Writer Sanctum
Writer's Haven => Marketing Loft [Public] => Topic started by: Hopscotch on September 11, 2020, 11:52:13 PM
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Face an AMS ads puzzle for which I’d appreciate some advice: For two series (war and Westerns), my Sponsored Products ads w/manual targeting and custom blurb sold books but failed to draw in reads. Shifted to auto target/standard (ie, no) blurb which cut my sales but ramped up reads. Any suggestions for how to combine the two in one or should I run both types of ads for the same series?
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Run both.
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I'm not in AMS anymore but if something is working, do both. Are you afraid you will be competing against yourself for bids?
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I'm not in AMS anymore but if something is working, do both. Are you afraid you will be competing against yourself for bids?
Yes, as it appears to produce a % of overlap and double-spending. But I'm ready to try and see what happens.
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Run both.
Effective Oct 1, that's what I'm doing, and thank you all for giving me the push I needed to act. Same time, I want to scale up my current ads which finally are producing a consistent (tho' embarrasingly low) level of sales and reads. Can't find good advice on scaling up, tho' - should I just throw money at AMS or?
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Never was able to find good advice or make it work to scale up on my own. Even with enormous budgets my ads only spent so much a day.
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I think I'll start an auto targeting AMS ad, too. Amazon has been refusing to spend my money this month.
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Just to clarify - I'm not doing AMS anymore but in 2019 into Jan 2020 I had budgets of $500/day or more. Usually spent less than $50, but it was profitable, especially the residual sales that were never linked to AMS. Then it just shut off. I don't know why. I was making money, Amazon was making money off my sales (I was not in KU). There is more to scaling up than adding money to the budgets or bids (I already bid slightly over recommended bids on everything). But I don't know what that something else is. I did research, even took one of AMS's free seminars on understanding the advertising model, but I couldn't figure it out.
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I run multiple AMS ads to one book, so don't worry about combining them.
IMHO, you should have
1 category ad (where Amazon chooses who to show it to, by genre category.)
1 auto target ad
1 group auto target ad, if you have a series
and 1 or more ads where you manually choose the targets
And ignore the suggested bid amounts. They're nuts. Stick to 40 cents or less.
Also, Bryan Cohen has a free Amazon Ads for Authors course. It's worth the time.
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DmGuay - Good advice, thank you!
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As soon as I hit Reply the info for the latest session of Bryan's class came into my feed! Here is the link, if you're interested. I had been running decent ads for a while when I took this. It was worth it. Good info on different ad types, bidding, ad copy, and tools for researching keywords.
https://bryancohen.lpages.co/amazon-ad-profit-challenge-landing-october-2020/ (https://bryancohen.lpages.co/amazon-ad-profit-challenge-landing-october-2020/)
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DM - Thank you very much for this.
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So far, my new auto targeting ad has been shown to exactly 53 customers, according to the Amazon ads spreadsheet. Not surprisingly, no clicks. It has a $15-a-day budget and I went ahead and accepted the suggested bid amount, too, but nada. On the good side (ha!), it has cost me nothing to get no results. Even assuming the ad reporting is three days behind, this is nowhere.
Meanwhile, my manually targeted ad has only delivered 5,281 views and 6 clicks on a $10-a-day budget. I can't say that I am thrilled with the performance of this ad, either. Women's fiction is not a confusing category to aim at, unlike, say, Gothic romance, which gets mixed up with "dark" romance and mafia romance and street, too on Amazon's pages.
I think I'll check out Bryan's ad challenge in case there's anything I missed. I've been running AMS ads for four years and they always used to deliver. A change in tactics appears called for.
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My approach is to set up the ads and over-bid a little, then wind back the bids until I'm still getting views and clicks, but not paying too much for them.
I don't know whether it's my genre, covers, blurbs, pricing or look inside, though, but I always have a hard time converting. To be fair I'm advertising all the books in all the series, and someone might click on book six then jump to book one and pick that up, which according to Amazon no longer shows up in the results.
Of course, with 6 or 7 series it's easy to get eaten to death by tons of small bites.
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As soon as I hit Reply the info for the latest session of Bryan's class came into my feed! Here is the link, if you're interested. I had been running decent ads for a while when I took this. It was worth it. Good info on different ad types, bidding, ad copy, and tools for researching keywords.
https://bryancohen.lpages.co/amazon-ad-profit-challenge-landing-october-2020/ (https://bryancohen.lpages.co/amazon-ad-profit-challenge-landing-october-2020/)
Thank you so much for posting this. I did the challenge and picked up quite a few tips.
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Still working my way through the information, but I did set up a bunch of Amazon category ads, which are new territory for me. I restarted the previous auto targeting ad, too. Fun and games.
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Thank you again, DM :littleclap - I audited Bryan's class this week and am trying all of his good ideas.
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I started the course a couple of days late so I began ads on the 16th and so far today is the fourth day with ZERO sales on Amazon and no free downloads of my first in series either. I was doing better with out them. :HB
I actually like doing ads so I'll hang in there a little longer, but I feel "universe hates me" discouraged occasionally.
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I am so thrilled you guys took the class. It helped me.
But don't get frustrated yet. I'd say it takes a week or two at least for the data to start trickling in.
AND, one of the best things I learned from that class is that MOST ads DON'T serve. That's why you keep creating more.
Let me also add that I took a second seminar with Bryan yesterday, and he said out loud what we all suspect. That Amazon sales and ads are in a slump right now because of the U.S. election. They will kick back up in mid November. He's the fourth "big name" author person I noticed has said that lately, so keep that in mind.
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In the past, I would do one or two ads max for a title and one would serve and the other would not. Apparently the hit ratio has dropped. At the same time, the fear that having two ads for a title at a time would jinx the second one seems to have abated. Bryan's opinion that 150 keywords are enough runs contrary to past wisdom, too. There's always something new to learn.
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Oh yes.
I didn't even know I could run a category ad until that class.
And, I used to be so scared of bleeding money that I would start 1 or 2 ads and set them at $2 or $3 a day. Gee. And I wonder why those ads didn't work. I'm glad those days are behind me!
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I am so thrilled you guys took the class. It helped me.
But don't get frustrated yet. I'd say it takes a week or two at least for the data to start trickling in.
AND, one of the best things I learned from that class is that MOST ads DON'T serve. That's why you keep creating more.
Let me also add that I took a second seminar with Bryan yesterday, and he said out loud what we all suspect. That Amazon sales and ads are in a slump right now because of the U.S. election. They will kick back up in mid November. He's the fourth "big name" author person I noticed has said that lately, so keep that in mind.
Thank you for reminding me. I was on the webinar yesterday too, but I forgot that. It was feeling like since I was willing to pay for ads the algos decided to drop me out of also boughts. I know, paranoid and I am not that important, but the thoughts were plaguing me.
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Amazon sales and ads are in a slump right now because of the U.S. election. They will kick back up in mid November.
Now you've given me another worry! After much AMS failure, just this month I managed to reach a consistent (low) daily level of sales/reads on which to build w/Bryan's guidance. If that's contrary to everyone else's experience, are you telling me when the pandemic's over I'm dead again??? :icon_cry:
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I'd say it means you'll be in better shape.
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Just set up a jillion Bryan ads and applied all your good advice. Looking forward to being rich and famous tomorrow. :icon_cool: But decided to sign up for his course just in case.
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I wrote myself a quick app to strip authors/titles from listopia lists. View source - ctrl+a - ctrl+c, then paste into the app and click Go. Done ;-)
Made half a dozen ads on the US and UK sites with relevant authors. I usually get lousy results with keywords ads (barely any impressions), but we'll see how they go.
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Didn't Bryan say something about how most of the keywords/ads will not be successful? So I think I will excel at that. But I feel like I have a plan now, rather than stabbing around in the dark with whatever keywords happen to be at the top of the charts (and therefore the hardest to get)
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Yep, that's true
I have one keywords ad created a few hours ago which has 1500 impressions and 5 clicks, but that's the only one of about 16 or so ads in the 4 digits.
To be fair, I'm only just getting the 'moderated' emails so it'll be interesting to see how they go over the next week or two.
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One thing that was encouraging was that I looked at the also boughts on a keyword that had been clicked on from a category ad. I always used the keywords that were clicked on in a category ad as a new keyword, but I never thought to look at those also boughts before. And they were very relevant.
On the other hand, I still haven't sold a book since the 17th. Two freebies yesterday. I don't expect the ads to work miracles but watching my sales dry up entirely is never fun.
I'm writing a lot of new hooks (and tracking them on a spreadsheet). Normally I like writing hooks but I am using his formula and they are far more blunt and I don't like them very much. :(
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I'm writing a lot of new hooks (and tracking them on a spreadsheet). Normally I like writing hooks but I am using his formula and they are far more blunt and I don't like them very much. :(
I may be mistaken, but got the impression that Bryan favors quantity over perfection - throw lots of ads out there regardless of the perfection of the copy and let the buyers tell you which sell and which don't, then write more like those. Everything is an experiment. Or did I misunderstand everything again? :HB
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I'm writing a lot of new hooks (and tracking them on a spreadsheet). Normally I like writing hooks but I am using his formula and they are far more blunt and I don't like them very much. :(
I may be mistaken, but got the impression that Bryan favors quantity over perfection - throw lots of ads out there regardless of the perfection of the copy and let the buyers tell you which sell and which don't, then write more like those. Everything is an experiment. Or did I misunderstand everything again? :HB
I think that's his idea. Only a couple of years ago we all were using hundreds of keywords for the targeted ads with the same concept: put them out there and see which ones hit and then pause the ones that don't. What an author thinks is relevant is not necessarily what a reader thinks is. The problem was and still is that we can't really know in advance what will be our best keywords; we can only discover them through trial and error.
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Off hand question:
Can you do AMS ads for the series page instead of specific books?
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Off hand question:
Can you do AMS ads for the series page instead of specific books?
I don't see series pages offered when I start an AMS ad, just the ebooks and paperbacks.
I think Bookbub/FB are your only recourse for those.
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I've done a multibook ad for one of my series. It included all the books in the series except Book 1, which is always being advertised. The idea was that these other books would get some impressions. It didn't seem to do much. Worth trying again?
I don't think that's the same as an ad for a series page as such.
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I am happy to compare notes, I have one multibook ad, for my three standalone romances. It has 3000 impressions and 5 clicks. Spent 99 cents so far. What I do with the automatic targeting ads is use the search term report to see what books the ad appeared on. These are the books the algos thought were most relevant. Then I save those titles and authors for a keyword targeting ad. I don't expect to sell a lot on this type of ad it is more for letting Amazon tell me what the best titles are. Same for category ads.
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I'm writing a lot of new hooks (and tracking them on a spreadsheet). Normally I like writing hooks but I am using his formula and they are far more blunt and I don't like them very much. :(
I may be mistaken, but got the impression that Bryan favors quantity over perfection - throw lots of ads out there regardless of the perfection of the copy and let the buyers tell you which sell and which don't, then write more like those. Everything is an experiment. Or did I misunderstand everything again? :HB
I agree with your assessment of his advice, I just like writing clever, snazzy or snappy copy. His method is very blunt so my creative side is sad but I am letting the business side have a go at it. And I am running one of my favorite copy (which also performed very well for me in the past) and we will see.
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Off hand question:
Can you do AMS ads for the series page instead of specific books?
I don't see series pages offered when I start an AMS ad, just the ebooks and paperbacks.
I think Bookbub/FB are your only recourse for those.
Slightly off topic - Kobo offers different series promos sometimes. Sorry Tim, I can't remember if you are full in on KU right now or not..
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Slightly off topic - Kobo offers different series promos sometimes. Sorry Tim, I can't remember if you are full in on KU right now or not..
Yes, all in KU. Only 2 books are not, because they can't be.
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I just checked the aussie product page for one of my own books, and there was a carousel with six pages of sponsored books underneath - all of them mine.
As someone said (Bryan?) it's better to fill your product pages with your own products than someone else's...
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I know nothing beyond the public face and books of Bryan, but it looks like almost everything Bryan has published is 'how to X' books. His few fiction books are co-authored and not doing very well. So... personally, if I were taking a course on AMS ads I'd take Mark Dawson's. He is actually making a substantial living publishing fiction books using the techniques he teaches.
(I don't know either personally and assume both are fine people. But if I'm going to learn how to do something I prefer the instructor either has done what he's teaching successfully or is currently doing it successfully. )
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A lot of it is common sense, but I picked up enough tips and pointers to make it worthwhile (watched the vids at 1.75x speed which helped)
I also find that watching a few videos on AMS ads gets me enthusiastic about putting in the effort, which is sometimes an issue for me. (Repetitive paperwork tasks, I mean.) Half the time I'm convinced I'm better off writing more books in the time I might spend herding hundreds of ads and thousands of keywords.
I've been checking my 7-day vs 30-day vs 90-day KU pageread averages in SalesScanner, and almost every 7 day average is in the green, whereas every single 30-day was in the red vs 90 day. So something's moving on the KU front even though sales numbers aren't really there.
I do like the idea of 2nd gen and 3rd gen ads using the best bits from the many scattergun ads we start out with.
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I also find that watching a few videos on AMS ads gets me enthusiastic about putting in the effort, which is sometimes an issue for me.
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So much...
Cheers,
R.C.
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A lot of it is common sense, but I picked up enough tips and pointers to make it worthwhile (watched the vids at 1.75x speed which helped)
I also find that watching a few videos on AMS ads gets me enthusiastic about putting in the effort, which is sometimes an issue for me. (Repetitive paperwork tasks, I mean.) Half the time I'm convinced I'm better off writing more books in the time I might spend herding hundreds of ads and thousands of keywords.
I've been checking my 7-day vs 30-day vs 90-day KU pageread averages in SalesScanner, and almost every 7 day average is in the green, whereas every single 30-day was in the red vs 90 day. So something's moving on the KU front even though sales numbers aren't really there.
I do like the idea of 2nd gen and 3rd gen ads using the best bits from the many scattergun ads we start out with.
It was worth the price (free) just for the second and third generation info and giving me the push to use spreadsheets. No more piles of post its!
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I knew nothing about the category ads previously. Most of the rest was not news to me, but it came at the right time, when I have a new book out that needs some attention, and when my other books' sales and reads need goosing. The 2nd and 3rd generation ads are an interesting idea, too. But there is a lot of churn involved, and I'd really rather "set it and forget it."
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I remember he said that if an ad stops working you should export the keywords and do another one. That it works better than copying it. For whatever reason, the algos aren't liking the longer running ads now. But it's good to know that there is a fairly quick way around it.
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I'll give all my new ads about 7 days to work. If they only have a handful of impressions by then I'll set up another with the exact same parameters and paste all the keywords in.
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I'm going to base the decisions on the number of clicks I get. Since I'm bidding low I'm prepared to wait a little longer. One book is already profitable, thanks to two sales I got off the bat and finally got another sale yesterday. (Whew) I know the romance book is going to take a long time to get enough impressions to get to 10 clicks since it's so competitive and hard to get impressions.
Not advocating anyone do anything in particular, just discussing.
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Not advocating anyone do anything in particular, just discussing.
Everything is worth hearing and I :littleclap the chance to hear it. After applying this thread's good advice and Bryan's teaching, I've begun to see a modest improvement in sales/reads. But I've been wandering in the sales desert so long I have to wonder, Who are these people crazy enough to buy my books?
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I just started 18 short-term category ads using Bryan's suggested budget, bid, and time span. I'm going to do a bunch more, because, why not? If 80% never work at all, this is not an expensive experiment. And the method is blessedly simple.
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Exactly. I already had a lot of ads running, with at least 6 different series to promote, plus a non-fic title and the box sets, times Auto/category/keywords AND the paperbacks.
It's just going to take some time to make 100 ads for each starter, paperback, box set, etc. Across 4 countries. (I'm not going to do any more for DE/FR/ES/IT)
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Luckily, I have only one title that has significant international appeal, so I've been ignoring all the additional ad venues except Amazon UK, where my (essentially second generation) keyword ad makes a profit.
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Thanks to the advice on how to title the ads I was able to see at a glance that hook 3 is my best bet right now.
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Something that only just dawned on me (duh) is that when I search for keywords using publisher rocket and it shows an estimated ~210 searches a month, that's only 7 per day for that particular keyword.
Combine 100 of those keywords in one ad, and 700 per day is the absolutel max *if* my ad shows to every single person who searches every single keyword/combo I'm using.
It's made me realise that some of my ads showing 500 impressions a day are actually doing far better than I thought. And that ads showing 100 per day are not necessarily terrible, that's just how the figures work out.
Also, that there's no point increasing bids on any of those ads, because I'm already getting all the hits I'm likely to.
So that leaves a choice - widen the keywords to include authors, books and search terms which are only barely related to my stuff, or keep searching for more and more obscure but relevant terms.
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Maybe Listopia lists at Goodreads would be have some older books that were really relevant.
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Yep, I'm using Listopia.
I think my biggest problem is that four of my series are in the SF Humour and Fantasy Humour categories, and there's a very limited number of targets. A couple of trad pubbed authors (Douglas Adams and Pratchett), a small number of midlist trad-pubbed authors, and another handful of indies who mostly sell at or below my current level.
The other two series (Gaslamp Fantasy and Space Opera) only have 2 books each, although I do have the third for each in the planning stages. I've not wanted to advertise those heavily until I've got the three books - or release dates, at least.
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You're gonna need a lotta patience then.
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Agreed. I came up with a killer plot for the third gaslamp novel and now I want to start on that one, but I have this other book to finish first ;-) December task, I guess...
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Useful new vid. Also contains a counter-argument for the 'hundreds of AMS ads theory'
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Useful new vid. Also contains a counter-argument for the 'hundreds of AMS ads theory'
I have watched several of David Gaughran's presentations. I always come away with new ideas and thoughts about how to improve my marketing skills.
Cheers,
R.C.
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DG is always worth listening to, and I'm glad he cut his weird beard!
When I first started doing AMS ads four years ago, I was grateful merely to get impressions. Soon, I got sales and reads, and until very recently, with various ups and downs, that has held true. My oldest ad still is reliably profitable for a very small monthly cost.
However, my recent situation of direly dropping sales and reads made me realize I had to DO SOMETHING. So far, having created over 30 category ads and a few more keyword ads (with more planned) is successful. I'm getting more impressions again, and I had my best day yesterday in months for both sales and reads. The ad cost was minimal. It's an experiment with an end date, so I'm not risking a lot.
I prefer Amazon ads to one-time ads on deal newsletters. I prefer to sell my books at full price instead of perpetually discounting them.
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I'm running ads for a friend of mine, who has a new release (YA paranormal fantasy.) I've set up US and AUS ads (she's Australian), and now I've done the UK ones. Will do CA as well shortly.
So far I've set up three campaigns in each country, one with relevant categories, another with a bunch of search terms like "YA Paranormal Fantasy", and a third targeting the names of authors of similar works.
I've managed to spend a whole 32c so far, but her page reads are increasing steadily.
My goal is simple: earn her US$3 per day net profit. To do that I've got to keep a lid on ad spend and monitor everything even more closely than I do with my own stuff.
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I'm running ads for a friend of mine, who has a new release (YA paranormal fantasy.) I've set up US and AUS ads (she's Australian), and now I've done the UK ones. Will do CA as well shortly.
So far I've set up three campaigns in each country, one with relevant categories, another with a bunch of search terms like "YA Paranormal Fantasy", and a third targeting the names of authors of similar works.
