First test ad

You may recall that I was skeptical about BookBub Ads when they were first announced. While it’s exciting to get a crack at that population of known book buyers, I didn’t really think CPM advertising (paying for impressions, rather than clicks) made sense, since they count opening the email as an impression. Yet you have to scroll down to see the ad. That means that a lot of those “impressions” aren’t really impressions at all, so we would expect the CTR (click-through rate) to be low. Well I’ve run a lot of tests, and I can tell you that my skepticism was justified. The CTR on BookBub ads is horrible. Pretty consistently about 0.4% for what should have been a very clickable ad. (See above.)

To make sure I was being fair to BookBub, I just ran a Twitter ad campaign. I’m using this tweet, which I…