5.3x ROAS: How Reedsy Turned a Niche Audience Into a CTV Advantage

Reedsy is an online platform that connects authors with publishing professionals ranging from editors, book cover designers, and marketers. It also provides free writing software and courses on writing and publishing. Reedsy advertises the marketplace on Vibe.

Megan Thomson, Reedsy's Head of Performance Marketing, runs all of the company's paid ads solo, from campaign setup to concepting to overall strategy.

Reedsy's customer isn't 'people who like books.' It's someone actively writing one: partway through a manuscript, looking for an editor, a cover designer, or a ghostwriter to help finish it. That's a much smaller, more specific audience than the broader publishing or reading category most platforms target.

The challenge

Reedsy was already running ads almost everywhere: Google, YouTube, Meta, Amazon, and a handful of smaller social channels. CTV was the newer bet for brand awareness, and wasn’t viewed as a performance channel. 

Reedsy's first CTV platform was MNTN. It was working initially, but results started dropping off; specifically on prospecting. Megan traced the cause to audience targeting and identified that MNTN's "MNTN Matched" audiences were broad interest buckets, useful for a general publishing audience, but Reedsy's actual customer is much narrower: someone actively writing a book, not someone who just likes reading them.

There was a second challenge: Megan runs every paid channel by herself. Toward the end of her time on MNTN, she was troubleshooting the platform almost weekly, chasing unexplained performance drops without clear answers from support. A channel that demands that much hands-on maintenance doesn't scale for a one-person team.

The solution

Audiences built from keywords, not broad categories. Vibe let Reedsy build custom audiences from its own high-performing Google keywords, terms like "developmental editing" and "copy editing", instead of relying on a broad "publishing" interest bucket.

Confidence in the numbers, not just the numbers themselves. Vibe's purchase ID matching lets Reedsy cross-check every attributed sale against Google Analytics, a validation step they didn't have on MNTN.

Less to manage, not just easier to launch. Reedsy went live on Vibe in two days, compared to roughly two months to get approved and running on other ad platforms. The bigger shift has been day-to-day: the weekly troubleshooting that used to eat a chunk of Megan's week on MNTN is gone.

That maintenance now happens every four to six weeks instead of weekly, and it's lighter when it does. Building a report in Vibe is quick, and the numbers hold up. On MNTN, finding the right dimensions was often a puzzle, and the ROI figures didn't always look right. The reports are also easier to act on. On MNTN, the interest names in a report often didn't match the names in the audience builder, so turning a finding into a targeting change meant translating between two different systems. In Vibe, the naming is consistent throughout, so a report leads straight into an audience update.

The results

Over the last 30 days, Reedsy's spend on Vibe has returned a 5.3x ROAS, at a blended cost of $15.05 per qualified lead across its prospecting and retargeting campaigns. That's on top of an ROI that's roughly doubled since Reedsy transitioned from MNTN to Vibe.

About half of Reedsy’s budget goes towards prospecting campaigns to reach new customers they can’t on Google and Meta, and the other half is allocated towards running more targeted, successful  retargeting campaigns with Vibe