I've managed to spend a whole 32c so far, but her page reads are increasing steadily.
My goal is simple: earn her US$3 per day net profit. To do that I've got to keep a lid on ad spend and monitor everything even more closely than I do with my own stuff.
I don't think I have the attention span to do that! :hehe
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Well, she's my closest friend and it's her first published novel AND I'm the one who convinced her to climb down into this well of sorrows we call a writing career in the first place, so...
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...climb down into this well of sorrows...
Words from a writer.
Cheers,
R.C.
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Over the past couple of weeks I've modified a few long-running, inefficient ads, and I've started up a bunch of new ones.
I'm definitely seeing a trend emerging, and it's a positive one. Nothing spectacular, but I'll take slow growth over the opposite.
This is a chart of pagereads over the past ~20 days. First few bars are my earlier ads, then a few smaller bars where I wasn't running anything, then the second half of the chart with the climbing average (light blue bar)
Ignore the bar far-right, as that's today (incomplete.)
More importantly, sales ranks are improving too, which means borrows not yet showing up in the pagereads.
(Chart from SalesScanner).
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That looks good.
As for my new ads, there's some action resulting, but nothing like a dramatic leap. My overall best seller for the month is my super niche nonfiction title that just keeps chugging along without any tweaking of the same ad I've been running for four years.
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Yep, nothing dramatic, but then again if I wanted dramatic and exciting I could bid $4 per keyword ;-)
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Glad you are having some good results. My sales are still in the pit. 4 of one book since I started ads, none on the other. I'm hoping it's the Big Vote next week that is putting people off getting books. Thinking about applying to Kobo's black Friday sale and also lowering the price on Amazon to give ads a kick in the pants come end of November.
In good news, my mailing list tripled over the past two weeks. From 1 to 3 subscribers! :dance:
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...My sales are still in the pit... I'm hoping it's the Big Vote next week that is putting people off getting books...give ads a kick in the pants come end of November.
I was just about to post a whine titled: "Is anyone else seeing poor results?"
It looks like people are "hunkering down with their disposable income" because of the Rona roaring at full-steam, again, here in the USofA.
FYI - Read a story this am that argued well: Meat prices will double over the next few months. If it comes down to food or books, books will lose every time.
Also, This is correlated to the above but the above is but not, necessarily, causal. I have been running one-day give-away promos, twice a week, for a couple weeks. HUNDREDS of downloads but very, like very, few follow-on buys.
Cheers,
R.C.
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Yeah, my sales have been dire in the US - I'm doing better in the UK right now. (I was born in the UK but live in Australia, and have always believed my writing to have a much more British flavour than anything else. In the UK they love the underdog loser who keeps making things worse for himself - Mr Bean, Basil Fawlty, David Brent UK edition - whereas in the US that type of character doesn't seem to appeal quite as much. I know I'm over-generalising re the US, but in the UK those characters are baked into the national identity. In Australia it's more the rough, lovable larrikin, which is not what I write at all.)
Anyway, I guess if people already have a KU subscription they don't have to choose between food and books, but I was wondering yesterday how many people might cancel streaming services and the like if things are really biting.
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Thanks and thanks to RC to for letting me know I am not alone with the sales in the dumpster.
Simon - I got an email from Amazon about Silver Enigma, put it on my calendar to order on 11/30.
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Thanks, I just got the email too. (I don't know who suggested authors subscribe to their own amazon author page, but it's a smart move.)
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I never got one on my latest preorder and I am following myself. Maybe it went into spam, but I'm not digging through that folder. :)
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Same here. Just checked and I am following myself, too. No email regarding my last two book releases.
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Maybe they know I'm a looky-loo who never buys.
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I always buy my own stuff. I'm probably my best customer.
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I used to buy my own books upon release to double check that everything looked all right. These days I ought to remember to buy them when I run a discount--but often I don't remember. :doh:
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I always buy my own stuff. I'm probably my best customer.
Now, that made me laugh.
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Since a lot of people are talking about a dip in sales, I'm heartened to report that the second half of October was much better for my books. I am on track to double my Amazon payout from what it had sunk to a couple of months ago (the payment that we got this week). Not great, but certainly less tragic. I ascribe this to having launched several dozen Amazon category ads in addition to a few auto ads and fine tuning a keyword ad.
Or maybe that goat sacrifice worked. grint
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The last two days have seen my royalties double the 3 week average. Page counts still creeping up. Ad spend still modest but increasing. (15-20% of royalties the past 2 days, but I'd take that given the increase.)
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Or maybe that goat sacrifice worked. grint
I am considering calling forth the wraith...
Cheers,
R.C.
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The two sales AMS is crediting to itself showed up immediately. I've yet to have a sale show up later. Anybody have a similar or the opposite experience.
Lily & Simon - warm congratulations on your results. :pdt :pdt
I'm wondering if I should try some ads in the UK this week as people may be less distracted there by other events as opposed to the US right now.
Also I'm wondering if both my psych thriller and WWII book blurbs are turning people off because they don't exactly indicate happy endings. Not sure that's what people want right now. Maybe I should concentrate on the romances.
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October was my best month so far - sales up 60% - w/most of that increase from the point at which I began applying Bryan's ideas. Reads barely increased, tho'. My herd of sacrificial goats is about to be -1.
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I always buy my own stuff. I'm probably my best customer.
:icon_rofl:
That line belongs in one of your books. :icon_mrgreen:
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Back when I was trad-pubbed I walked into a bookstore on my holidays, and there were three copies of my novel on the shelf, spine-out. There was a big fat Peter F. Hamilton book hogging a load of space, so I bought that one and it left enough room to turn my books face-out...
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Back when I was trad-pubbed I walked into a bookstore on my holidays, and there were three copies of my novel on the shelf, spine-out. There was a big fat Peter F. Hamilton book hogging a load of space, so I bought that one and it left enough room to turn my books face-out...
:ices_angel_g:
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Tried to create a UK ad, hit submit and went to fix breakfast. An hour later it was still processing so killed it. :(
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I just created a UK ad and it went through. On the other hand, I had a long delay whilst refreshing the KDP dashboard.
I've just boosted the bids on a few keywords, testing to see where that puts me on the carousel. On the UK site I went from page 19 to 2.
I don't know... one of my books has been around since 2011, and was permafree for 7 years or more. During that time the also-boughts must have accumulated gawd knows what, and I suspect Amazon has a low 'relevancy' score for that title when I try to advertise on other SF Humour titles.
I'm also wondering whether KDP categories have an impact on ad visibility. E.g. that title is in Parodies and Satire amongst others (Hitchhiker's is in both) but if the books I'm targeting are not, does that reduce the visibility of my ad?
I recall that a high bid alone won't move you up the carousel, because Amazon gives preference to books it thinks are a better fit. You can take a sledgehammer to this by bidding wild amounts, of course, but that could get expensive.
The only thing is, I KNOW my book is relevant to those targets, so I'm hoping bidding high and getting clicks will retrain the amazon ad system, so that it will see my book as more relevant over time.
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I recall that a high bid alone won't move you up the carousel, because Amazon gives preference to books it thinks are a better fit. You can take a sledgehammer to this by bidding wild amounts, of course, but that could get expensive.
The only thing is, I KNOW my book is relevant to those targets, so I'm hoping bidding high and getting clicks will retrain the amazon ad system, so that it will see my book as more relevant over time.
Relevance is EVERYTHING in the algo right now.
Here's an example...
(https://i.imgur.com/CCn3yZ1.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/jZHK0jT.png)
* click the images to enlarge for easier readability
This is a single keyword.
The key isn't just whether your book is relevant to a target. It's whether Amazon believes it's relevant to a target. There are many things you can do to "juice" relevancy.
The reward is being able to lock down the top spots both in search and the ad carousel for pennies when everyone else is going broke paying five, six, or seven times as much for the same visibility.
This is one of the core reasons I do well with Amazon ads.
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Great results, congrats.
That's exactly what I meant in one (or two) handy images. Half my books are clearly humorous scifi, but I've been having trouble getting them to show on humorous scifi product pages. I'm trying to retrain Amazon for that very reason.
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When I started in AMS I watched some videos by Cheri Yvette. She explained it as a feedback loop. Getting clicks on something is a plus for the feedback loop. Getting a sale another plus. Having a book that's priced over $9 means Amazon makes more on each sale, which I believe to be a big plus in the feedback column. When an ad is doing well it makes sense that it gets more placement. The one thing I was never able to wrap my brain around was why Amazon would just cut off ads that were doing well. The only advice I've ever seen in that case was to start the ad again.
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Well, look at the UK contact tracking system, where they were using an old Excel spreadsheet and it was throwing away anything after row 65535. (Max number you can store in a 16-bit unsigned integer.) All the names they were supposed to follow up just vanished every time they added more.
Computers are literal, and humans are not. Getting one to program the other is asking for trouble.
For example, humans often think 'up to 100' might include the number 100, but to a computer ... nah. Or maybe books with an odd-numbered ASIN are sorted down the bottom of the table when the code serving up the product page is deciding which of 10,000 competing ads to show. Who knows?
In two years of trying I've never had a really successful AMS ad. I've tried with 7-8 different series across the same number of genres, with 99c books, full price books, freebies, you name it.
I suspect the 4 years I spent between 2014-2018 where I published nothing and sold even less might have left a black-hole sized drag on my 'relativity' as an author.
I've never sat down and thrown wads of cash at AMS, trying to kick-start things, because I'm a frugal type and as long as I've got enough to live on I don't really care about anything else.
But on an intellectual level, as a computer programmer with all the custom software, spreadsheets and info I need to make and track ads*, I'm annoyed that I can't get everything to click. I mean, I have eight different series starters I can advertise, with a backlist of 29 full-priced books. If I can't make AMS work, what hope does my friend have when she's starting with one 2.99 book and a budget of about $10/week?
* I'm planning on modifying SalesScanner so it will import the AMS reports and show the ad spend next to each book in the royalties/income tabs. That way I can see if I'm spending too much on something which isn't selling, and not enough on something else which is.
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I published in 2014 and didn't try AMS until 2019. I was able to get lots of sales, great placement, profitability, until something big changed in Feb 2020. When I started I went in bidding just over suggested, but rarely paid near that for a bid. I just didn't convert to sales nearly as much as Anarchist so ads were ate a bigger percentage of my profit, but I was happy. Would have been thrilled to scale it up, but couldn't figure that out. Then it just crashed.
I think you're in smaller genres and keeping the ads going, keeping the books in the top 100 for extra free visibility will work, but it may have a lower upper limit for sales just because they are smaller genres.
I am also just thinking right now is a crappy time to be starting ads if you aren't in KU because people are worried about the near term future in so many ways and their subscription is already paid for. I'm not in KU so that affects me, can't remember if you are full in on KU or not. I am profitable so far, and the psych thriller sales are covering the small number of clicks the WWII book is getting so I'm going to keep experimenting. It keeps me off other, more upsetting, parts of the internet anyway.
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Yes, I'm fully in KU.
I've been running Bookbub ads on the side, almost entirely for a freebie to date but yesterday I fired up a couple of ads for a 2.99 series starter. (Ad mentions the 10 books are in KU)
I think I'm too focused on seeing 'this ad got that result', rather than just spending on ads and 'as long as it's costing less than 25% of my royalties, stick with it'.
As someone said, if your ads are targeted to the right books and authors and people are clicking them, the sales will flow (or the books are just not up to par...)
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Day before yesterday I tripled my bids on certain keywords (authors and books which are almost precise matches for my own stuff.) These are my 2nd generation ads, so they've already proven themselves.
I'm seeing an impact, as you can imagine.
But more importantly I'm using the 'popularity' charts on Amazon to track the ranking of a couple of my books. These lists influence amazon recommendations according to David Gaughran, and so they're worth a look. (Nothing to do with sales rank numbers.) Thus, far more important than bestseller charts.
Yesterday the two books were on page 13 of my category, and today they've moved up to 12. My goal is to get them onto the first page, but apparently these lists move like treacle, smoothing out one-day-bursts of sales.
Riddle in Bronze is on page 7 of gaslamp fantasy. You can save a link to the exact page, so it's easy to come back later and note any movements.
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What do you mean by popularity charts? How do you get to them? Thanks.
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(Jump to the 13 min mark)
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Oh okay, got it. I always got to the popularity list and click on a book to find the bestsellers in the category. Just didn't know that's what it was. Thanks. And congratulations on your results.
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I'm setting up more ads with hand-picked ASIN targets now - culled from also-boughts and earlier ads.
By the way, my reports page on AMS US just comes up blank now, no matter how many times I refresh it. All other countries working, and the same page works for my friend's ad account. I've reported it, but it's annoying because I can't access my valuable reports.
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(Jump to the 13 min mark)
Never heard of it, and can't find it.
Without seeing screen images or a vid of doing it, none of what he said made any sense.
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Here you go.
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Oh okay, got it. I always got to the popularity list and click on a book to find the bestsellers in the category. Just didn't know that's what it was. Thanks. And congratulations on your results.
The point is, it's not bestsellers. It's more like 'what amazon is most likely to recommend in that category'. If you watch the whole vid he explains it very well.
Completely separate from the top 100 lists.
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Oh okay, got it. I always got to the popularity list and click on a book to find the bestsellers in the category. Just didn't know that's what it was. Thanks. And congratulations on your results.
The point is, it's not bestsellers. It's more like 'what amazon is most likely to recommend in that category'.
I'm not entirely sure that is useful at all.
What Amazon recommends is person specific.
For me, most of those links were empty. And the reason I suspect is, my reading is so focused that there is nothing for them to recommend to me in most categories.
There wasn't even a Space Opera category, so it couldn't recommend anything I do read.
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I didn't mean recommend to the person viewing the list, I meant recommendations in that category.
I just went to the Space Opera list and there are over 30,000 books
Found Midshipman Spacemage on page 18 and Ensign on 19:
[link removed because useless]
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I just went to the Space Opera list and there are over 30,000 books
There were only 3 categories under Science Fiction, and Space Opera wasn't one of them.
I'm obviously not getting what you are.
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Yep, that's why I've been showing people how to get to the right place and sharing vids instead of a link. To me the link looks like it contains a ton of tracking gumph, probably related to me.
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In the new-style Author Central you can view a list of all your books at once, and they're sorted by popularity (not sales rank.)
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In the new-style Author Central you can view a list of all your books at once, and they're sorted by popularity (not sales rank.)
I don't have it yet. Either.
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Make sure you go to the main Author Central page, not the sub-tabs. Click the icon top-left on the AC page if you're not sure. That's when the invite to try the new system showed up.
Quick tip: if you bookmark the Author Page tab or the Sales Rank tab under the old system you can still use the old system after changing to the new one.
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Looked at it. It's not particularly useful visually but the real question is would changes made in Author Central show up on the book pages in the Amazon store, or would those edits be useless?
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Okay, so I've been upping the bids on more of my dormant ads, because when I view the carousel on product pages for my target ASINs I've been showing up on page 19+ ... which is next to useless in my opinion.
By the way, I ran a Facebook campaign on a 99c box set and got about 30 clicks and five sales. They were expensive too - I used to pay about 9-12c, this time I couldn't get below 35c. So I'll skip FB for the time being.
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Okay, so I've been upping the bids on more of my dormant ads, because when I view the carousel on product pages for my target ASINs I've been showing up on page 19+ ... which is next to useless in my opinion.
I don't think I agree on that.
When you're going for the quality of the click, anyone who's reached page 19 on the slider is genuinely looking for something to read, and if they click through to your book, there is a higher chance they will buy it or KU read it. (And yes, when I'm actively looking for a new read, I do go through the entire slider. Although I do also-boughts first)
The front page might be high visibility, but it attracts a high proportion of curiosity clicks, where page 19 gets only serious interest. Curiosity has a lot lower conversion rate than serious dogged check the whole slider action.
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That makes sense, yes. The only argument I have against it is that I've adopted the 'bid low' strategy for the past 2 years (and still have one ad which has been running all that time), and no ad of mine has ever done particularly well. By that I mean gaining lots of clicks rather than impressions and no clicks. (I ignore sales/page reads on the AMS dash)
So, just for a change I'm going to try bidding higher to try and appear on pages 2-4. (Not daft enough to try and outbid everyone)
If it works, Amazon may promote my ads to the first page thanks to relevance, and I'll be able to reduce the bids.
I'm experimenting with only two of my series starters: Hal book 1, and A Riddle in Bronze.
Hal because it's a ten book series, and I can afford to eat higher bids.
Riddle because the first book has been well received (review wise) and book 2 is finished and up now for preorder. I'm just knocking out a short scifi novel and then I'm going to write book three, so the timing is good.
My 3-4 other series I'll continue to run with lower bids for comparison.
I've also created two campaigns on two different marketplaces where I've set up four split ad sets within those campaign, with the same keywords and bids, but one with Broad and the other with Phrase.
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More like that would be nice...
(Not related to my recently increased bids.)
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What are you actually paying versus the bid? That may be a good sign of relevance. I don't know whether or not people who get to page 19 of the carousel are buyers or browsers, but I do remember when the romance carousel was 100+ pages and when you tried to page through it locked up around page 48 or so, so no one was seeing those placements.
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What are you actually paying versus the bid? That may be a good sign of relevance. I don't know whether or not people who get to page 19 of the carousel are buyers or browsers, but I do remember when the romance carousel was 100+ pages and when you tried to page through it locked up around page 48 or so, so no one was seeing those placements.
It still locks up on page 48, and you have to refresh the web page to view from there onwards.
With a bid of 1.21 on a particular author I paid 1.01, but it's only the one click and 48 impressions on that keyword on that day.
I'm bidding the same on another popular indie author in the exact same genre as me, and I've only had 14 impressions in a week (much of it at a lower price, but even so.) It's just not showing. We have books in each other's also-boughts too. That's why I'm boosting the bids.
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Just made myself a new tool. It watches the clipboard, and every time you copy a URL it extracts the ASIN and adds it to a list. Once you have enough you can copy the list to the clipboard and paste the ASINs into a new AMS ad.
You can also open the most recent ASIN's product page on Amazon US or UK, to gather more ASINs.
(It doesn't break any T&C of the Amazon website, because it only reads the local clipboard. You have to manually right-click a link in your browser and copy it to the clipboard, at which point it's read to the program.)
It's really handy for quickly making lists of ASINS from also-boughts, sponsored ads, series lists and the like.
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I've been struggling to get enough keywords to start another ad this week on my psych thriller because all my alsoboughts on clicks are pointing back to books and authors I've already used. I think yesterday I got maybe 4 new books off of an also bought list that had 20 pages. Patience is not my forte.
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Re gathering keywords, have you tried targeting the people advertising on your book pages? Anything that looks like a match, but without clicking on them of course (I know you don't). That's partly why I wrote this new tool, so I can get the asin/store page from the sponsored link without clicking it.
Have you ever set up ads with ASINs? I like them because they're targeted to that one book, but I think they're harder to get going somehow.
On a related note, it's not clear to me whether having a bunch of different, conflicting ads for the same book is a major disadvantage. For example, if I have a bunch of AMS ads for the same book, including...
