Goodreads Self-Serve Ad

Goodreads Ad

I ran a 3-Day Goodreads Self-Serve Ad on Oct. 1st.

The way Goodreads works is you pre-pay for the amount of clicks they estimate you will have over a certain number of days. They estimated that I would have 60 clicks a day. I offered to pay .25c a click. The price you pay for clicks can run up into the hundreds of dollars. The more you pay, the better your visibility.

It’s not just clicks you’re looking for when you buy the ad but also a boost in people who outright buy your book or in my case people who add the book to their to-read list. After 3 days I only had 6 clicks total and an additional 10 people adding the book to their to-read list. I thought about keeping my $45 campaign going for a month but decided it wasn’t worth it.

The placement of the Goodreads Self-Serve Ads are abysmal. They’re either in the bottom corner of the Goodreads home page of the left side of your Goodreads author/personal page. Either way nothing sticks out about them and they flicker through the ads at a rate that doesn’t make you latch on. I honestly never paid attention to them before I was looking for a way to advertise on Goodreads. And I don’t think many other people do either.

 I asked Goodreads for a refund of my remaining $43 and they complied with no fuss. Good customer service. Now if only they’d give a tier system for their actual ads. Having a $5,000/mo budget requirement is ridiculous.

Filed under: Advertisements, Promotional