Barnes & Noble

I have a Barnes & Noble problem and it kind of struck me out of the blue a few days ago. As you know, I normally run ads on BookBub every week for three days, Friday through Sunday. For some reason, I was checking the stats on the ad for First, the same ad I’ve been using since last August. Hey, it’s been effective and the few times I’ve changed the ad, the click-through rate has gone down. But using the same ad for so long gives me a good sample size to evaluate. People set their preferences, e.g,. Amazon, Apple, etc., and when they click on an ad it takes them to the bookseller they prefer. What I noticed in the statistics was that the click-throughs for B&N account for a full THIRD of total clicks, but when I compare clicks versus sales, the actual ratio of First purchases from B&N readers is about 5% of the total sales. I may not be a rocket scientist but even I can tell that’s a big discrepancy. And it makes me wonder. Why? Do people set their preference on those ads to B&N but then end up buying the book on Kindle? Or am I missing a huge chunk of readers who click but don’t buy, and if they don’t buy, why not? I have to say the B&N book page isn’t the most well-constructed. And no readers have rated or reviewed it there, which also seems odd given that I’ve sold enough that there should be at least a few. That could be off-putting to other potential readers. Maybe this is a question for AI to investigate. I certainly don’t have the answers at this point.