1 categories ad (e.g. Humourous Science Fiction)
1 keywords ad (book titles - e.g. Hitchhiker's Guide)
1 asin ad (specific asins (some ASIN for HHG)
1 keywords ad (author names - e.g. Douglas Adams)
1 search terms ad ('science fiction humor' for example)
1 keywords ad (broader terms like Douglas Adams Books)
Now, one product on amazon will match all those at once, so which of my ads does AMS show there? The one with the highest bid? Or does it pick the first matching ad of mine, which might have the lowest bid of the lot, not even checking the other ads?
The only way to be sure would be to turn off all conflicting ads, but I don't want to do that because chances are they'll never fire up again.
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I've been struggling to get enough keywords to start another ad this week on my psych thriller because all my alsoboughts on clicks are pointing back to books and authors I've already used. I think yesterday I got maybe 4 new books off of an also bought list that had 20 pages. Patience is not my forte.
Do you have publisher rocket?
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I liked your idea about looking at the sponsored products for my book page. The algos must be picking those and thinking they are the most relevant. Nobody's bidding on my name or book name. (For giggles next time I start an ad I'll see what my name is going for. Grossly overpriced I'm sure.)
I tried KDP Rocket once, is that different from publisher rocket? I didn't get it. I thought it would spit out keywords for you. It gave you a lot of good info, but you basically had to check the keywords for the right combo of criteria and in the couple of weeks I used it, I didn't find a one that was actively searched on, actively bought on and not actively bid on. Or something, I don't really remember the exact criteria.
It's okay. I am really taking it slow this time. I have passed 100 clicks on one book and it's am profitable. The WWII book is only 16 clicks and no sales, but the other book is doing well enough to cover some experimentation. I don't expect to move into Generation 2 ads until 2021, which can't get here fast enough, but not because of ads.
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KDP rocket was renamed because trademark, I'm guessing. I use it only for keywords on my product pages, not so much ads.
I just paused all my Auto and Category ads. The latter have the most impressions by far, but a terrible CTR (0.02 or something). Figured that might go into some amazon cauldron 'o' numbers which then weighs against my books across all ads (hey, I'll keep reaching for reasons...
As for auto, I suspect they show all over the place (soap powder, you name it.) Again lots of impressions but not much in the way of results.
So, for the time being ALL my ads are keyword or ASIN ads only.
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I run the search report daily to see where they are putting my ads. I've only ever had one truly weird one, but I don't remember what it was. The category ads always sold the most books for me in 2019 but they were costly. They were a great source of keywords.
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I still can't get to my reports page on the US site.
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Oh crap, what happens when you try that?
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It just shows a spinning circle, which vanishes leaving an empty page.
I tried 3 different browsers, and just to confirm it was my account I signed into my friend's AMS on the same PC and her report page came up.
I've had a thought though - I had it emailing me reports a couple of weeks back, and they have direct links in. Maybe that will work.
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I still can't get to my reports page on the US site.
Working AMS without the reports is like firing a Barrett M82 without a scope.
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I just paused all my Auto and Category ads. The latter have the most impressions by far, but a terrible CTR (0.02 or something). Figured that might go into some amazon cauldron 'o' numbers which then weighs against my books across all ads (hey, I'll keep reaching for reasons...
As for auto, I suspect they show all over the place (soap powder, you name it.) Again lots of impressions but not much in the way of results.
So, for the time being ALL my ads are keyword or ASIN ads only.
One note about pausing your Auto ads. I keep one auto ad and create negative keywords for anything in my also boughts that isn't a good fit. Those books usually fall out of the also boughts after a few months. While the relevant books stay.
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That's a good idea, thanks
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I still can't get to my reports page on the US site.
Working AMS without the reports is like firing a Barrett M82 without a scope.
I managed to copy the Create Report URL from the canadian AA page, and switch out the EntityId for the one from my US account. Now I can create new reports and run them, although I can't get to anything else on the reports page. But at least I can do something.
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Amazon ads are so strange, and yet they can be encouraging because they can show that something is happening.
One of my category ads has had 75k impressions, which cost under $3. That's a thrill, and yet it's the same terrible CTR you mentioned, Simon, 0.02%. The other eight category ads I have for that title haven't even topped 1,200 impressions combined. The keyword ad I'm running for that title has 64k impressions and cost a whopping $37 before I adjusted some way overpriced keywords copied from another of my ads. It has spent only a dollar in the past week since then, which frankly isn't good. And the auto ad for that same title has stalled at 679 impressions and hasn't moved at all in many days. All but the keyword ad are scheduled to end in two weeks. Long enough for an experiment, but what did I learn? Out of nine category ads, I got 15 clicks total. None for the auto ad. The keyword ad got 62 clicks but barely converted. I'm too embarrassed to mention the low number. :icon_redface:
Maybe I'm one indie who ought to invest in having others write my ad and blurb copy for them.
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I don't use ad copy in most of mine - I just run the ads without. (Can't have ad copy anywhere but the US anyway)
I'm leaning heavily towards ASIN targeting now. I've done this a lot before, but it seems I never bid high enough to get the impressions in the first place.
One of my ASIN ads has a CTR of 1% over the past 7 days, with 1600 impressions and 16 clicks. That ad is laser-focused on books in my genre.
Another has a CTR of 0.23 but it's a very new ad - not much data to go on.
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By the way, if you want to try my Asin Extractor (I decided against 'Asinator') I can always put a zip file up. It's a simple program with no need for installation or anything, but bear in mind it is Windows 7 or later.
I'm not looking to share it more widely at this stage, because it's pretty specialised. It does a pretty good job though, and I've found it really useful for picking out similar-sounding/looking books to mine (you can also right-click on amazon cover thumbnails. It specifically looks for /B0 in the URL, which for now is the start of all ASINs.)
Screenshot below. It's not pretty but it works ;-)
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Bryan's tip for ad copy.
1 - what the character wants
2 - what's in their way
3 - what's the worst that can happen if they don't get what they want
I like writing clever copy but the sledge hammer hook is working better.
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I still can't get to my reports page on the US site.
Working AMS without the reports is like firing a Barrett M82 without a scope.
I managed to copy the Create Report URL from the canadian AA page, and switch out the EntityId for the one from my US account. Now I can create new reports and run them, although I can't get to anything else on the reports page. But at least I can do something.
At least that's something. But man, that situation seems infuriating.
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By the way, if you want to try my Asin Extractor (I decided against 'Asinator') I can always put a zip file up.
I actually read it as Asian Extractor. Gave me a chuckle. Then, I saw your "Asinator" and laughed again.
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Asinine Extractor (because you shouldn't need to do this.)
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Asinilator.
Because resistance is futile.
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Okay, so a lot of my bids are quite high now.
Two days ago I was paying 61c average per click. Yesterday it was 56c average. Today (so far, early figures) it's 51c. (These are the actual amounts, not bids).
The impressions/clicks/ctr were similar for the 5th and the 6th November, with only the average dropping. Today's CTR is a shade better than both.
Makes me wonder if the 'zon bidding is like FB, where the price starts high but falls dramatically as the ad serves and the system begins to get feedback in terms of response.
I'm not giving much away by revealing these figures, because I'm running ads for 8 different series across 7 genres - and non-fic as well. I'm just sharing the fact the bids appear to be coming down. Perhaps the targeting is improving the relevance, which is good news.
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...
Makes me wonder if the 'zon bidding is like FB, where the price starts high but falls dramatically as the ad serves and the system begins to get feedback in terms of response.
...
Emphasis added.
Anecdotally, my recent experience supports the hypothesis. When I noticed the drop in CPC, I tweaked the CPC amount (lower) and lost momentum. I raised it back, response re-started. The CPC seems to always start high, then lower slowly.
The key to all this is the adverb: slowly.
Also, yes, AMS feels a lot more like FB now than I would prefer...
Cheers,
R.C.
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On AA UK they've added a new feature. You can look at your search terms for a particular campaign, then select some or all and automatically add them to the campaign search terms.
However, when I clicked 'more info' I came across a rather interesting paragraph:
"Note: In the customer search term column of the report, you may notice alphanumeric entries such as “b00ipgvvz4” in addition to more traditional search terms such as “phone case”. These alphanumeric entries correspond to ASINs and the related product detail page on which your ad displayed. You will only see ASIN-related entries listed as customer search terms for your automatic-targeted campaigns. You cannot block ASINs through negative keywords, or bid for ASINs in manually-targeted campaigns."
Bolding is mine.
I'm puzzled because I have ads which are exclusively targeting ASINs. Out of 36 ads I'm running right now, one of my ASIN-only ads is #5 in terms of impressions.
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In fact, that has to be nonsense because you can enter ASINs when setting up a manual search and it shows the product (title, etc) down the bottom after adding each one.
It also shows asin="ABCWHATEVER" in the 'product target' lists.
Left hand, meet right hand?
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Left hand, meet right hand?
Both not only don't know what the other is doing, but they also don't know what the gripping hand is doing. grint
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Maybe ASINs only work in the bookstore. After all, a lot of people sell socks and jocks using AA, and they wouldn't have the KENP column for a start. Shared help system, I'm guessing.
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Shared help system, I'm guessing.
Help system written by a different department. And no-one checking how accurate it is elsewhere.
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Maybe they meant manually targeted keyword list versus manually targeted pick a product?
Some holdover explanation from when the system wasn't designed or used for books?
Are ASIN always alphanumeric, versus a pure number? The search term report gives alphanumeric hits and pure numbers. You can find the book easy enough by plopping it into an Amazon search but I always wondered why.
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You can use a paperback book's ISBN (all numbers) - that's what I've just done with a bunch of books for a paperpack ad I set up.
When you create a manually-targeted campaign you can choose keywords or product targeting. Choose the latter and you pick categories or asins (a different tab for each) and you can mix them within the same ad group.
If you choose Asins, it's not like entering keywords. Every ASIN you add shows the matching product down the bottom of the page, meaning the ad engine goes off to find the product and then displays the title so you know what you're looking at.
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Yesterday ended up at 52c average per click. Today, so far, it's 45c. I've actually increased a few bids.
So for the past 4 days it's been 61, 56, 52, 45. Same ads, and the spending and click count are within 20% of each other - excluding today which is only half way through.
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It will be interesting to see if it keeps going down.
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Actually it just went the other way, but it's skewed by a couple of higher CPC on the ads I recently added more ASINs to.
But both of those clicks have KENPC beside them, and there on book 1 of my 10 book series so I'm not fussed.
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I've been looking into the "Campaign bidding strategy" on a few of my AMS ads. I usually can't decide between 'Dynamic bids - down only' and 'Fixed Bids', preferring the former. (Sounds like a money-saver.)
At times I've run all my ads one or the other.
Anyway, when you read their help (I know, I know), it says that their bid adjustments are based on ACOS, of all things. So, if you have lousy ACOS for a particular keyword/target, it will bid lower thinking it's not going to convert.
That's all well and good, but as we all know ACOS is about as accurate as a U-shaped arrow. On top of that, if I'm targeting hand-picked product ASINs, I don't want them cutting my bids by 80% because their algos think I'm not a good match.
So, I'm experimenting with fixed bids on closely targeted ads, and dynamic up/down on author/title/search keywords which could end up anywhere.
BTW the popularity for many of my titles has just climbed a lot on the scifi humour list in the USA. Whereas last week I had two books in the first 20 pages, I now have 15. (This list only seems to update once a week, and the latest was today.)
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Thanks for doing the investigating. As I understand it, I'd have to choose dynamic or fixed per ad, not per keyword, right? So if I have some suspected meh keywords they should start at fixed and eventually be eliminated?
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I use fixed bids for the same reason you stated. I've done the research for books and authors that are a good match. I want a little higher bid on those keywords as an attempt to train amazon that my books are a good match to theirs.
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Keep a really close eye on the up down bid spending. When I first started AMS I did well with bid plus. When they did away with that in favor of up down I picked that thinking it was the closest to bid plus and I was quite wrong about that. Up down burned money about as fast as a book bub ad in "spend as fast as possible" mode.
I was offered by Amazon free webinars next week on advertising, so I am doing the Intermediate and Advanced ones they offered. If I pick up any good info, I'll post it here.
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I've registered for those seminars, too.
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I tried to watch the basic intro one, but got a web page error. After that I gave up.
Can the seminars be watched any time after they've aired? I don't do live stuff, mostly because of my time zone but also because I stopped living to other peoples schedules around 2005.
I've never used the 'up and down' bidding method. To me that sounds like a fast way to empty my bank accounts.
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Ohh, now I remember the issue. I got this massive 'blocked script' error covering my web browser window, and assumed it was trying to use Adobe Flash.
Now it's just sitting there, spinning gently.
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Oh sorry, I thought you said you were using up down. I only registered for the intermediate and advanced webinars, but if they mention you can watch after I'll let you know.
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Thanks for that! I'm watching the intro one now. Slow going with lots of pauses and they don't have a 'speed up' button, alas.
I will experiment with Up and Down eventually. I should do it for one series and see whether it leads to better results.
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I'm having a bumpy ride using Bryan's method. Applying his teaching, I got quick upticks in sales/reads. Now rollercoastering down. Anyone else the same? Should I augment his training w/another goat sacrifice (my herd is already pretty thin)?
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I had a slow start, then some sales, then not, now a sale again today. I've only spent 36 bucks and both my books are profitable. If they weren't I have a 100 clicks on one book so I would be dialing the bids down but I don't need to. I consider this the info gathering stage and I am prepared to wait until January to have enough good keywords to start generation 2. As long as I am profitable, I am sticking with the plan.
I think it's a crappy time to be trying to build momentum with the holidays, covid, a lot of turmoil due to the big vote. I'm looking at the daily search terms report and keeping a list of what terms lead to clicks and sales.
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Most of my trial category ads have done nothing much and cost nothing much, but sales and reads have increased. One ad has cost just over $20 so far; it sells a series of six titles and they have been moving. That's the sole category ad for that title. Out of 34 category ads, only two have spent significantly over a dollar. One spent over $7 very fast with no sales and I realized it wasn't drawing the right sort of crowd and paused it. That's the problem with some niche books; they may rightly belong to a certain category that has been invaded by titles that palpably do not belong.
On balance the category ads are not an exciting success but neither are they a horrid failure. Technically, having spent just less than $40 on them and earned significantly more, they are profitable. There's only one problem: I did a BookFunnel joint promo this month for a couple of books in that series and some of my sales and reads may have come from the promo instead of from the category ad.
I haven't examined the keyword ads to see if there is anything new to learn from their data.
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I have a new tool now which imports the Advertised Products Reports from AMS US/UK/etc. Then I import this and display the ad spend against matching ASINs in my sales analyser software.
Basically, I can see royalty + kenp income in one column, and ad spend in another. There's a net difference displayed too. Instead of saying 'I spent too much on ads' I can now see which books are costing more to advertise than they're worth.
What I haven't done yet is to take all the income for a series and deduct the ad spend from that, instead of just deducting it from book 1. That would be more useful.
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:help I don't know where my reads come from. How can I find out? The AMS "KENP read" column only accounts for a tenth of the reads I've had this month. I'm not running any other ads, don't have a newsletter and my website gets few visits. Is there any way to figure it out so I can better target readers?
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Have you gotten to the top 100 in any subcategories or popular lists? Supposedly AMS only tracks for two weeks after someone clicks on an ad. Could people have made a note of you a few weeks ago and just gotten to it now?
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The sales and KENP read figures on the AMS dash are woefully inaccurate. The only thing you can do is try to correlate clicks in the AMS dash with changes in the rankings for your books. That will tell you if there were borrows.
Start from the assumption that you have no organic sales to begin with (or take the average book ranking, sales and KENP for the month before you start advertising.)
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Thank you, Simon and notthatamanda - very helpful. Now have a new puzzle: AMS today suspended one of my Bryan ads b/c the ad text violates current policy. Puzzling b/c this is an autotargeted Standard ad w/o any ad text. Zipped off an email to contactus for guidance. Anyone else had this happen?
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Not for an ad with no ad text. A long time ago I saw something about covers and/or book titles/subtitles sometimes triggering it though. (One rule I read was 'no covers where there's a gun pointed at the reader'.)
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I think you just have to wait to hear from them. They have a tendency to use one error message for a bunch of different things and sometimes things get flagged incorrectly. You can always start the ad again and see if it goes through.
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Probably a glitch, although it used to be said that Amazon's weekend crew was more censorious than the weekday crew.
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My impressions/clicks/CPC have been climbing to the point where I'm winding back some of my wilder bids. I'm keen to see whether impressions plummet, or whether I've now given AMS a thirst for my ad dollars and they continue to show my ads despite the lower bids.
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I've been looking into the "Campaign bidding strategy" on a few of my AMS ads. I usually can't decide between 'Dynamic bids - down only' and 'Fixed Bids', preferring the former. (Sounds like a money-saver.)
At times I've run all my ads one or the other.
Anyway, when you read their help (I know, I know), it says that their bid adjustments are based on ACOS, of all things. So, if you have lousy ACOS for a particular keyword/target, it will bid lower thinking it's not going to convert.
That's all well and good, but as we all know ACOS is about as accurate as a U-shaped arrow. On top of that, if I'm targeting hand-picked product ASINs, I don't want them cutting my bids by 80% because their algos think I'm not a good match.
So, I'm experimenting with fixed bids on closely targeted ads, and dynamic up/down on author/title/search keywords which could end up anywhere.
BTW the popularity for many of my titles has just climbed a lot on the scifi humour list in the USA. Whereas last week I had two books in the first 20 pages, I now have 15. (This list only seems to update once a week, and the latest was today.)
I read a post about using fixed bids to get amazon to see where you are engaging with the audience. By having a higher bid for a while you tend to get more clicks.
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Certainly getting lots of clicks. At this rate I'll finally be able to analyse the results, then pick out the targets which worked best.
Wouldn't it be nice if the Orders and KENP on the AMS dash actually worked?
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Just found a popup on my AMS dash (US only) - introducing estimated KENP royalties. I enabled the column, and it does what it says.
However, it's just the existing unreliable* KENPC x last month's KENP rate, so it's not that useful.
* I have noticed more page reads on the AMS dash recently, spread across a number of ads, but then I'm spending more so perhaps that's normal.
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I've re-upped my top-performing category ads for a short period and made them fixed bid only to see what happens with that variable. I've also initiated the fixed bid tactic for a few other ads. Another two-week experiment.
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I'm going to create a few second gen ads soon, using the best keywords from the first round. (The ones that actually got impressions...)
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I haven't had a sale at all in five days so I'm all about chocolate and cheese.
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I haven't had a sale at all in five days so I'm all about chocolate and cheese.
:tup3b :banana-riding-llama-smiley-em :banana: :HB :doh: :icon_think: :smilie_zauber:
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Yep Lily, you pretty much covered it.
Trying to remember in a normal year, mid Nov through Jan 1 would be pretty slow anyway.
Maybe I'll see you in webinar comments later.
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After the bid adjustments, and having switched off a few underperforming keywords, I've managed to get my overall CTR (US store) from 0.19% over the previous 7 days up to 0.32% now.
CPC is 0.41c average across all my ads.
I spend most of my time tinkering with ads that have few impressions and no clicks. If I look at the last ten in my list for the day, and fiddle with those, I assume that tomorrow will be the next-worst-10. Keep doing that, and I'll gradually improve or cancel everything ;-)
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It really does seem that in order to run efficient, usable ads, you first have to run a bunch of ineffient expensive ads and throw out or fix the worst offenders. It could have something to do with training the algos, too.
