Anyone else seeing AA ACoS rising across the board?

[David VanDyke]

Anyone else seeing AA ACoS rising across the board?

Is the holiday season increasing competition and bid costs for clicks?

[Ghost5]

Yes, I believe they are rising.

I think holiday season is a factor. Oddly, I think it could also be down to Mark Dawson's ads course opening up and all the accompanying free webinars about Amazon ads that have people trying them out or tweaking their current ads.

I have no basis for thinking that--it's purely speculation.

[TimothyEllis]

Each time I do a new ad, I find the ACoS becomes worse, and the entire stats line becomes less and less useful.

I dont think it's any one factor. I think AMS is simply pricing itself out of reach now, and the stats just show how hard it is to get seen without bidding the farm.

Whole thing is a sick joke imo.

[Eric Thomson]

Yes.

I figure it's unrelenting upward pressure on CPC as Amazon's drive to maximize AMS profits is looking for the highest it can go without breaking the big advertizers' backs.

[TimothyEllis]

I figure it's unrelenting upward pressure on CPC as Amazon's drive to maximize AMS profits is looking for the highest it can go without breaking the big advertizers' backs.

And the little advertisers are already broken, so why would they care? A lot of the mid-list are already broken too.

I'm not running any ad at the moment, because I cant see it being worth while to do so. Costing me rank penalty, and seems to be impacting sales more than KU reads, but its been a good enough year I can afford to coast to the next launch.

[David VanDyke]

It seems like in the long run, oddly enough, this might be not so bad. Higher advertising costs, it seems, should drive heavy advertisers to raise their ebook prices. So, those who do not join the advertising stampede will be able to keep prices lower to compete, but prices should rise across the board, which might benefit all indie authors?

[Kevin Michael]

This is one of the weirdest falls since I began self-publishing (been in the game since 2010). 
I keep hearing the term pay-to-play being mentioned on podcasts.  It seems that with also-boughts being shuffled around everywhere that some of the veteran indie publishers believe organic visibility will be very difficult to come by. 
At the same time, trad pub usually goes crazy with ad spend this time of year. 
In addition, Amazon makes those tweaks to Amazon Advertising (still want to call it AMS) a few months ago, introducing the bid plus feature. 
Ever since then, I have noticed a steep rise in the cost of bids. 
Like David mentioned, the ACOS is getting worse.  To the point where AA almost doesn't seem worth it unless you have a really long series.
Part of me wants to put ads on hold until January or February in hopes that bids become cheaper. 
Another part of me worries that things are going to get worse. 

[Joseph Malik]

If I wasn't selling at $5.99, I'd have scuttled my AA campaigns at this point.

Most of my ACoS are above 50% and I have one campaign, for Book II, that's above 100% that I'm keeping going because the CTR is like 1/130. I have a handful of campaigns that are at ~30% ACoS, but they've been around for a long time and a couple of them haven't generated a sale (or a click!) in months. (You all export your ads into Excel every 30 days and compare/contrast/analyze, right?) These non-movers are weird; it's like a few months ago they just went into stasis, or something. About the time, I reckon, that Amazon introduced Bid+.

One other thing that's hanging me up is that, looking at the last two months of AA since my sequel went live, ads for Book II in my series appear to be resulting in sales of Book I. Book I sales are way up, and clicks on Book II are better than clicks on Book I, although the ACoS on Book II ads are far higher across the board.

I think people are clicking on the AA for Book II, seeing that it's a sequel, and buying Book I, and when they eventually go back and buy Book II, it's not from a click-through so I'm not seeing it reflected in the ACoS even though I effectively made two sales out of that click. I say this because the Book II ACoS is out of hand for nearly every campaign, but the ads as a percentage of monthly income are staying reasonable. For this reason, I'm continuing to run the ad for Book II that has the killer CTR even though the ACoS is over 100%.

ETA: All that said, looking at my numbers and doing some quick math, if I was selling at $2.99 or even $3.99, AA wouldn't be sustainable.

[TimothyEllis]

but the ads as a percentage of monthly income are staying reasonable.

That's the only think I look at now. Besides actual impressions.

If the monthly money is showing the ad is working, it's worth continuing. If not, stop.

With my last book being a relative flop, I've stopped until the next one comes out.

[ilamont]

Average ACoS for this month is the same as November 2017 (22%) but far higher than November 2016, when I was getting 13%. There is the seasonal factor driving up competition, but also far more people in general using AA, changes in the algorithm, and changes in policy (such as higher defaults and stricter guidelines) which raise costs and make it much harder to maintain long-term, successful campaigns, particularly for headline search/"sponsored brand" campaigns. I find myself now having to go in twice per week to shut down high-spending, low conversion keywords and campaigns, whereas in the past I was able to get by with only bimonthly adjustments.

What's happening in Amazon Advertising is similar to what happened in the early days of Google AdWords. For a few years it was great -- cheap CPCs made it possible to profitably advertise low-cost goods but those opportunities mostly disappeared by the early teens as more advertisers piled in and surfers learned to ignore them.
 

[notthatamanda]

I only started AA/AMS in November so I'm still feeling my way around.  One of the things I did on my latest ad was put one of my own books in there, just to see what the suggested bid was.  (Then I removed it before I launched the ad.)  It was 45 cents, which I thought was both flattering and ridiculous.   I always look over the suggested bid, but I learned a lesson, maybe the wrong one, on BB ads, and I just bid low, really low.  But maybe Amazon is slowly cranking up the suggested bids?

[David VanDyke]

If I wasn't selling at $5.99, I'd have scuttled my AA campaigns at this point.


ETA: All that said, looking at my numbers and doing some quick math, if I was selling at $2.99 or even $3.99, AA wouldn't be sustainable.

This reinforces my contention that there's a silver lining, and the situation may be good in the long run, if more authors and publishers come to this conclusion.

Ebooks are far cheaper in constant dollars than mass-market paperbacks were (new) twenty years ago. Good for the consumer, bad for publishers, a split decision for authors. Rising ebook prices, at least a slight trend in that direction (rather than the opposite) would be a good thing IMO. 

[Joe Vasicek]

It seems like in the long run, oddly enough, this might be not so bad. Higher advertising costs, it seems, should drive heavy advertisers to raise their ebook prices. So, those who do not join the advertising stampede will be able to keep prices lower to compete, but prices should rise across the board, which might benefit all indie authors?

I admire your optimism, sir.