Hacks for Amazon Marketing Response
Hello and welcome back to my blog. Or if it’s your first visit, welcome! It’s good to have you. I’m Weston Kincade, fiction author. It’s nice to meet you.
Today I’ll be responding to friend and fellow fiction author Scott Rhine about our progress learning Amazon cost-per-click ads. His latest post, found here on his website, is titled Hacks for Amazon Ads. Just a warning, if you don’t like math, stats, ROI, and other assorted business acronyms, this might not be your cup of tea. However, if you want to see behind the curtains and learn about marketing books, read on!
Scott,
What if you died daily, only to live on as speaker for the dead? Read it today.
You are venturing down a rabbit hole I haven’t dealt much with by using Product-based targeting and Rest of Search. I mainly focus on keyword and category ads, but here are my responses based on your questions and observations.
Just based on my initial observations of your stats, I’d suggest lowering your CPC bid max pretty significantly. Consider this, when marketing anything online there is a certain amount of time and clicks it will take before you get a sale. When you know that number, you can figure out your average conversion rate (or CVR). Then you know approximately how many clicks it will take to make a sale and you can price your ads appropriately. If your average CPC is too high, you will almost always spend way too much to get a sale. Books have much less room to advertise because their overall cost is so low. This will slow down your clicks and sales, but that is okay. It’s much more manageable then and will spend slower. You just create more ads and evaluate them the same way for profit. Making more ads will start to add to your ad spend, but if the CPC is lower you will be spending much more wisely and should be making more on every dollar spent if your targeting and book’s sales page are up to par.
1. Product Pages Only… Or Not
Well like I said, you are venturing down a rabbit hole I can’t really weigh in on here. Aside from a few oddball tests I ran some time back, I have only used Product Category ads and Keyword ads, not Individual Product ads. However, your interest motivated me to investigate it. I am running some Individual Product ads right now using what I know. I’ll let you know what I discover. From what I understand currently, Individual Product ads work but can be expensive. It sounds like that 800% bonus you are doing may be supercharging the ad too much.
Before we jump the gun though, look at your actual sales. Amazon is horrible about reporting sales, and it doesn’t track pages read for books in Kindle Unlimited (KU) or KU orders. If you wonder how much you’ve made from KENP reads, try using BookReport. It’s free until you really start bringing in money. Then you have to upgrade. But it’s far more accurate than the Amazon dashboard. Amazon is also unveiling a beta version of a royalties and KENP dashboard. I don’t think it is available to everyone yet, but if you have a link at the top of your KDP Dashboard that says, “NEW! Try the new KDP Reports beta,” then you can click that link and try it out. It’s pretty accurate compared to Book Report, but I’m not sure how much I’d rely on it right now considering Amazon’s track record and that it’s in the beta stage, not when Book Report is available and accurate. I look forward to when Amazon’s dashboard gives everything you need accurately.
If you have already factored in your readthrough from KENP read for any book in KU, then try lowering the 800% supercharge or turning it off completely. The recommendation from other authors who are much more well versed in Amazon ads than me is to leave that for later until you master the other ad types. The same can be said about the new Lock Screen ads. I don’t think most people have figured out how to make them work affordably yet. You could be the one to do it, but I suggest mastering Keyword and Category ads first. What you learn will translate, but if you continue to venture down this rabbit hole, I am very curious about what you find.
2. Rest of Search
The Rest of Search options you mentioned have me a little confused. I’m not sure what you are referring to. Are you referring to the Campaign Bidding Strategy section? I generally leave that at Down Only just to be safe and to keep my costs low. When I am more confident with AMS ads and my keywords, I’ll venture into that more. You can certainly increase your bid for more action, like you did. It will get you sales, but in my experience they will generally cost more than you make. For Amazon ads, the best way to approach it in my experience is like farming or picking apples. You are trying to harvest as many good keywords as possible and pick the best to use in future ads. It’s a numbers game. You want as many profitable ads running as possible. Keep making new ads and finding new keywords that relate to your target audience.
3. Skipping Days Manually… Don’t
When I first began, I thought that too. There were a couple days a week that seemed not to produce. However, as time went on and I discovered how much about KU income wasn’t being reported, I found that there wasn’t a consistency between the days. I spoke with other authors too and asked them. It’s not certain days of the week, at least not so far as anyone I’ve talked to can tell. Any day can be a bad day of sales for some ads while others do really well. I have hundreds of ads running simultaneously. Bad days happen and there are a ton of variables. This is partly because of all the unreported KU income and the 48-72 hours it sometimes takes Amazon to accurately report sales.
Since I started using Book Report, I’ve found that many of those days that aren’t reporting sales are still showing spikes in KENPs read, more than what it should be from sales. There are KU orders happening all the time, which doesn’t make authors money; however, the pages read from them do. All of that adds up and can tell you whether your ad is really profitable.
Additionally, since I’ve delved deeper into Amazon ads over the last couple of years, I now see no connection to the days of the week. I see much more connection to holidays and specialty days like Black Friday. For instance, right after Christmas there is normally a small surge as people get Amazon gift cards as presents and begin scouring Amazon for their next reads. If you have ads running to the right keywords or products, you can benefit from it and get your books into more readers’ hands.
4. Manually Enabling on Key Days
As I mentioned in part 3, I don’t really see too much benefit to doing this, especially once you are running hundreds of ads. I can’t predict which days of the week will sell more books, and as long as my ads are continuing to be profitable overall, I don’t want to mess with them.
Unfortunately AMS ads can be very finicky. You want to mess with them as little as possible in my experience. For unknown reasons, they can suddenly stop working. If you think this has happened, check the impressions of that ad each day for a few days. If it is still getting impressions, it is still working. If not, when it happens you can sometimes fix it by making another change, like to the budget. Then wait and see if it starts getting impressions again over the next couple days. You have to give it a few days though, because the KDP dashboard doesn’t report impressions on days the campaign doesn’t get clicks. A change to the ad will sometimes get it going again, but generally I have to recreate the ad to get it working again.
If you are curious about learning more, I highly recommend best selling author Bryan Cohen’s AMS Ad School. It has proven really beneficial.
If you missed our earlier discussion about AMS ads, read it here. Also, if anyone has questions, feel free to leave them below.