(Aside from tinkering with the bottom 10 ads, I also watch the top 5 most costly ads. If the sales/page reads for the books in those ads aren't showing the expected gains, I adjust the bids down.)
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My questions and answers from the AMS webinar I just watched.
Q: if you use a key word of say "coffee machine" and bid on broad, phrase and exact aren't you bidding against yourself? Why is that recommended? Thanks.
A:
Hi Amanda, that is a great question! As long as your campaigns are coming from the same account then you will not bid against each other and having the same keyword in with all three match types will allow you to see how that keyword perfoms on a match type specific level and you can adjust the bid accordingly! You may also notice that a keyword performs well with one match type but not very well with a different match type and then you could remove the keyword with the underperforming match type while still keeping the keyword which converts well for you
Q:If you accidentally use the same keyword, say "coffee pot" for "broad" in two different campaigns do they also not bid against each other since they are from the same account?
A:
That is correct, you can have the same keyword in multiple campaigns and as long as they are coming from the same account they will not compete with each other.
Q:
So back to my first question, about campaign budget. There is a lot of chatter on line that if your campaign budget is bigger, Amazon will take your ads more seriously and you'll get more impressions. But you (general you) are saying it is relevance + bid and budget doesn't matter, correct?
A:
The size of your budget is not related to how seriously we take your campaigns :) We do want your campaigns to run thorughout the day, but increasing your budget isn't the only way to do this - take the time to optimize your campaigns by lowering bids, adding negative keywords, adjusting your bidding strategy, etc. to help your budget last longer throughout the day
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Thanks. I got a phone call (one that I wanted) just when the Q&A started so I missed them all.
On the whole I thought the presentation was cogent but did not detail a lot that was new to me. However, it confirmed much that has only been speculation.
It'll be interesting to see if the next one, at 4 PM my time, has any surprises.
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Oh you wouldn't have seen those. I typed them in and they answered me directly. They are supposedly going to email a link with the full presentation, which I may have to do for the 4. The other laptop is fighting with zoom and the dance studio had to go remote for two weeks so I may have to give up my laptop for that.
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Simon, what criteria are using that you want to go 2nd generation? I only have 9 sales so far so I don't think I'm ready.
I'm going to try a concentrated ad, one author, all their titles, and do broad, phrase and exact to see what that yields.
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For me it's impressions. When I have an ad with 150 keywords and I run it over a week, I find that the few clicks are spread out so they're often in single digits for ASIN/Keyword target. Not really much to go on. Impressions, however, tell a story.
So, if I have 150 keywords and 100 of them haven't even had an impression, I survey a few of them. If they're for popular authors/books, I assume my bid is too low. If they're relative unknowns with very low sales rank, I assume there's little traffic to those pages (AND my bids might be too low.) I don't need to advertise on those keywords.
First job is to remove all of the latter. Then I can copy the keywords with decent impressions into a new ad, and bid higher on those.
I also increase bids on keywords I think should work (in the original ad) to see whether it gets them moving.
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Thanks for sharing.
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It's so frustrating when the tools Amazon give us aren't up to the job. The AMS dash doesn't report income accurately, and the only way to find out if someone is borrowing my books is to repeatedly load the book list on the author page for each supported store, to see whether the rankings are climbing.
(A borrow doesn't show up anyware except as a jump in sales rank. It's only visible as pagereads when people finish the book they're reading now, and maybe 2 or 3 after that, before they finally start on mine.)
As an experiment, I've been running ads at a higher total daily budget than I want to. It seems to be the only way to gather the data I need (CPC/CTR/effective targets)
Some days I see a big spend on ads, with just enough sales to justify the spend, and a KENP which is about the normal average, if a touch higher.
It's only when I look closer at the breakdown that I see something pretty significant: Today, despite a modest overall page read count, a large percentage of those reads are for 'first in series' books. In other words, the ones I'm advertising. A couple of them are 2-3 times higher than the page reads for book 2 in the same series, which means something is bringing in those new readers - and it has to be the ads.
The sales ranks for those books don't support these figures, which could mean these folk borrowed the books days ago, when I first boosted my ad spend, and are just getting to them now.
Anyway, if I'm reading the data correctly, the readthrough could eventually turn the ads into decent earners. If not, I'm throwing money down the well.
Usual case, with advertising.
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I agree about the frustration. I got one of those "Your budget has run out. Triple it and the world is your oyster" emails from Amazon last night and I did triple it. The ACOS on that ad now is 559.36%.
That'll teach me. In one of the Amazon webinars yesterday they encouraged us to add to our budgets when we get such messages. It has never, ever worked for my books. Never ever. One wonders what they are smoking.
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If I get those messages I leave it paused but lower my bids. Next day, I assume it won't hit the budget. (Unless it's getting a great CPC and I can see lots of orders/good sales rank for that title. Then I would raise the limit.)
Most of my campaigns are set to $10, with some at $15 or $25. I've only hit one limit (a 15) in the past 6 months.
I have to remind myself that if I see $xx spent in one day, it's spread across 7 different series starters and my non-fic title. If someone had one series they could divide my ad budget by 8 and they'd probably consider it pitiful.
What I could do is to stop all ads except those for ONE book, and then increase the bids and budget. The only reason I haven't is because I write in 8 different genres/markets, and so I can potentially reach 8 different audiences (and make 8x more money, hah.)
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Lily, was it an auto ad?
They said in the seminar the other day that they like the ad to run all day, so I agree with Simon, lower the bids.
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They just gave us access to the brand page (in the US anyway). It does a landing page for you and you choose what to put on it. For example, I could do a page for each trilogy or all my romance (I think it said 8 products max). It showed you the landing page but I don't know what the customer is going to see in the sponsored ad. You pick the keywords.
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Do you mean the brand page is available now through AMS, or they made it available to people who watched the vid?
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Hmm, well I watched the video, so I can't tell if everyone got it, or just people who watched the video.
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Pardon me if I do this first: :HB B/c, after applying Bryan's AMS magic and all your good advice for a month, I've achieved a consistent daily level of sales and reads. BUT my AMS chart reports that only about 1/3 of those sales and about 1/5 of the reads are attributable to AMS. Can anyone help me understand what's happening?
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AMS doesn't report all the sales and reads generated by your ads. (Oh yeah, and as of a few weeks ago it doesn't report sales of your OTHER books generated by a click on your ad. So if someone clicks the ad then buys your entire series in one go, you'll only see a sale of the first book or - more likely - none at all.)
That's what makes it so frustrating.
By the way, they also say 'allow 2 weeks for data to show up'. Now, I've never figured out whether they mean the old data shows up in today's/yesterday's dash OR it changes the reports from 2 weeks ago. I ought to take a screenshot of the AMS dash with the date set to 9 days ago and then check it again in 2 weeks.
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Different reasons. For example, if you run an ad and someone buys your book because of that ad, now your book is in also boughts with all of their also boughts. Now someone buys a book from the also boughts that will never be attributed to the ad. And that reader may never have found you with out the ad. I like Bryan's strategy of focusing on the overall profitability. When I did a lot of AMS in 2019 I had lots of sales that were never attributed to ads which was fine by me.
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They just gave us access to the brand page (in the US anyway). It does a landing page for you and you choose what to put on it. For example, I could do a page for each trilogy or all my romance (I think it said 8 products max). It showed you the landing page but I don't know what the customer is going to see in the sponsored ad. You pick the keywords.
Do you mean this: https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-specs/landing-pages
Ahh, never mind. When I clicked Create Campaign it now shows the brand option.
So I guess that means I need to create new ads instead of just retargeting the existing ones. Ouch.
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Just got another "You're about out of budget" email. It's a category ad with a $5 budget, and I was experimenting with fixed bids. I've switched to dynamic down only, since the ACOS is now 660.54%.
I think this is proof that fixed bids can run one out of money fast without producing great results. Or possibly the ads dashboard reports money spent faster than it does page reads or sales. In either case, it makes deciding whether to keep an ad going very dicey. This is not the only ad I'm running for this series, which complicates the situation further.
I have let most of my dozens of category ads expire. Interestingly, although the ads dashboard does not show any clicks for another series also in KU for which I have a category ad running, someone has been reading it. This may be more proof that the dashboard simply is not reporting information in a usefully prompt manner.
This stuff hurts my brain. :HB
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Yes, you definitely have to ignore the orders, sales and pagereads on the AMS dash. Just pretend those columns don't exist.
If you're not advertising anywhere else, then you just have to assume all sales/borrows/pagereads/sales rank increases are due to the ads. If you advertise more and those figures rise, especially for the first in series, it's working.
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Are you taking the titles and authors from the category ad search term report and creating keyword ads with those?
Category ads sold the most books for me, but they were expensive, with higher ACOS. Taking the books that got the most sales and clicks from those ads gave me great keywords for cheaper ads.
Also, what category? Rhetorical. You can try to narrow down the categories so you aren't using just a broad one.
Bid lower on Romance, higher on Historical Romance.
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I'm testing a slightly different strategy for one of my ads. I've halved all the bids and changed the bid type to 'up and down' (the one which goes up to +100%) and I've also added a 10% loading to 'top of search' and 'product page'.
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I'm testing a slightly different strategy for one of my ads. I've halved all the bids and changed the bid type to 'up and down' (the one which goes up to +100%) and I've also added a 10% loading to 'top of search' and 'product page'.
Not the first time I've tried this - last time was months ago, but the ads never fired up. (Low bid was TOO low I think.)
Unfortunately this strategy relies on Amazon recognising which product pages to push the book onto.
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You got more balls than me. I tried up down when they first introduced it and lost my shirt, pants and underwear. Good luck.
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Haha. Lucky I have my faithful dressing gown.
But if you halve the bids and allow Amazon to double them as required, isn't that a better outcome than setting the bids high in the first place and locking them to that amount?
(Don't answer - I'll soon find out. I've been running the ad pre-changes for a week, so I'll have a before and after as a comparison.)
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If you're not advertising anywhere else, then you just have to assume all sales/borrows/pagereads/sales rank increases are due to the ads.
Okay, I think I've got it now: Ignore the AMS dashboard - it's a poor tool to measure/calculate AMS expense vs profit b/c its reporting is neither timely nor complete. Use the KDP dash instead - b/c it's more accurate/timely re: sales/reads - to calculate overall AMS success. And to calculate down to book/series level. However, in seeking out keywords that draw buyers, use AMS dash for impressions/clicks - understanding the imprecision of the AMS dash means reading those #s only as trendlines. Or :icon_question:
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I'd say that's right. Impressions and Clicks (and spend!) are the important parts of the dash.
If I have an ASIN-targeted ad where I'm paying for a lot of clicks, that's great because I've picked those ASINs as close matches for my books. If they're not buying/borrowing despite all the clicks, then I'll tweak the blurb/subtitle (or reduce the bids/remove that target)
If it's a keyword ad and it's getting lots of clicks, I'll check the reports very closely to make sure all the clicks aren't people searching for burglar alarms or books on DIY pet food or something.
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I keep adding to my list of negative targeting words and phrases. I am not paying for a click from someone looking for a "nasty western romance."
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If you're not advertising anywhere else, then you just have to assume all sales/borrows/pagereads/sales rank increases are due to the ads.
Okay, I think I've got it now: Ignore the AMS dashboard - it's a poor tool to measure/calculate AMS expense vs profit b/c its reporting is neither timely nor complete. Use the KDP dash instead - b/c it's more accurate/timely re: sales/reads - to calculate overall AMS success. And to calculate down to book/series level. However, in seeking out keywords that draw buyers, use AMS dash for impressions/clicks - understanding the imprecision of the AMS dash means reading those #s only as trendlines. Or :icon_question:
And look at your search term report to see where the automatic ads are placing clicks. They are what the algos think are the most relevant and since relevance is key in getting impressions, and below bid impressions, you want to keep an eye on those. I run it daily.
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My questions and answers from the webinar today. I typed these into the chat. My screen froze up when the presentation was over and I didn't hear the live Q & A.
Is there an optimum number or range of keywords to use in a manual campaign? Does it matter?
A:
Hi Amanda, when you get started we recommend aiming for around 30 keywords but this can be more if you are a KDP advertiser
Thanks. Is too many keywords bad? I can go over a hundred in a campaign usually.
A:
as long as you keep checking to make sure that all keywords are driving sales. if you add to many you may see that your budget runs out pretty quickly.
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Okay, they're certainly dispelling a few myths then.
I was holding off starting 2nd gen ads until I had lots of keywords, but maybe it's possible to fire them up with 30 after all.
PS I've been working on SalesScanner, and it will now show a chart of the last 30 days of royalties and pagereads, with averages, and also (new) it will draw another line on the chart indicating daily ad spend. (You can tell I spent 20 years writing share market charting software...)
The ad spend line requires downloading a specific report from AMS (or having it emailed daily, which is what I do) and then converting it using yet another program I wrote. I aim to roll that program into sales scanner. At the moment it supports reports/ad spend from the US/UK/AU and CA markets.
Reason this is great is because I can see at a glance whether my royalties are climbing faster than the ad spend. (Recently a curbed a few bids, and while the royalties have kept increasing, the total ad spend dropped.)
When I say 'royalties' I'm including KENP in that. Since I've been heavily advertising all my 'book ones' I would expect KENP to have a long tail due to readthrough. That's the one variable I don't have yet - whether that long tail will show my recent higher ad spend to be a mistake or not.
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I've just updated the program so it'll display charts per market. This is a sample for one of them:
As you can see, ad spend jumped a lot yesterday, even with my lower bids. I can also see I was more profitable a month ago with minimal ads, but the recent ad spend has definitely reversed a slump.
(It's not colour-blindness friendly at the moment, but the bars are green when they're higher than the previous day)
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Here's the KENP chart for the same period and market. It's what you might call a V-shaped recovery.
And as I said, the ad spend going up is fine as long as these page reads (mostly for first in series) translate to readthrough. Behind the 7 books I'm advertising are 23 others, all lined up and ready to read.
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I'm going to be trying some general word ads soon versus authors and titles. I had some luck with those in the past, but the bids are usually pretty high on those and I'm sticking with the 30 cent maximum for the time being.
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They just changed the copy ad completely. I wanted to copy an ad I did and use it for a different book but instead of putting you into the new campaign page it just launches it (you can choose to pause it) and you can't change the book. I can export the keywords but man, I don't see the point of this. The old way was better. Maybe has something to do with that bulk stuff.
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If the original ad had a blurb, then I'm guessing that's why you can't change the advertised book? Could you ever? (Can't recall)
With a blurb-free ad you can just add another book and untick the first.
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Nope, this ad didn't have a blurb. But I'm pretty sure I just used to copy the ad and it would shoot you into the new ad page and then you could change everything. I exported the keywords and negative keywords and copied them back in. Took 10 minutes (my laptop is slow). Old way would have taken a minute but it's done. Will all be worth it when I get 4 clicks and no sales over the next month.
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Now you're just being flat out over-optimistic.
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Still, it's probably a better outcome than paying twice as much for bids and ending up with 'negative royalties'
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Well if I'm the optimistic one, we're in trouble.
Thinking it over, I am pretty PO-ed about it. The two main reasons I would copy an ad would be to change the creative or to change the book. Now I can't do either. I'm not sure what the point is of this change is. Everything you can change when you copy an ad now you could always change in the original ad anyway. And since I learned that I can't compete against myself, I was prepared to test a lot more copy head to head on the same keywords, which will now be more of a PITA to set up. :rant
Edit - here are some interesting results. One author and all her titles for keywords. Identical ads with 6 different hooks and one with no hook. Impressions so far:
Hook 5 - 48
Hook 6 - 84
No Hook - 57
No clicks yet, but the first hurdle is getting the impressions and the algos clearly have preferences. I have another author to set up an ad for but I will still run all 6 hooks and none, to see if there is any difference between what the algos prefer for a different author, or if it is pretty standard.
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Am I wrong to think that, very generally, 1,000 impressions should generate 10 clicks that produce 1 sale?
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Well if I'm the optimistic one, we're in trouble.
Thinking it over, I am pretty PO-ed about it. The two main reasons I would copy an ad would be to change the creative or to change the book. Now I can't do either. I'm not sure what the point is of this change is. Everything you can change when you copy an ad now you could always change in the original ad anyway. And since I learned that I can't compete against myself, I was prepared to test a lot more copy head to head on the same keywords, which will now be more of a PITA to set up. :rant
Edit - here are some interesting results. One author and all her titles for keywords. Identical ads with 6 different hooks and one with no hook. Impressions so far:
Hook 5 - 48
Hook 6 - 84
No Hook - 57
No clicks yet, but the first hurdle is getting the impressions and the algos clearly have preferences. I have another author to set up an ad for but I will still run all 6 hooks and none, to see if there is any difference between what the algos prefer for a different author, or if it is pretty standard.
Common wisdom is that copying ads is not the way to go. (For some reason the copy carries baggage from the original - e.g. performance figures.) I know David Gaughran says not to, and Bryan Cohen does too. I don't copy ads for that reason.
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Am I wrong to think that, very generally, 1,000 impressions should generate 10 clicks that produce 1 sale?
Hard to say, as it's impossible to directly measure sales.
Picking one of my books in one marketplace from yesterday, the set of 10 ads generated 9000 impressions, 19 clicks, 2 orders and 128 page reads. My dash shows 1 sale and 300 page reads for that book in that marketplace - but I guess it's possible someone refunded a copy. (Nope, just checked and I've not had a any returns for that one all month.)
So, that second sale probably took place some time over the past 14 days and has only just been credited to the ad. Annoying.
A different book yesterday had 800 impressions, 1 click, no sales showing but there's one sale for that one in my figs.
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The other day I set up two of the new brand ads. I got an error message for one, but when I clicked submit a second time it went through.
Anyway, no impressions yet, and I've been raising my bids a little at a time to try and get them to fire up.
Yesterday I created a third Brand ad for a different series. It was rejected an hour later with a message saying i must provide an author profile pic.
I opened up the draft (they helpfully converted my ad to a draft so I could edit it), and sure enough there's a pic there. I mean, it stayed there from the original two ads and they were both accepted.
So, clicked submit. Error: You've already used that campaign name. I added a 2 to the campaign name and resubmitted.
An hour later: rejected. No profile pic.
This time I deleted the profile pic, uploaded it again, cropped it, changed the ad title and submitted again.
Ding! No profile pic. Third rejection. (Each time I went to the feedback page linked from the ad and clicked the 'I don't understand' option.)
By now I'm getting a bit fed up, so I left everything alone and changed the ad title:
ITS GOT A PROFILE PIC FGS.
and clicked submit. I regretted it immediately, because I don't usually do that sort of thing. I consoled myself with the thought that (hopefully) I'm only railing against a dim-witted AI.
Anyway, this morning the ad was accepted, so I quickly changed the title and went on with my life.
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Adding fuel to fire...
The fears are being realized.
The Sponsored Brands AD was approved but has ONE impression in just under 24 hours.
I'll bump the bid and see what happens.
Cheers,
R.C.
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Yep, it's a winner takes all situation.
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You guys think they are favoring the sponsored brand ads now?
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Just a thought, but has anyone seen a brand ad with the three books in yet? (According to the setup/help they don't show on product pages but in search results. Therefore, my targeting of ASINS is probably a waste of time.)
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I'm not even sure where to look. Occasionally I a sponsored ad on a book page under the book description, all by itself, not in a carousel. Maybe it would be there, but those are rare.
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It says they show in search results, and doesn't mention product pages.
