Ads Update

You’re probably wondering to yourself: Self, how are the advertisements for First doing? Glad you asked. It’s been an interesting experience. I’ve learned a few things along the way with some ads that worked and others that didn’t at all. I’ve done around ten different ad campaigns, two of which are live now. The ad producing the most click-throughs has been running since the day after Christmas. I keep thinking about pausing that one, but it continues to produce a decent CTR (click-through rate). Plus, and this is what I think works for it, is that the ad shows the book cover and all the text says is, “Second is not an option.” See what I did there? That seems to work.

The newest ad has a blurb from that awesome review I got last week. I also changed the background image to zoom in on our hapless little astronaut floating in space, and the book title and my name are nowhere in sight. Just the text and button for clicking to buy First. It’s only been a week but the CTR is pretty good so far. I had another that featured another plan on the title which said, “Sometimes being first isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” I let that one run for a few weeks but the number of impressions dropped and I moved on to a different approach.

Does all that mean I’m a marketing genius? Not even close. At least with the BookBub platform I can experiment and quickly pull an ad if it’s not doing well and try something else. And if something works, I can ride it for a while. Like almost two months in the case of the first one I talked about.

What about the ones that clearly didn’t work? We’ll talk about those next time.