about how to test BookBub Ads targets here.