I added some categories along with my ASIN targets, because we all know how well the former work...
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Well you can tell me what you used (PM me if you want) and I'll search and see if anything comes up, yours or anyone else's. I don't think our categories are terribly similar but I promise not to use your keywords.
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Meanwhile, my flirtation with fixed bids has ended. Amazon spent my budgets extremely quickly, and alas, sales and reads have not equaled the ad costs. Back they all go to dynamic down only.
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Ick, sorry. Better luck with dynamic down.
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I'm not risking a lot of cash, but I don't like seeing an ACOS of 672.07%. Hard to believe the numbers can go that high! :dizzy
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Yep, I'm finding the fixed bids too rich, especially later in the day when AMS seems to delight in spending as much as possible.
I am trying the up/down bids though. I set the keyword bids to half what I normally would - that way, worst case is I'm paying my normal max. I also added a healthy percentage for top of search and product page placements.
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Now the freaking export isn't working. Typing in all the keywords manually again here I come. :HB
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An up to date 30-day KENP chart. The last green bar isn't done yet - about 4 hours to go I think.
There's a visible upwards trend since I started advertising heavily and over-bidding. (That part isn't a surprise, except to prove that ads will generate pagereads, even if they eat up all your profit into the bargain)
What IS a surprise to me is that almost half that last green bar consists of page reads for my 'first in series' books - just 6 titlles out of 25+. So, like I said yesterday, there's a chance those ads will continue to pay for themselves over weeks to come.
In the past I've never spent this much on AMS, and I've always pulled the pin after 2 or 3 days. This time I'm determined to soldier on and find out whether it's possible to get things to snowball.
I'm not completely nuts, though. I've been converting fixed bid ads to up/down ads and trimmed most of the bids in half in the process. As a result my ad spend is half what it's been recently. But then, of course, there are also half as many impressions and clicks ;-)
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Well you can tell me what you used (PM me if you want) and I'll search and see if anything comes up, yours or anyone else's. I don't think our categories are terribly similar but I promise not to use your keywords.
Do you mean for the brand ads? I'm not using keywords there, just ASINs and (now) categories. I did enter 'humorous fantasy' and saw an urban fantasy brand ad at the top, but further down on the first page were one or two of my book covers so I don't care (organic results, not paid.) I repeated it for 'humorous science fiction' and saw a brand ad for an author with similar stuff to me, but I've seen his ads for months so I suspect he had an Advantage account. Again, 2 or 3 of my books showed up organically on the first page of results, so my keywords etc are working.
I think keyword ads are the way to go for these brand ads though.
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Yes I did, but it sounds like you got it covered. I still haven't run across any brand ads poking around on Amazon.
Update - so I started 5 ads at basically the same time, with the same keywords, bidding on broad, phrase and exact for each keyword. 4 different hooks and one ad with no creative. Default bid is 30 cents. Got my first click for 6 cents. So I think I bid against myself 15 times and it didn't affect what I paid.
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Yes I did, but it sounds like you got it covered. I still haven't run across any brand ads poking around on Amazon.
If you go to amazon.com, select Kindle Store from the dropdown to the left of the search bar and enter Humorous Fantasy, what appears at the top of the search results? I get a brand ad (3 covers, a logo/photo to the left, etc)
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Humorous fantasy gets me a brand ad for a very dark looking epic saga series.
I tried humorous fiction and I got a brand ad for mafia romance.
Humorous science fiction gets me a brand ad for humorous science fiction.
So the ads are showing but the targeting seems a little off. I don't know if just not enough people are bidding on those spots yet cause the first two seem way off on relevance for me. Maybe it is a good time to try an brand ad for each of my trilogies.
Edit - did one for each of my trilogies. I'm sure romance will be very competitive. I bid 15 cents, don't expect a lot of placement.
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That dark looking saga is meant to be a comedy, if it's the 'never shoot an ogre' one. I just added all his ASINs to my targeting because I've never heard of it.
I'm doing a new pair of Brand ads now for keywords instead of categories. I also deactivated all the ASINs from my manual targeting brand ads, because they never did anything no matter how much I bid. I just left one category in each.
Once the new keyword brand ads are up I'm going raise the bid, refresh, raise the bid and refresh until they show.
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Edit - did one for each of my trilogies. I'm sure romance will be very competitive. I bid 15 cents, don't expect a lot of placement.
I had to bid 10x that before I got any impressions at all (3). That's with categories.
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I did categories for keywords, eg romance, contemporary romance. No impressions yet. I got to keep my costs down.
The one I'm getting in humorous fantasy is about an evil prince and crows. Book one has a best seller tag for "Teen & Young Adult Depression Fiction Books". Did not know that was a category, but it really doesn't sound like humor. Are you bidding on humorous fantasy? Cause your books would be a better match.
I have a vague idea about using AMS to test copy and translate that into more relevant blurbs but that would be a slog.
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I'm still trying to get them to accept my keywords ads after about 20 attempts. Every time I submit, they reject them for not having an author profile image. (Which they have)
Yesterday I submitted the same ads over and over until they finally accepted them. Today I've resorted to emailing support.
So, at the moment I only have a category ad running.
Once the keywords ads go up I'll experiment with bids to see whether I can get my brand ad to appear. (I can bid a lot higher on humorous scifi because there are 10 novels in that series vs only 3 in the humorous fantasy series.)
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I had a tough time with one submission for the brand ad, but it took eventually. Also the review was longer. My sponsored products ads usually run immediately. Brand ads took overnight in review. I suspect it will take readers a while to look at them, or I might just be weird. I was seeing some but I would just scroll past them to get to what I expected to see. It took you pointing it out to me for me to actually look at them.
Edit - over 100 impressions for one of the brand ads and 39 for the other, bidding 15 cents. No clicks yet. I got a download of the first in series free on the first one, not credited to the ad. I really hope the landing page will make it clear to people that only the first book is free.
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Up to 247 on one of my brand ads. Man, I must have hit the sweet spot on relevancy.
If the book is free does anyone know if AMS counts that as a sale?
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It will show up as an order, yes. Congrats on the impressions!
I've seen a few impressions since I switched to categories instead of ASINs, and I resubmitted my keywords brand ads.
My ad spend cratered overnight - combination of reining in the biggest-spending keywords and tinkering around with others I suspect. (I changed a lot of my ads to up/down and much lower bids, but used bid+ to try and get the first page of the carousel plus product display ads.)
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Okay, mine are getting clicks now.
If you edit the campaign and view the creative, you can click the 'Shop AUTHORNAME books' link to see your landing page.
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You can see I'm managing to curb the ad spend (red line) but the royalties + pageread income are still climbing. (Bear in mind I have the 99c promo running)
The green bar on the right still has 3 hours of US sales to go. The tiny red bar to the right of that is the start of today's UK and AU sales. (Curse those timezones!)
The lower the red line and the taller the bars, the more profit.
My ad spend for today just leapt up (not displayed yet - figures come in tomorrow), so there might have been a delay in live reporting on AMS.
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I fired up three more product ads today. They only have 20 keywords each (40 if you count phrase/exact) and each ad targets one author and all their works by title.
I'm bidding higher than usual, because the people who read these authors are the audience for my series.
I'd love to see my ads on page one of the carousel on their listings, but we'll see.
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Haha! I guess THAT worked:
But wait, because books 2-10 are on the first 3 pages of the carousel, but book ONE is on page 23! That tells me Amazon thinks book 1 of the series is really on the nose, I guess.
It's nothing to do with the age of the book, because book 2, 3 and 4 were all published on the same day as 1 (2011), and they're showing on page 1 or 2 of the carousel.
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I'm still digesting the fact that my series starter is impossible to advertise. All these months/years I've been trying to gain traction with this series, wondering why I'm so far down the carousel, and it never occurred to me to try a different book in the series. (I have run ads with all the books before, but I never went off to look at the ad carousels. Plus I used to bid tiny amounts.)
Anyway, I've just edited all the ads with Book 1 and put Book 10 in there instead. If people click that they can find book 1 easily enough. I still have a couple of ads with creative text in, which can't be swapped, but I'll try this new experiment for a couple of days first. It could blow the budget really quickly if I suddenly appear on page 1 of all kinds of targets, instead of page 20+
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Is book one free? Or 99 cents? AMS definitely favors books that make them more money. I put one of my romance dogs at $7.99 and tried ads on it. First slot in the carousel instantly. Didn't sell any cause it was too expensive.
If I ever take one of the amazon sponsored webinars again I definitely want to ask them in the side bar what's in the relevancy formula and what percentage of each is important. I figure cover, reviews, blurb, price. I'm trying to compile a list in case the opportunity arises to ask them. I kind of want to sign up for a webinar again just to ask that.
So I have one first in trilogy free credited to AMS (15 cents for the click) but I "sold" 2 more and 2 of my first in other trilogy free.
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Good theory, thanks. It's 2.99 whereas the others are 3.99 and 4.99 (they all show mixed in the first 2 pages of the carousel.)
It might be that Amazon knows I bought book 1 in 2011, but then I've bought some of the others too. Or maybe I've looked at book 1 so often it thinks I'm not interested - assuming the carousel is assembled per customer, and not one size fits all.
This is a brand new ad, by the way, so there's no history yet.
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By the way, congrats on the sales. (I meant to say that in my prev post, but I'm cooking and could hear sounds that meant I was charring instead.)
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Thanks. :)
If you want to PM me your keywords (gotta guard the ones that are working) I'll check and see what I see for you.
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Oh, this one's no secret. I'm targeting EM Foner's books. (He and I email each other from time to time to discuss the state of the humorous SF market.)
Here's one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LS7ST98
I just dropped my bids because I'd gone silly to test it was working. But now there's one of mine on page 2, and the rest are spread through the first nine pages.
Except book 1. I've gone through all 42 pages and can't see it at all. MIM1 is in there, funnily enough.
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By the way, off topic but I keep seeing this book pop up:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N9FK5W2
Is it just me or is that, er, Arnie on the cover?
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By the way, off topic but I keep seeing this book pop up:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N9FK5W2
Is it just me or is that, er, Arnie on the cover?
sure looks like him to me... the author bio is the longest i've ever seen.
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I didn't get to the bio. I did wonder whether this book was some kind of official release connected with one of the movies, but I've got other things to busy myself with ;-)
I didn't even realise this was the author behind that 1,000,000,000 book that shows up in every ad carousel. (There's the tenuous link to the topic).
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I looked up EM Foner, on his book 4 you have the number one spot for Hal book 1 on the number one page of the 1st carousel. If you want to try to talk me through a screenshot I can try. No promises.
Number 1 on the second ad carousel is the book with Arnold on the cover. I don't know what to make of that.
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The brand ad I started yesterday has over 1000 impressions. I'm flabbergasted. What the heck did I do right this time?
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The brand ad I started yesterday has over 1000 impressions. I'm flabbergasted. What the heck did I do right this time?
If you find out, let me know. I had only one impression for the first week. Then it shot up all the way to 130 since yesterday.
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I got a double yolk in an egg today. That's supposed to be good luck right?
Edit - actually I was wrong. It's over 1400 impressions. :icon_think:
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I got a double yolk in an egg today. That's supposed to be good luck right?
Edit - actually I was wrong. It's over 1400 impressions. :icon_think:
That's fantastic! Here's hoping it really starts to pay off with clicks & more sales.
I got 4 for one of mine and I'm wrestling with AMS support about the three ads they won't approve.
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I looked up EM Foner, on his book 4 you have the number one spot for Hal book 1 on the number one page of the 1st carousel. If you want to try to talk me through a screenshot I can try. No promises.
Number 1 on the second ad carousel is the book with Arnold on the cover. I don't know what to make of that.
Okay, thanks for checking that out. Now I'm wondering whether amazon is pushing Hal book 1 out of sight for me. I'll check using a different browser.
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Using a different browser I showed up #1, so that must be it.
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By the way, off topic but I keep seeing this book pop up:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N9FK5W2
Is it just me or is that, er, Arnie on the cover?
Definitely Ah-nold.
And I think the woman is Kristanna Loken. That would make the cover a Terminator two-fer.
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Over 2000 impressions. 3 clicks, 15 cents each. No sales credited but two people downloaded the free first in trilogy yesterday. Which is the stunned emoji?
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Sounds like you've hit paydirt there. I mean, where you generate impressions and clicks, surely sales will follow. (Ignore the credited sales - that part of the dash doesn't work. You'll probably find they randomly show up 10 days from now.)
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I've had a Brand ad for my middle grade series spend its entire budget this morning. I advertised a set of 4 paperbacks in the ad, so I won't know whether the flurry of clicks actually did anything until the books (if any) are shipped. Fingers crossed it gets a few sales, though.
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Good luck.
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4000 impressions 8 clicks at 15 cents each. No sales. Rank on both my permafree books are stuck on 11/23, two days ago. Author central says "No data yesterday". What the freak is going on?
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Yeah, US rank is stuck for me right across the board. Hasn't moved for hours, despite the sales coming in.
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All of a sudden the AMS dash is showing a bunch of clicks on the Riddle ads, which explains the flurry of sales. (But no change in sales rank all day.)
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Damned annoying about the sales rank, because this is my best day for the Mysteries in Metal series for over a year. (They're buying Silver as a preorder as well.)
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5000 impressions, 15 clicks, 1 sale registered (but not on the targeting list for that campaign). I used bklnk and am in top 250 for 2 categories. Also don't have enough categories listed, so I have to try to get that updated today.
As exciting as this is, if my readthrough doesn't kick in, this will just be wasting money, but I'll let it go for a while since I will be home to monitor it.
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I checked my search terms report for the brand ads today and saw something like 'new christmas books for girls' which ended up displaying my middle grade science fiction which is primarily aimed at boys. (I mean, I'll sell to anyone, but a target market is a target market.) Plus Santa doesn't show in my stuff, even as a robot.
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You going to add christmas (and xmas) as negative keywords or just see what happens?
Edit - since it's for kids maybe they opened it up to what the customer has purchased before, for gift giving, as opposed to Christmas being the theme of the book. Just guessing.
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I've lowered my bids but I won't add negative keywords yet.
Middle-grade books are a bit different because they're always bought for someone else, and if someone's shopping for xmas presents they might see my books and think they'd be good presents for another kid they also have to buy for.
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I've had a Brand ad for my middle grade series spend its entire budget this morning. I advertised a set of 4 paperbacks in the ad, so I won't know whether the flurry of clicks actually did anything until the books (if any) are shipped. Fingers crossed it gets a few sales, though.
Just got the figures and 6 paperbacks sold from this ad on that day.
I think Christmas is the only time of year MG paperbacks are really worth advertising.
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Cool. The holiday shopping season has just begun so maybe you will sell many more. Amazon was doing a webinar just on Holiday Advertising.
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Cool. The holiday shopping season has just begun so maybe you will sell many more. Amazon was doing a webinar just on Holiday Advertising.
I started listening to it but their idea of pre-planning was way later in the season than any of us plan. I skipped the rest of it as obvious.
Although Amazon has said it would send replays, I haven't received any so maybe we're supposed to actively find the replays. Too busy to look.
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Another 6 paperbacks in that series today. Maybe I've finally found out how to sell my middle-grade stuff? It's been one of my major disappointments over the years, knowing I have a series of 4 books I would have killed to read as a 10-year-old, and yet not being able to get them into the hands of readers.
(It was only meant to be a series of three books, all of them written in 2012, but in 2018 my nephews begged and begged and begged and begged x 100 for another one. I kept putting them off, knowing it made zero financial sense, then eventually wrote and illustrated the fourth book just for them.)
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Another 6 paperbacks in that series today. Maybe I've finally found out how to sell my middle-grade stuff? It's been one of my major disappointments over the years, knowing I have a series of 4 books I would have killed to read as a 10-year-old, and yet not being able to get them into the hands of readers.
(It was only meant to be a series of three books, all of them written in 2012, but in 2018 my nephews begged and begged and begged and begged x 100 for another one. I kept putting them off, knowing it made zero financial sense, then eventually wrote and illustrated the fourth book just for them.)
That's the best reason to write a book. :tup3b
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Just to close out one AMS issue:
AMS today suspended one of my Bryan ads b/c the ad text violates current policy. Puzzling b/c this is an autotargeted Standard ad w/o any ad text.
After repeated msgs to AMS HQ and repeated auto/boilerplate replies, someone in AMS actually looked at my textless ad, determined it could not be policy-offensive, and un-suspended. Impressions and clicks now flowing nicely. Things worked as they should but it required pushing.
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Leaped out of bed this AM to review my end-of-month AMS stats and see that I had a great Bryan month - consistent level of daily sales/reads higher than anything I’d managed pre-Bryan (tho’ I remain not even a prawn but a peanut). But it cost me 27% more in AMS fees than I made in profit, so I botched that part of the program. Figure that out and I’ll be ready to rocket up to prawn status. :cool:
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Yeah, it's tough finding the balance between 'my ads aren't showing' and 'I sold lots... oh and paid out even more.' I have to admit, my strategy of getting ads to run (high bids, but a lower budget so they didn't go crazy), and then paring them back a bit, does seem to be working.
One thing that helped enormously was adding the ability to import AMS reports into SalesScanner (my kind of homebrew Bookreport thing.)
I can see the breakdown of ad spend by title, across 4 markets, either daily, for this week or for the last 30 days, and whether I'm over-spending on one particular series. (Wouldn't be useful if you're running ads for 1 or 2 books, but I run them on 8 titles/series.)
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Amazon keeps emailing me wanting me to raise my budget on the UK site for my one nonfiction title. If I did that, I'd wipe out my profit on that title. My book is evergreen. So it runs out of budget today, big deal.
Amazon sent around another pitch for more of its ad seminars. I find it amazing that Amazon can do this with a straight face. Their advice stinks and their dashboard stinks. One of the most confounding aspects of self-publishing is the bizarreness of everybody's ad structures. Opaque, labyrinthine, Byzantine, and for BookBub I have to submit and be chosen to throw away my money. :HB
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Yeah, Facebook is the one I dread the most. Talk about taking something easy and making it complicated - and I've avoided the platform entirely since people kept reporting their accounts were getting suspended for linking to amazon pages.
Bookbub is easy to set up, but I don't think I get the results to justify the bids. The other day I got 90 clicks on something and I doubt 1 in 10 converted... on a 99c box set.
I'm having success with AMS, and this will be my highest month (turnover) for a year. But deduct the ad costs and it's not quite as rosy.
Thing is, my sales and pagereads have been dying a slow death for 12 months, probably because I haven't published anything that entire time, or run ads or promos. So, without the promos, the ads and the new release, I imagine the decline would have continued non-stop. Lesson learned!
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I have one ad that ran out of budget yesterday. It is my most profitable ad. I raised the budget to 6 from 5 and looked at the targeting. One target is getting all the sales, and most of the clicks, I left that at 30 cents. Another target had a handful of clicks, no sales, I reduced it to 20 cents. Other two targets I left at 30, no clicks.
I managed to be slightly profitable on my WWII books with a Bookbub ad with B&N, but since B&N is such a mess, I don't want to bother now. When I release book 2 I might try again.
Learning that you can't compete against yourself was the most helpful tidbit of info from Amazon's webinars.
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i can now be considered comically inept.
You cant imagine how bad i am at these but here's my go.
Since my book is on pre order and wont be out until late jan, (Its all ready to go edited and im thinking of using kindle create to format) I heard its incredibly hard to sell preorders as an unknown it can take like 100 clicks.
Paying 35cents for a click doesnt make any sense at all.
I thought i'd try all sorts of seldom used there for cheaper keywords. Good idea? Bad idea?
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An Amazon ad is practically irresistible to try. Use the best and most relevant keywords (other than "romance" or "Nora Roberts"), because you want your ad to be where the most people go, not the fewest. Relevance is much more important than keyword price. Bid low and keep the budget low. Your ad will appear way back in the carousel (if it even exists these days), but anyone who bothers to look that far back may be eager to buy. Also, use negative keyword targeting to help the relevance. Will it work? No way of knowing until you try. What drives us all crazy is regulating the bids versus the budget versus the keywords.
Or you could discount the book at launch and buy a newsletter ad to promote it. You'd get some action instead of that horrid big glacial silence that can happen. Just don't expect to make a profit. Check out Nick Erik's promo site roundup and see if any of them would work for your budget: https://nicholaserik.com/promo-sites/
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What I do is include the preorder title in with my ads for the rest of the series. So, if it's book 4 in a series, I'll set up an ad with books 1-3 + the preorder, then let AMS work out who to show it to.
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I don't know of an easy way to determine if a keyword is heavily used or rarely used. Like Lily I suggest just keeping your bids and budgets low.
Bryan Cohen said he would offer the free webinars in January. He takes you through all the ins and outs of ad setup and his strategy is designed to run ads profitably. If I hear the details on that I'll let you know.
Edit - if you are doing KU use your free or 99 cents days right before book 2 is going to launch. I think you have to be in KU for 30 days before you use them anyway, but I can't remember exactly.
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I don't know of an easy way to determine if a keyword is heavily used or rarely used. Like Lily I suggest just keeping your bids and budgets low.
Bryan Cohen said he would offer the free webinars in January. He takes you through all the ins and outs of ad setup and his strategy is designed to run ads profitably. If I hear the details on that I'll let you know.
Edit - if you are doing KU use your free or 99 cents days right before book 2 is going to launch. I think you have to be in KU for 30 days before you use them anyway, but I can't remember exactly.
I purchased publisher rocket. It has all sorts of information about keyword.
What I do is include the preorder title in with my ads for the rest of the series. So, if it's book 4 in a series, I'll set up an ad with books 1-3 + the preorder, then let AMS work out who to show it to.
I dont have any other books up for pre order. They said that just depresses rank on release day. I was trying to use my reader magnet to drive some pre orders as well as building a newsletter.
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I thought I moved all the end dates out but somehow I missed some and they shut off a couple of days ago, including a couple of good ones. Still finding news ways to be inept at this. :HB
Edit - and today I learned if an auto ad ends you can't unend it.
Edit again - bleeping reports aren't working. Will try again later.
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I just went through and reduced the bids on my highest spending ads. With sales so few and far between the balance was shifting from profitable to breaking even. The brand ad I got phenomenal impressions yielded 3 downloads of the free first book and zero follow ups. :( But I know I missed the target with the tropes for that. I don't know what to do with the romance books, they straddle the line between romance and women's fiction and either one is going to make a certain percentage, perhaps the majority, of readers unhappy. It's not really not an issue since I didn't make enough this year to justify all the new covers I will need.
I really hope people are just frantically trying to get all their shopping done right now and things pick way up in January, if not before.
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Why is AMS re-moderating all my Bryan ads moderated and approved a month ago? (So far, no changes in approvals.) Anyone else w/same experience?
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Mine are all still delivering and I've had no emails about moderation. That's weird.
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Why is AMS re-moderating all my Bryan ads moderated and approved a month ago? (So far, no changes in approvals.) Anyone else w/same experience?
Yes, I received "moderated" emails out of the blue. I chock it up to their BOTs are not tuned correctly.
Cheers,
R.C.
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AMS has been more aggressive this year in moderating ads. I suspect they started with the big spenders like myself where Amazon's exposure is greatest. AMS has suspended several hundreds of my ads in the last few month. (All of them are back up and running after my having made the requested changes.)
I have thousands of ads running that are guilty of the same violations as the ones that were suspended. I'm expecting a lot of future suspensions that I'll need to devote time to.
Not a pleasant thought, but adapt or die. lol
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Did you add any promoted books? I added a few extra titles to existing ads and they went through the approval again.
Recently I also noticed two of my ebooks were denied/blocked from being advertised in several ads (Butt of Heads was deemed offensive - same on Facebook. It's not that kind of butt, people...) and another has a girl with a space gun which is vaguely aimed at the ground. (Covers with guns pointing at the readers can't be advertised... even though that's sometimes the only way to get a sale.)
But then, without me doing anything, the ads went through another review process and those books were allowed again.
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Did you add any promoted books?
No, this is for the traditional sponsored ads in the U.S.
My ads violated the updated content guidelines. The new guidelines prohibit something that was fine under the old guidelines. Fortunately, I've done enough testing of my ad copy to know what converts. My "corrected" ads are converting even better than my suspended ones.
So, it was inconvenient but ultimately a big win.
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Jeez, it would save them a lot of time if they would just tell us the new guidelines. Do they publish those anywhere?
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Jeez, it would save them a lot of time if they would just tell us the new guidelines. Do they publish those anywhere?
https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-policy/sponsored-ads-policies
The difficult part was that my violation is not mentioned anywhere in the guidelines. It's not spelled out. My trespass was an extrapolation of one of the bullet points. The problem wasn't intuitive (to me, at least).
For example, take the following bullet (found at the above link):
"Exploitation of sensitive events such as natural disasters, human-caused disasters, incidents of mass drama, or the death of public figures."
Sounds reasonable, right? But let's say you've written a post-apoc thriller, and your ad includes the copy "A massive EMP has caused severe food shortages."
You receive an email from AMS saying, "We have suspended your ad because it is non-compliant with our content guidelines (https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-policy/sponsored-ads-policies). Please make the necessary changes."
So you visit the link and comb through the bullets. The only item you see that MIGHT explain the problem is the above bullet. But you're left wondering whether mention of the EMP is considered a "human-caused disaster" or whether mention of severe food shortages is considered an "incident of mass drama."
No way to know for sure because your violation hasn't been explicitly explained.
Needless to say, there was a lot of trial and error on my part before they finally approved my corrective actions.
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Thanks. It's nice to have this reference. I've only ever been denied for spelling violations. One of which made it though numerous times before they flagged it. Bad writer.
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That "incidents of mass drama" phrase is so vague and wide that it could apply to almost any fiction book ever written. :Hqn66ku:
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Especially young adult.
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That made for interesting reading.
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My ads are all expiring soon and I'm pretty tempted to just let them. Sales keep getting slower and slower as the month drags on, eating into the profitability I had.
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I just re-upped some Amazon ads, some category and some keyword, the ones with the most views or good sales percentages.
Sales are slow. Either people are fixated on news re the virus and the vaccines or they're all busy buying presents and trimming trees and such.
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I agree, but I don't see the point in spending more money on ads right now. I don't have any home runs that are consistently bringing in sales or I would keep those.
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Yep, my ad spend has dwindled a lot since I reined in the expensive bids. I guess a lot of people are competing for the same eyeballs.
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Does AMS autotarget shift targets w/ea ad impression event or are targets constant throughout ad run? Scouring all my Bryan ads today to prepare for a refreshed run at AMS Jan 1 and don't see autotarget has been much help so far.
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I just threw a little money at newsletter ads to see what would happen. Immediate net loss, of course, but the increased page reads might lead to more for the whole series. One can hope so, anyway. I've scheduled a few more newsletter ads for January just to pretend I am doing something useful.
Meanwhile, despite upped budgets, Amazon is not showing my ads. In ten days it spent four dollars. That's sad.
My next move, a more expensive one, is to change the cover of my western series starter. Newer covers come across as much crisper, so it needs an update. Then I'll see if my old ad will show my new cover and start moving again, or if I need more drastic action. I'm leaning toward creating new Facebook ads.
A BookBub cpc ad has cost $10 so far and earned $4. Could be worse. I didn't discount the book.
My Amazon UK ad for my one nonfiction title continues to earn steady money at 10 cents a click. This is the book I published as a family obligation that I never expected would even sell a hundred copies. It has far, far outstripped that number.
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Does AMS autotarget shift targets w/ea ad impression event or are targets constant throughout ad run? Scouring all my Bryan ads today to prepare for a refreshed run at AMS Jan 1 and don't see autotarget has been much help so far.
Do you run the search term report to see what books are getting sales and clicks from your auto target ads? That's the biggest use of the auto target ads, for me anyway. There was a popular book that the auto ad really liked, I got a lot of clicks, but not a huge amount of sales. I would have targeted that author but it was her first book.
All my ads shut off on the 20th and I'm still getting free downloads and a handful of sales. Really don't see a huge difference between that and when the ads were running. I was thinking of firing up some ads for Jan 1st, but now I'm not sure. I may hold off until my WIP progress is finished, then started running ads on book 1 of that series.
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Yep, did that to help put together ads running for month of Jan - tho' surprised how little useful data autotarget ads provided, at least at my subterranean level. Bryan helped me move up to a consistent daily level of sales/reads and I'm pleased. But that level is far from my goal. So I consider myself still struggling on Bryan's first level of effort, and disappointed I haven't done better. Espec as everything I write is a work of unparalled genius. :icon_rolleyes:
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Yeah, I didn't get any miracles aka find any unicorn ads. Did you not get a lot of clicks or sales on the auto ads? I usually found they were useful for finding relevant keywords.
Keeping track of everything on a spreadsheet will be useful for me when I jump back into it.
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Now that I have a full year of AMS data and can see some patterns, here is a tip:
If you're experimenting with AMS ads and are a newbie DON'T start in November or December.
Amazon burns through your ad dollars at 2-4 x the normal monthly rate in Nov.-Dec. in the lead up to Christmas, as more people are on their site shopping and "browsing". Those browsers really do run up your click bill!!
So, if you're new and experimenting, these are not the months for you. The data will not reflect your ad's performance during the rest of the year.
For me personally, my sales stayed about the same in November and December, but my AMS ad spend tripled. These are the months of the looky-loos!
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Thanks. Maybe I will fire up some ads in January. Which is like two days away. Mid January.
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I've got a couple of January countdowns and newsletter ads scheduled. It's hardly worth the effort to pause my Amazon ads, since they aren't even spending a dollar a day right now. Nevertheless, in 2020 I managed to drop a couple thousand dollars on ads, mostly on Amazon, making a slim profit. Not a great year for selling my books, but I was happy enough to have written and published them. Still am.
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That was the conundrum I was in. The spending was really small per day, but I hadn't had a sale attributed to ads in a while. I don't do KU and wasn't seeing sales in books 2 and 3 of my trilogies. So it was just eating away at my profitability click by click.
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Most of my stuff is wide now. Ebook sales are up, and page reads are still maintaining their average.
Re the AMS ads, I've left everything as-is, although I've taken to lowering the highest bids each day, bringing down anything which has a CPC above my wince range.
Over the past couple of days I've actually seen better profitability, probably because people are buying the ebook edition instead of (maybe) adding my books to their library. Almost all my books are 4.99, with maybe 400-500 KENPC, so I earn twice as much from a sale than a readthrough. (Royalty of approx 3.70 vs readthrough of $1.60-$2 if I'm lucky. The latter is even worse outside the US.)
Starting to see a few sales on Apple and Google and Kobo, but I've not announced that I'm wide yet, nor promoted in any way.
I've completely redone my spacejock.com.au website since Christmas - all 400 pages - and included random banner and sidebar ads for my own books. As a follow-up I did the 500+ pages as spacejock.com as well.
Next I'm going to update the hundreds and hundreds of links for my ebooks over at Bookbub, bringing those up to date.
Eventually I plan to run AMS ads plus some new Bookbub ads with links to all retailers, perhaps even avoiding Amazon so I'm not competing for clicks against KU bidders. For example, a Bookbub ad targeting Kobo in Canada.
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Bookbub ad for Kobo in Canada sounds interesting. Good luck wide (welcome back).
Edit - I went and created one ad with no ad copy. I didn't get any really well performing hooks with my experimentation with ads Oct-Dec. I did figure out that the algos decided they hated the hook that did really well for me in 2019, they wouldn't show it at all. I think doing no hook ads won't suck up too much time or money, so maybe I'll stick with that for a while. Going to create another one for my WWII book now.
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Off the bat things didn't quite go to plan. Book 1 in my main series was delisted by Google due to a conflict with someone else's published version of the same book. (My original trade publisher has the paperback novel listed on Google books, but not as an ebook.)
Sorted that out, then they locked my account for a review.
On the Kobo side, I decided to apply for a freebie promo for that same book, and they immediately reduced the price to zero. Amazon price matched it within about 0.03 of a second, and it's still free (there) a day later, but nowhere else. I'm not too fussed as this book was perma-free for the best part of a decade, so a few more downloads won't hurt. It certainly increased the clicks (and outlay) on my suite of ads for that ebook though...
Smashwords all went okay, so the Apple and B&N listings are up. Last night I spent about 3 hours updating/adding bookbub store links for all my ebooks. I didn't bother with the short stories.
Tomorrow another 4 of my books drop out of KU, and I've also cancelled the renewal on everything else. (March for one series, April for the other)
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Off the bat things didn't quite go to plan. Book 1 in my main series was delisted by Google due to a conflict with someone else's published version of the same book. (My original trade publisher has the paperback novel listed on Google books, but not as an ebook.)
Sorted that out, then they locked my account for a review.
On the Kobo side, I decided to apply for a freebie promo for that same book, and they immediately reduced the price to zero. Amazon price matched it within about 0.03 of a second, and it's still free (there) a day later, but nowhere else. I'm not too fussed as this book was perma-free for the best part of a decade, so a few more downloads won't hurt. It certainly increased the clicks (and outlay) on my suite of ads for that ebook though...
Smashwords all went okay, so the Apple and B&N listings are up. Last night I spent about 3 hours updating/adding bookbub store links for all my ebooks. I didn't bother with the short stories.
Tomorrow another 4 of my books drop out of KU, and I've also cancelled the renewal on everything else. (March for one series, April for the other)
Um, that's weird.
AMS - No hook ads - My WWII book has one impression since yesterday. The psych thriller almost 2500 with one click for 6 cents. :shrug
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AMS - No hook ads - My WWII book has one impression since yesterday. The psych thriller almost 2500 with one click for 6 cents.
Curious to hear how those w/more AMS success interpret notthatamanda's result (and ideas for a fix). As my own effort to move up to Bryan's second level of ads has resulted in a similar collapse of my daily sales/reads. :icon_sad: (Or is the news from Washington DC more entertaining than any book?)
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May I ask how often you're checking your ad stats? It can take weeks for the data to populate. The stats in KDP and AMS don't populate in anything close to real time.
I only check my ads once every two weeks or so, and that gives me a good enough idea of ad spend vs royalties.
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My psych thriller has 40+ reviews with a 4 star average. My WW2 has one 3 star rating. Also the psych thriller market is bigger, so less opportunities for WW2 to be placed period. Also my psych thriller has a much longer and better sales history. So I think those might affect the algos decisions to place it.
I'm not trying to fix it so much, I'm just going to add an ad or two every day and try to get some more visibility cheap.
I think I could entice more people to click on it with decent ad copy, I'm just lazy about doing it right now.
Not sure it any of this is helpful.
I think people are quite preoccupied right now.
My plan is to try for a big push on the WW2 book when I get ready to release the sequel.
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May I ask how often you're checking your ad stats?...I only check my ads once every two weeks or so, and that gives me a good enough idea of ad spend vs royalties.
I check ads weekly, which means I'm gun-jumping. I check sales/reads daily. Thanks :littleclap for the advice - I'll make the intervals longer.
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Weekly might be all right. But I do think it takes two weeks to get a more accurate reading.
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In 2019 my total daily budget was easily over $500 a day. I checked it daily just to make sure I hadn't made any mistakes and nothing weird was happening. I agree you have to give it time to see results, but be sure you can live with the consequences if your ads start spending higher all of a sudden. I've seen it happen. I monitor daily and try to be patient for results. I'm not very good at the second part.
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Yep, I've done Kobo promos in the past and I thought the prompt to set the price was meant to be 'this is the price it will be if we accept the deal'.
The only other possibility is that the price was already set to zero, dating from before my foray into KU. I thought I checked everything, but activating and checking 20+ titles across three or four retailers whilst uploading covers and content ... let's just say it would be easy to miss one. (On smashwords, all my books were at the 2.99 price until I realised it.)
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Since part of my point in being wide is keeping the permafrees at zero I've never been in the position to have that happen.
Side note - I just got turned down for the first in series free again. They find me about as attractive as bookbub does.
Edit - I took my ad that has 4000 impressions since Wednesday and used those keywords to make another ad with my best hook from my Q4 experimentation. I did sell two paperbacks of that book this week, but I can't be sure if they are Amazon or not cause ranks never update (hyperbole cause the delays are annoying).
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Not a single impression today after racking up 2500 in two days on one ad alone. Anyone else seeing impressions or is the whole thing stuck?
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11k impressions on the US ads store here.
They just accepted my inadvertant permafree for a promo. It's in the SF category, so perhaps there's less competition? After all, so much SF is in KU these days ...
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Not a single impression today after racking up 2500 in two days on one ad alone. Anyone else seeing impressions or is the whole thing stuck?
Not stuck for me. U.S. impressions are on track (7 figures).
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I had to log out and get back in. Thanks guys.
I need to work on my hook. I have a hook that the algos like but the readers are definitely not impressed.
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Now that the rest of my longest-running series is wide, I just created a Bookbub ad for my permafree prequel novel/novella.
I'm only targeting Australia and Canada at this stage, with a $50 budget (each country) for 5-7 days. (I like to split my BB ads up per country, because otherwise the US swallows the entire budget and costs more per click.)
I'm not targeting any authors for these ads, just the Scifi genre. Reason being, CA and AU are already small markets.
By the way, last time I ran wide ads on BB I ended up switching off the Amazon link for each country because it was twice the price per click than the others. I think AMS is the better option for reaching Amazon readers.
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So you're targeting Kobo, Google, Apple, B&N? Just curious.
In the inept category, yesterday I came up with a new hook that I liked and I thought would appeal to readers and the algos. And I spelled one of the words wrong. AMS still granted me 75 impressions. Fixing now.
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I didn't target B&N - I wasn't sure whether they were US only.
I did target Amazon and also added a manual link for Smashwords.
I remember reading somewhere, long ago, that Kobo is supposed to be the #1 store for Canadian ebook buyers, more popular even than Amazon.
In Australia I think it's Apple and Google - maybe because ebook buyers here couldn't get hold of a Kindle initially, and probably still can't buy a Nook, and went straight to reading on phones. Perhaps.
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Yep, just looking at the figures for my Australian wide ad, and the google link has around 4x the views of the other stores.
Unfortunately the google reports/analytics tend to lag 2-3 days, so I won't know whether it's leading to any downloads of the freebie there.
I've had one click on the Kobo link and that immediately showed up as a download on the Kobo dashboard, source country Australia.
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You just doing the bookbub ad for the freebie? I've actually had moderate success with book bub for my full price ww2 book on B&N. Haven't tried other retailers. I should add the preview to book 2 to the D2D version and maybe try again. And try categories instead of individual authors, thanks for the idea.
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For the moment, just the freebie. I'm just waiting for Google to stop suspending/checking/approving my account (second time in 2 weeks right now), and then I'm going to apply for a 99c bookbub on one of my newly-wide series.
Right now the ads are just a token effort. My strategy is promo stacking and Bookbubs, which is why I decided to leave KU.
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The algos seem to like my latest hook for my first book (Hook 9). 500+ impressions since I started ads new to me keywords, versus 200 impressions on my previous best hook (hook 3). Still waiting to see if the readers like it. The no hook at with those keywords is only at 49 impressions.
Edit - my new hook got me 3000 impressions in 24 hours and no clicks. :icon_sad:
Edit again - started a UK ad which doesn't allow hooks
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Some results (at last) for my Bookbub ad. This campaign is for a permafree prequel novella, and I'm just experimenting by advertising wide to Canada and Australia. (Apple, Kobo, Amazon, Google).
The Canadian ad didn't fire up much. In fact, BB sent me an email saying so, and that I was welcome to leave it running but it wasn't high priority for them to show it at my current bids. Never had one of those emails before, so it might be something new. Since they sent the email I have actually had 2 clicks, but they suggested copying it and raising the bid.
For the Aussie ad, I got 6 clicks on Apple (5 converted), 8 clicks on Kobo (6 converted), 4 clicks on Amazon (all 4 converted), and 74 clicks on Google(!) of which at least 52 have converted. It's hard to tell because the Google figures are always 24-48 hours behind. That lot cost me almost $50, which was the amount I decided to put into the experiment.
Over the next few days I'll see whether that particular series attracts any sales on those stores. I mean, if Google shows no sales at all from Australia for a month, then I won't advertise a freebie there again - which was one of the things I wanted to find out.
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My advice if you get one of those bookbub 'your ad isn't performing' emails?
Ignore it.
Today, barely 24 hours later, the ad has gone nuts, spending most of the budget overnight. e.g. 66 clicks on Kobo CA. My guess is that someone else's campaign has been paused (or ended) for the weekend.
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Or their ad ran out of money. Bookbub ads are good at that. They could spend 20 bucks while I took a shower.
I'm frustrated with AMS. My new hook has 6000 impressions in 3 days. No clicks. No sales. I know how it goes; if you don't get clicks the cover is bad, if you don't get sales fix the blurb, but I sold thousands of this book in 2019 with the same cover and blurb. I guess I'll do some more ads because they aren't costing me anything (closing in on spending a solid dollar for the ytd) so what the hey I can pretend I am working.
I got my first follower on my blog yesterday, though I'm not sure what to make of it, their site looks kind of scammy.
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How can I structure an AMS ad (or its custom text) to target KU readers rather than book buyers? I've several books that sell only a few copies ea month but pull in fair #s of page reads. I'd like to jack up the reads. :confused:
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Target authors and ASINs which are in KU.
There's no way to actually target KU readers directly, unfortunately.
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Use KU and Kindle Unlimited in your keywords. I'm not in KU so I use KU and unlimited as negative keywords.
So if you are targeting author Jane Smith have extra keywords Jane Smith KU and Jane Smith Kindle Unlimited.
I haven't done this so I don't know how effective it would be but Kindle offers up keywords phrase like this when the user is searching so presumably some of them choose to click on it.
Your ad will also presumably be shown to non KU users. AFAIK that's as close as you can get to actually targeting KU readers. Also use the top KU books and authors in your categories from the category best sellers list.
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Good advice on getting more KU reads attn and I wll follow - thank you!
BTW, today completes my first full month working at stage 2 of Bryan's AMS plan and (no fault to Bryan) I've made a hash of it. Rather than bldg on the substantial progress I had made w/his stage 1 (tripling sales and doubling reads), sales and reads collapsed by half. Looking at the January data, I suspect Bryan's stage 2 plan requires maintaining a higher CPC than I offered in Jan. I'm going to jack up CPC for Feb and see what happens.
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From what I remember from Bryan's plan he didn't advise raising bids until you were making $500/month profit per book.
I'd be interested in hearing how other people found January. I would describe it as extremely horrible. I think the rising cases/hospitalizations followed by the um, excitement kept everyone preoccupied for a while. Or maybe my books just stink.
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From what I remember from Bryan's plan he didn't advise raising bids until you were making $500/month profit per book.
I'd be interested in hearing how other people found January. I would describe it as extremely horrible. I think the rising cases/hospitalizations followed by the um, excitement kept everyone preoccupied for a while. Or maybe my books just stink.
My January has been meh. A few peaks, but mostly doldrums. But, I haven't had a new release since October. I generally leave my ads and don't tinker too much. I don't ever up bids.
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My January looked nicer because of the cheap newsletter ads I bought to coincide with Kindle Countdowns, but it has still been super meh. I've just finally done a new ad for my big series starter. It's very much like the old ad, but with an updated cover and ad copy and only a small number of keywords (150 if one counts each one as broad, phrase, and exact). We'll see if it even runs. The bids are all low, but the daily budget is relatively high. I would wait a couple of weeks before adjusting the bids.
For some reason I thought you couldn't use Kindle as a keyword. Have I confused that with not being allowed to do it in ad copy?
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AMS offers Jane Smith Kindle and Jane Smith Kindle Unlimited as keywords when you type in Jane Smith as a keyword. I don't use the unlimited ones. I don't know about the ad copy, didn't they used to say Kindle Unlimited right in the ad carousel?, but now it doesn't seem to anymore.
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It shows Kindle Unlimited above the covers of enrolled books, but only if you're viewing the amazon store relevant to your location. Even though my account is with amazon.com, I only see the KU flash when I visit amazon.com.au (australia).
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I'm in the US and I'm only searching in the US. I tried several authors again just now and I don't see any KU books in the carousel. I see Just Released and Preorder flags above the covers but nothing for KU. This could explain why ads are less effective for me these days.
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I've been cancelling AMS ads left right and centre. Of all the ones I'm running, across 4 countries, the auto ones still seem to get the better sales.
I applied for a Bookbub last night (worldwide) and they sent an acceptance this morning - intl only, sadly, but it's cheaper than my weekly AMS spend and always makes more money. I mentioned a while back this was my plan - to exit KU and try for regular bookbubs, or failing that run my own promo stacks.
I still have to book promos for the US at 99c, and I'd better get on with that now!
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Good luck with the bookbub.
Yeah. January my brand ad ate up most of my profit. I dropped the bids on that one down. I'm getting really discouraged. No sales in February yet, just free downloads. Auto ads were always good, and a good source for keywords, but ate up so much money.
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Yep I just booked 14 other promos around the bookbub, to make up for not getting a US deal.
Frankly, if I could rotate promos through all my books every 30-60 days, I wouldn't use AMS at all. All these sites have different rules about frequency though - I think the worst is 60 days between 'same' author and most are 90 days for the same book.
I've noted them all down in a spreadsheet, anyway.
My next series drops out of KU in 30 days, and another 30 days after that. I'll just apply for a BB with each as they're freed.
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Your non AMS plan is about the best we can do these days. I don't think I have enough books to make the numbers work though.
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My new Amazon ad clearly isn't doing anything. It got 142 views in a week. Compare that to 5.6 million views for the original ad, which is still running. Since the new ad costs nothing, I'll keep it running. Well, limping. :icon_sad:
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Trying to get some traction going on my WWII book in preparation for the release of the sequel. Started an ad a couple of days ago and with 30 cents bids I have zero impressions. Changed the bids to 35 cents. If I can't get something going on this the launch is going to be a total bust.
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In doing some calculations for the tax man (yes, it's that season here), I see that my 2020 sales/reads income made up just 2/3 of my AMS costs. Bryan's AMS tng gave me a boost Nov-Dec which I haven't been able to sustain into 2021. I'm back to circling the drain. Beginning to think I was better off when I sold trad and let NYC rob me. **Sobs of self-pity.**
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Amazon just sent me a survey. I told them I want better data, specifically, data on where my ads actually run and for how long. I don't expect Amazon to tell me. I'm supposed to search the entire store to find my ad. This is so contrary to normal advertising it isn't funny.
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I'm up for a self-pity thread. No optimism allowed.
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In doing some calculations for the tax man (yes, it's that season here), I see that my 2020 sales/reads income made up just 2/3 of my AMS costs. Bryan's AMS tng gave me a boost Nov-Dec which I haven't been able to sustain into 2021. I'm back to circling the drain. Beginning to think I was better off when I sold trad and let NYC rob me. **Sobs of self-pity.**
I totally feel your pain. It's a lousy situation. Amazon's advice is conflicting and doesn't work. Bryan's advice, which at least he updates as he sees which way the wind is blowing, also doesn't work (remember, I did 30 category ads; the result was meh).
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Here’s my analysis for why I can’t make AMS sell tons of my books:
- I’m not the genius writer I think I am. (Don’t be ridic!)
- Amazon hates me. (But it doesn’t even know my name.)
- I need to buy higher quality sacrificial goats. (Makes sense.)
- Or timetravel back to the last month when I actually made a profit. (Where’s Einstein when I really need him?)
- Readers are too stupid to appreciate the beauty of my prose. (Hmm.)
Which means I can:
- Raise CPC bids to spend more in one month than I lost all last year on AMS in hopes of finally getting some attention.
- Or keep stumbling along dreaming of a lightning strike one day. (Joyous success or to put me out of my misery.)
- Or just keep plugging away, understanding that, as all art is a con game, so is advertising, and I’ve just got to out-con the AMS game. (Ooof!)
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...
- I need to buy higher quality sacrificial goats. (Makes sense.)
...
Damn it, I knew something was wrong with my marketing ritual. I need to drop the newts and go with higher quality goats!
Cheers,
R.C.
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I need to stand on the corner waving $20 bills. Amazon has spent $2.18 of my budget so far this month. No WONDER all my sales and reads are coming from paid newsletter ads.
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Call me comically inept for sure. I spent an hour dramatically increasing the keyword bids on my two nonperforming ads. Then I added new keywords and I not only accepted Amazon's suggested dollar figure but actually went slightly over.
The question is, will Amazon spend my money now, or did I just waste an hour of my life?
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I did a bunch of ads last night sitting next to my husband on the couch while he watched a basketball game. If I hadn't been doing that I would have been reading reddit. So wasted time either way for me.
Lily - do you know how to increase all the bids on an ad at once or were you trying to be more selective on each keyword? Increasing the bids on every keyword in the target group should take a couple of seconds.
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I did a bunch of ads last night sitting next to my husband on the couch while he watched a basketball game. If I hadn't been doing that I would have been reading reddit. So wasted time either way for me.
Lily - do you know how to increase all the bids on an ad at once or were you trying to be more selective on each keyword? Increasing the bids on every keyword in the target group should take a couple of seconds.
No, I don't, but I was adjusting them based on their current bids, so adding 20 cents to each did not produce the same bid figure uniformly. I suppose my next step would be to do a universal bid hike on the keywords, a hike to some improbable dollar figure.
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There is a check box to the left of each keyword. Check the box at the top of that column and adjust bid will come up above the keywords. You could adjust them all to the highest bid you want and then selectively go down the list and move some down. Hope that's helpful.
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We measure our effectiveness by sales, but I've spent hundreds in the past 2-3 months advertising one particular book, targeting the readers of books and authors I think are a good match. Sales have barely covered the ad spend, never mind the royalty.
This book was released on Kindle in 2011. Over the past 5-8 years the also-boughts have been a mess, and I swear I've never seen it in the carousel for another title on Amazon (also-boughts, also looked at, recommended) unless I paid to show it on the product page.
Well, slowly, gradually, it's been creeping into view, and now when I look at random targets I see my book in their also-boughts and also-looked-at.
As a result, the daily sales have steadily increased until they're sitting nicely above the 90- and 30-day average. And 90% of these sales are in the US, which tells me it's the visibility and the amazon algos leading the charge, because I'm paying the same amount to advertise in the UK and sales there are currently minimal.
So what's my point?
You cannot measure your AMS ad performance on sales alone. There's an invisible hand at work, guiding the amazon algos so that more of the people looking at your book are likely to buy it.
How to make this work?
First, spend on ads targeting specific other titles related to your book. In my case, popular humorous scifi like Space Team, Earthcent, Bob and Nikki. This can be expensive, because people using a scattergun approach and paying heaps for bids will be all over the books you're targeting.
This step can take weeks. You need sales, even if they're costing more to get than you're earning.
Now, once those targeted books start showing in the Also-boughts on YOUR product page, you can fire up auto-ads. These should be cheaper than the targeted bids above, and because you've already trained AMS to a certain extent, they should show your book on the same product pages above, but at a lower cost.
As you make sales, keep checking several target product pages, going through the also-bought carousel until (hopefully) you see your book. Also check the ads carousel to see if your auto-ad is showing. If it's on page 40 or something, you'll need to increase your bid.
I started all this in Sept/Oct last year, and only now am I seeing the benefits. It's like all the various parts of the AMS and Amazon platform have finally meshed and I can see the steps to (hopefully) reproduce it.
I spent way too much in the earlier months, mostly on expensive auto-ad bids which I was running before Amazon knew who to show them to. Running the targeted campaigns first, training the algos, is the key.
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This is pretty much the experience I had in 2019 only I got there faster. High bids buy you the chance to compete and if your books sell the algos learn to like you a lot. Congratulations. I hope it continues for you for a long time.
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Thanks! I've read many times about cliffs and the difficulty of getting amazon to notice older books, but if this works out I have several other series I can apply it to.
I don't think it's anything special about my book btw. I just think I spent enough on narrowly-targeted ads to make it work, which was the reason for my post.
But whatever the spend, high or low, I think 'highly targeted ads even though they may not be profitable' followed by auto ads with lower bids (which should be profitable or breakeven) might be a working strategy. At least until the algos change or something else comes along to spin the crystal ball off its axis.
I think I said very early on in this thread that I was happy to throw some money at AMS in an attempt to fix my also-boughts.
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The conundrum I'm in is 2020 was so bad I'm not sure I want to spend a lot to try to get the ball rolling. My success in 2019 was on my first book (2014) and my newest one. I need to do the tax form and see how much I actually netted, I'd happily put that into advertising, but I know it's going to be real depressing and probably not enough to make an impact. I liked Bryan Cohen's approach because it focused on profitability, but with low bids I couldn't get anything started.
In good news, I got two more subscribers yesterday on my mailing list. I think the tags for my posts must be doing something because none of my books have my website in them (started working on that this week).
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Do you have a subscriber magnet? Short story/prequel/short audiobook? I found that was a good way to gain subs.
The other way was to run FB ads which led to a bookfunnel page with a freebie, where they had to sign up to get the book.
The downside with some of these methods is a list full of freebie seekers, but it's not that important unless you're at the threshold between mailerlite subscriber levels (e.g. mine is the same cost from 2k to 5k, so having 3k or 4k costs the same.)
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Working on it. My book that I'm releasing in April, one of the MC writes a story that she submits to a magazine and it gets published. So I'm writing that story as a magnet. Put my mailing list sign up link at the end of the new book with a promise to send it when it is done. (Be forewarned, you guys are going to have to talk me through book funnel) My kids had last week off so I didn't write, but I should be able to finish it up pretty quickly.
I'm not on Facebook, but maybe a google ad eventually. I'm a ways from worrying about paying mailchimp because my list is too big. Like from here to Jupiter a ways.
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Simon and notthatamanda - thank you for this exchange - very helpful! Now I feel less like :HB
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Some strange magic has happened - I've begun to break even on AMS ad spend vs sales. Plus see a bit of profit overall. Bryan's teaching and experimenting w/lots of the good advice on this thread did it. Now I'm terrified to make any further changes or I'll jinx everything.
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You can add more ads with the hooks that seem to be working for new key words. If you've made it onto the first step the success you have had so far may make the algos like those books on new ads right off the bat. And congratulations. Keep a sharp eye on your end dates so nothing working gets turned off by mistake.
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Went through and upped the bids on my WWII book ads in anticipation of release of the sequel in April. I need to add more ads too, I haven't sold a copy of the WWII book since early December.
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Following notthatamanda's advice, last night I fired up a new ad, almost immediately got 93 impressions producing one click for one $7.99 sale at 9 cents CPC. notthatamanda is my new goddess! Of course, now I expect her magic to work forever. Grin
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I prefer "Queen of the World" but can't seem to get it to happen. I would be benevolent.
Not to be bossy, but keep adding ads. Look at your also boughts, the best sellers in the categories, the authors getting the top page of the carousel of the best sellers. Not financial advice, YMMV, if an erection lasts more than 4 hours seek medical attention, etc, etc and so forth.
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I prefer "Queen of the World" but can't seem to get it to happen. I would be benevolent....
Empress Amanda has a ring to it... Just sayin.
Cheers,
R.C.
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I just want the tiara. Oh and to bestow benevolent acts.
Too soon to say if upping my bids this morning did anything. Patience is not one of Empress Amanda's virtues.
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Created new category ads for my WW2 book and sequel. Never had much luck with category ads for that book, they did work well for my women's fiction/psychological fiction but were expensive. I guess this is Hail Mary number 7. Next week I'll add Hail Mary #8 - automatic ads if (when?) this strategy doesn't work.
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Thanks! I've read many times about cliffs and the difficulty of getting amazon to notice older books, but if this works out I have several other series I can apply it to.
I don't think it's anything special about my book btw. I just think I spent enough on narrowly-targeted ads to make it work, which was the reason for my post.
But whatever the spend, high or low, I think 'highly targeted ads even though they may not be profitable' followed by auto ads with lower bids (which should be profitable or breakeven) might be a working strategy. At least until the algos change or something else comes along to spin the crystal ball off its axis.
I think I said very early on in this thread that I was happy to throw some money at AMS in an attempt to fix my also-boughts.
Simon, I had a similar experience as you. The first advertising I did was too broad and it messed up the also boughts. In addition, the book advertised never showed up in anyone else's also boughts, similar to, or also viewed. Even when it was ranked as high as 10k in the US store. To fix it, I scaled down my ads to a more narrow group of books and authors (about 350 keywords in all). It took about three or four months to clean up the also boughts.
Then I saw your post about bidding high on extremely specific keywords and figured I'd give it a try. I started by bidding higher on about 50 keywords. I haven't done any crazy bids yet (highest is .52), but I'm getting sales for the most specific keywords and finally showing up in other books' also viewed. And finally, finally, finally getting more organic sales. Now I'm in the process of raising bids on keywords that are the closest match to the book and are getting sales.
Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for your idea.
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You're welcome! It's just common sense really, but even so I stumbled into it by accident. I've been advertising almost non-stop on AMS since March 2018, and it's taken me this long and a lot of $$$ to discover that two plus two equals four.
I still like ASIN-targeted ads, but I think if you're running multiple ads on the same book they take a back seat to keywords in the AMS system.
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If you think a 52-cent bid is high, you haven't tried to advertise a romance. (Well, I know you haven't.) I recently started an ad with 57-cent bids across the board and a $10 daily budget. Tightly targeted to non-steamy contemporary Western romance. Only fifty keywords in all three versions, broad, exact, and phrase, so 150 total. Nicely rewritten ad copy. Nada. The ad hasn't served.
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After raising my bids to 50 cents (not romance) yesterday I got 8 clicks. Some may have been in the wee hours of the morning since the search term report from yesterday only shows one. That was on a book of Walt Whitman poems. No offense Walt but I don't think you are the magic bullet keyword that I am looking for.
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RE high bids: I've one book that draws in 50% of all my sales and shows a profit after AMS costs. How can I juice it up? After much Bryaning, I have its ads set at 21 cents up/down. Should I jump to some astronomical CPC w/a view to easing down until I find a CPC sweet spot or do the reverse or sacrifice more goats?
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More goats.
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RE high bids: I've one book that draws in 50% of all my sales and shows a profit after AMS costs. How can I juice it up? After much Bryaning, I have its ads set at 21 cents up/down. Should I jump to some astronomical CPC w/a view to easing down until I find a CPC sweet spot or do the reverse or sacrifice more goats?
More ads with more keywords. Bryan's advice was not to raise the bids until you were clearing $500 month PROFIT on a book. (Whether you want to follow that or not is up to you, but that is what he said.) Look at the also boughts and top spots on the sponsored carousel of the books that are selling your books for new authors and book titles for keywords for your new ads.
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Category - American Fiction Anthologies
Got impressions and a click(50 cents) for a book that has copies of the Declaration of Independence and other historical documents. Pretty steamed. Went through and reduced my bids on all the anthology categories to 5 cents.
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Something I should have figured out 2 years ago--
Wanted to advertise on a particular author and their titles, more than 30 of them. (I know about the data scraper but I don't have Chrome on my laptop) Googled for a list of of the author's books. Cut and pasted that into an excel worksheet. Cut and pasted from excel into the AMS keyword field. This is going to make creating ads a lot faster so I ramp up the rate at which I get frustrated that nothing I do with AMS seems to work.
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This is fascinating. I'm still running my new ad for my western romance series starter, an ad that according to Amazon has resulted in 602 page reads and zero sales. I started it a month ago. Tonight Amazon emailed me saying it's out of budget and I should boost the budget. Okaaaay...But I started the ad at $10 and finally lowered it to $2 because it wasn't doing anything and now Amazon says it ought to be $15 a day. On the basis of...???
Meanwhile, the other ad for that title is also out of budget, and Amazon thinks that daily amount should be $3. :icon_think: :HB
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So for the YTD I'm about -$5 on ads, if you consider the books I am advertising on. No sales credited to ads. Books 2 and 3 of my first trilogy are propping up my bottom line. I let a bunch of ads expire on March 1st. Got 3 decent clicks on relevant books for less than the 50 cent bid yesterday. I'll start new ads with those. Hopefully since the algos think those books are relevant they'll want to give the books a good chance with decent placement.
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This is fascinating. I'm still running my new ad for my western romance series starter, an ad that according to Amazon has resulted in 602 page reads and zero sales. I started it a month ago. Tonight Amazon emailed me saying it's out of budget and I should boost the budget. Okaaaay...But I started the ad at $10 and finally lowered it to $2 because it wasn't doing anything and now Amazon says it ought to be $15 a day. On the basis of...???
Meanwhile, the other ad for that title is also out of budget, and Amazon thinks that daily amount should be $3. :icon_think: :HB
I take all AMS recommendations with a grain of salt.
"You should bid $4.52 to win auctions for this keyword." - Haha. Nice try, but I'm doing great at $0.XX.
"Your campaign exceeded its daily budget and it's only 3:30. You should increase it to $XXX." - Nah, the campaign is doing its job as is.
"You should schedule a meeting with one of our experts. We can help you with your ads." - LOL, pass. I'm more experienced than your "experts." And judging from past conversations, more knowledgeable, too.
Ignore all AMS recommendations. They might one day be worth considering. But right now, nope.
Nothing trumps my own data.
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With AMS, some things work until they stop working, some things never work and then suddenly do, it's impossible to copy someone else's success, and I'm beginning to feel as I felt when a frantic new parent - no one has ever been on this frontier before and we're all pioneers. There's no science to any of this (short of mind-reading AMS) but it's just so much :HB fun, isn't it?
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With AMS, some things work until they stop working, some things never work and then suddenly do, it's impossible to copy someone else's success, and I'm beginning to feel as I felt when a frantic new parent - no one has ever been on this frontier before and we're all pioneers. There's no science to any of this (short of mind-reading AMS) but it's just so much :HB fun, isn't it?
It can take up your whole day, every day, if you let it. And the ad seminars! At least the ones hawking expensive hand-holding courses have some content. Amazon's were garbage.
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Oh that reminds me, is anyone doing Bryan's course on Bookbub ads today at 3? We have an orthodontist appoinment to go to and I'm not changing that (speaking of doing everything wrong).
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I listened to only some of it.
Put the discount price on the ad image.
99 cents is the best price compared to other discount prices.
Target authors rather than categories.
Add categories to narrow the audience.
People counted as fans of an author include anyone who clicked through their newsletter ad.
Test platform by platform.
Use the Related Authors tool, one author per ad.
Target your fans, then the fans of similar authors. Avoid targeting big name authors. Look for similar tropes and themes.
Use author targets whose books are wide if yours are or in KU if yours are.
Any of this sound new? It doesn't to me. I may have missed something thrilling. If you registered you can certainly listen to the rebroadcast.
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I finally have an ad thats getting traction.
It's still losing a ridiculous amount of money not sure i believe that or not but here is the stats.
4.7k impressions
15 clicks
1 purchase
47 page reads.
Im rolling in it now :icon_rofl:
Though seriously this is good right? It might take a while to built up but its going somewhere ... ish.
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Actually, your stats sound pretty good. Applying the standards I've seen used most frequently of 1K impressions should produce 1 click and 10 clicks should win 1 sale (or page equiv), you've made a good start w/this ad :littleclap!
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I listened to only some of it.
Put the discount price on the ad image.
99 cents is the best price compared to other discount prices.
Target authors rather than categories.
Add categories to narrow the audience.
People counted as fans of an author include anyone who clicked through their newsletter ad.
Test platform by platform.
Use the Related Authors tool, one author per ad.
Target your fans, then the fans of similar authors. Avoid targeting big name authors. Look for similar tropes and themes.
Use author targets whose books are wide if yours are or in KU if yours are.
Any of this sound new? It doesn't to me. I may have missed something thrilling. If you registered you can certainly listen to the rebroadcast.
I'm not familiar with the related authors tool. Thanks for writing this up.
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As I :HB against the AMS wall, curious to find that a book of general (post-Vietnam war) fiction I never thought would sell has begun to Bryan a copy or two a day. Nothing goes right for me w/AMS and then this freak jumps up. If only I could bottle freak.
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As I :HB against the AMS wall, curious to find that a book of general (post-Vietnam war) fiction I never thought would sell has begun to Bryan a copy or two a day. Nothing goes right for me w/AMS and then this freak jumps up. If only I could bottle freak.
I'm seeing the same thing. It's like a roller coaster.
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Warning - late last year I was trying to set up the new Sponsored Brands campaigns, and I created about two dozen of the things because Amazon kept rejecting them.
Yesterday they approved ALL of them (I received about 35 emails). All of the campaigns have expired (show Ended) BUT they're displaying and costing me money.
I can't pause them, change the bids or do anything to stop them, so I've emailed support. Every option on the ads is greyed out. But they're running.
Just letting everyone know, because if you set up a Sponsored Brand ad any time since they made them available, and it wasn't approved, it might be running now.
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I selected all the active, ended ads and archived them, which was the only bulk option available. When I look at the Archived Ads list, they're all stopped now. So, that seems to have fixed it.
Gonna be a lot of upset people though.
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Warning - late last year I was trying to set up the new Sponsored Brands campaigns, and I created about two dozen of the things because Amazon kept rejecting them.
Yesterday they approved ALL of them (I received about 35 emails). All of the campaigns have expired (show Ended) BUT they're displaying and costing me money.
I can't pause them, change the bids or do anything to stop them, so I've emailed support. Every option on the ads is greyed out. But they're running.
Just letting everyone know, because if you set up a Sponsored Brand ad any time since they made them available, and it wasn't approved, it might be running now.
WHAAAATTTTT?????? What a bleeping scam. Thanks for posting this. Off to check now.
Edit - I only found 4 brand ads and none of them were delivering. Thanks again. I don't open those emails but now I guess I'm going to have to.
Edit 2 - Went in and archived all my ads that ended in December. They won't let you restart an ad that has ended but will do this. Enfuriating.
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As I :HB against the AMS wall, curious to find that a book of general (post-Vietnam war) fiction I never thought would sell has begun to Bryan a copy or two a day. Nothing goes right for me w/AMS and then this freak jumps up. If only I could bottle freak.
Well, congratulations. Once the book starts selling my experience is the clicks get cheaper. You may want to add more ads. YMMV etc...
My stats for the year - 200K impressions for the year - 132 clicks - no sales attributed to ads. 5 sales of my psych thriller this year, none of the WWII book which is what I am focusing on.
Category ads are yielding some good keywords for me but are expensive. I think Powerball is a better option and bought the next 7 draws last week.
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These were specifically Brand Ad campaigns which were originally rejected because of my brand logo. (They wanted an author photo. I used my imprint logo.)
All of those were suddenly accepted a few days ago, so unless you had that same experience I doubt the ads will have magically reactivated like mine did.
Incidentally, the original rejection said 'no logo uploaded'. What it meant was 'you uploaded a logo but we didn't like it.' Hence me trying 30+ times.
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Weird question. Does a person reading the next book in the series count towards pg reads for your click?
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No. Once it was 'all sales resulting from the click over a 3 week period' but now it's the click and nothing else.
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What if it's a brand ad and it's the first three books in a series? And if someone buys or reads all three books within two weeks? Are you saying they don't attribute sales unless they result in a sale immediately? Just curious.
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Just stopped by to say that I accidentally did a tiny promo stack and that's why Amazon is finally spending my ad budget. Two ad newsletters in a row, plus my own newsletter. A tiny trickle and then a nice chunk of sales. Now Amazon intends to wipe out my profit by spending all my ad budget for the month as quickly as possible (which they say they can do, so $5 a day is $150 they can spend however they please). That is why they've been pestering me to add to my budget. Mystery solved.
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Category - American Fiction Anthologies
Got impressions and a click(50 cents) for a book that has copies of the Declaration of Independence and other historical documents. Pretty steamed. Went through and reduced my bids on all the anthology categories to 5 cents.
Despite my attempts to reduce my bids on all anthology categories I got one yesterday at 50 cents. Looked at that ad and turned out the specific category had a suggested bid of 13 cents. Going to check all my ads for anthology categories again and will probably do another sweep to make sure all ads that I started before this year are archived.
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I'm new to AMS and I finally made a profitable ad. Whee! A few notes in case it's helpful:
1. ACOS isn't a great metric because it gives credit for the full sales price when Amazon is only paying 70% of the sales price. So you need to cut that number down to actually assess ROI. But then you need to imaginatively add in potential read through? The numbers help but the math still feels fuzzy.
2. My ad that targets specific ASINs of very similar ebooks is running profitably, even though click-through % is tiny.
3. My keyword ad for my subgenre is running at a loss. I've cut my bid amount to stop it from burning down my daily budget, and I'll be working on my blurb to see if I can improve things there.
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So I started a new ad targeting a big author in a genre similar to mine but not the same.
The clicks are horrifically expensive. Like mind numbing, but i'm getting a click for ever 125 impressions i cant math.
Would it be a good idea to develop relevance with this author. Because there is no way the cpc will be worth it even if i sell every 4th click.
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I think you have to reduce the bid. If the algos think it is relevant they will give you the placement at the lower price.
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You could also try halving the bid but using bid+ (or whatever it's called now) with a 100% boost. The net effect ought to be the same.
I tend to bid lower and use 20-50% in the 'overbid' setting.
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Simon made me do it. He goes big w/AMS bids and I copied. Big CPC bid up/down, big daily budget, no ad text, chose several dozen of the AMS-recommended search terms w/full three-spread. Did that last nite, woke up this AM to find 627 impressions (yes, peanuts) for 1 click (even peanutier) @ 25 cents (hmmm) for 1 sale of a paperback at $15.95 (yay!). Of course, this one freak sale could be AMS's devilish trick to get more of my ad $$ but one can dream. :doh:
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Odd note i'm still seeing a click for ever 125 impressions for this author. But zero sales. Yet her name is now showing up in my also boughts and my also viewed. Is it lag?
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Blame me if it doesn't work but praise your advertising acumen if it does ;-)
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Odd note i'm still seeing a click for ever 125 impressions for this author. But zero sales. Yet her name is now showing up in my also boughts and my also viewed. Is it lag?
You don't need to get a sale for it to be in the also viewed. And you don't need a sale credited to ads to show up in someone else's also boughts. So it could be a lag, or not.
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Ok this is odd. So one of the authors books i'm targeting has resulted in 3 sales and like 6-7 borrows maybe more, but they don't show in my also boughts or in my also viewed. I have many pages of them an not one of this authors boo. is that normal or does that just mean its not enough sales in comparison to show up?
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ok weird question. i set a daily cap on spending for one campaign at $10 but it spent $20 can it do that? can i file a complaint or something?
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ok weird question. i set a daily cap on spending for one campaign at $10 but it spent $20 can it do that? can i file a complaint or something?
I think because it is based on the monthly average total. So if it was running for 5 days and you spent only $5 per day the next day it could add the 25 you didn't spend to the 10 you have for that day.
From : https://advertising.amazon.com/help?ref_=AAC_gnav_support_center&entityId=ENTITY3H6KGJ2W0IEU1#GTGPQGUXNCTHE2DS
The daily budget amount is averaged over the course of a calendar month. On any given day you could spend less than your daily budget, or up to 10% more than your average daily budget. This system allows you to benefit from high traffic days.
At the end of the month you will not spend more than the daily budget you’ve set, multiplied by the number of days in that month. Your invoice will be adjusted for any over-delivery, so that you will not be charged for any amount in excess of your monthly charging limit.
We'll notify you when your campaign reaches its daily budget.
For example, if your budget is $100 and you receive $90 worth of clicks on the first day, you could receive up to $110 worth of clicks on the second day. This would bring your total spend over two days to $200, which averages to $100 per day.
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ok weird question. i set a daily cap on spending for one campaign at $10 but it spent $20 can it do that? can i file a complaint or something?
I think because it is based on the monthly average total. So if it was running for 5 days and you spent only $5 per day the next day it could add the 25 you didn't spend to the 10 you have for that day.
From : https://advertising.amazon.com/help?ref_=AAC_gnav_support_center&entityId=ENTITY3H6KGJ2W0IEU1#GTGPQGUXNCTHE2DS
The daily budget amount is averaged over the course of a calendar month. On any given day you could spend less than your daily budget, or up to 10% more than your average daily budget. This system allows you to benefit from high traffic days.
At the end of the month you will not spend more than the daily budget you’ve set, multiplied by the number of days in that month. Your invoice will be adjusted for any over-delivery, so that you will not be charged for any amount in excess of your monthly charging limit.
We'll notify you when your campaign reaches its daily budget.
For example, if your budget is $100 and you receive $90 worth of clicks on the first day, you could receive up to $110 worth of clicks on the second day. This would bring your total spend over two days to $200, which averages to $100 per day.
Thank you!!!
It was seriously scary
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Bryan Says if you only advertise on AMS (as I do), then attribute all sales / reads to AMS to measure cost vs profit. On the billboard theory that if a buyer sees your book mentioned often enough and buys it, then the billboard probably made him/her buy. Which suggests that ads producing tons of impressions, even those not resulting in clicks, are doing you some good. And means I dare not suspend any ad w/high impressions but low sales b/c I can't know if it's working billboard magic on bookbuyers' brains? :confused:
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How can they be charging me $4 $8 $11 for a click? I have dynamic down only selected and no front of the page % set. My max bid for each is less than a $2. Most are less than $1. Can they just charge whatever they want for a click cause this is ridiculous. One click is costing more than my daily budget.
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You have to check your custom and default bid. Something isn't right there. You have to check both.
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Got my first order credited to a sale for the year. 200K impressions, 133 clicks, $30 spend. Which is the meh emoji?
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I believe this one would do: :HB
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If an AMS ad starts to die, what's a cure? Raise/lower budget or CPC? Or kill it and replace it? The Bryan ads I've run seem to fade (in clicks and sales) about the 45 day mark despite my feeding in fresh search terms/targets.
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I vote kill. Instead of adding keywords to existing ads you can start new ads when you have enough keywords. That way you'll always have something that is fresh for the algos to chomp on. YMMV, etc etc and so forth.
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If an AMS ad starts to die, what's a cure? Raise/lower budget or CPC? Or kill it and replace it? The Bryan ads I've run seem to fade (in clicks and sales) about the 45 day mark despite my feeding in fresh search terms/targets.
You can also try to lower your daily budget to see if Amazon will bite.
I would also considering looking at the targeting and seeing if maybe there's a keyword in there that isn't as relevant as you think it is.
I don't recommend killing any ad because you never know if it might start serving again. However, you could probably try to pause the ad for a few days, take some time to look at its targeting and any search terms from readers, and see if maybe you can tweak it. (I wouldn't recommend adding new terms, but pausing some terms might help.)
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My one sale for the year lists the actual royalty, not the sale price. That's new, right? It used to be the sales price which was misleading because it made your ads look more profitable. Or am I remembering it wrong?
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I've discovered why Amazon has been spending my entire ad budget day after day on one title yet there are no sales. The search terms for bdsm, erotic, and others of that ilk that include the word "romance" have been matched by Amazon with my keyword "romance" and the same for those that include "western."
This I think is the result of a change in algorithm. The title of my first in series is somewhat provocative in an old school way, but the previous 90 negative target terms I had were enough to prevent the kink audience from clicking and spending my budget. Now I've had to go back and add several dozen new "negative phrase" and "negative exact" terms to the list. Plus bdsm, which is a huge stretch for the algorithm when all my descriptive keywords are sweet, clean, mild, etc.
Meanwhile, a Fussy Librarian ad for that same title during a Kindle Countdown has resulted in extremely pitiful sales--a mere four so far. The Fussy ads don't cost much but for my books they also don't do much.
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Ninety negative words! Wow that stinks Lily.
Did you get any sales off the BSDM & erotic keywords? If you were getting sales I would think that would increase the algos confidence that they knew what they were doing.
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No, because it's a closed door romance with only a tiny bit of panting here and there prior to the very end. I'm not even sure I mentioned a tongue when they kissed. After people click on the book they realize it's not the "nasty" "spanking" "steamy" book they're looking for. Sheesh!
Edited to add: I don't see how I can escape all these erroneous matches Amazon is making. I've long since put "historical" and "mail order bride" in negative targeting but Amazon has been leading people to my book because the word "romance" matches. There simply are too many combinations for me to list since apparently Amazon will not eliminate a match despite it having a word in my list of negative targets. For instance, "audiobooks." It's not good enough that I've listed it as a negative; if the word "romance" is in the search term Amazon will direct people to my book despite there being no audiobook.
I think this situation calls for: :HB :HB :HB
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I use audio and audible for my negative words and I do negative phrase. I don't get any impressions for people searching for audiobooks even when I was actually doing well on AMS, but maybe the algos have changed a lot since then.
Sorry for your woes.
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Setting up lots of ads for my WWII book in anticipation of book 2's release. Amazon has the price reduced on book 1. Maybe it will help, but it still annoys the heck out of me.
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I'm running ads with high bids and a total budget over 500 a day. Started April 1st, so far not even 10,000 impressions and ten clicks, no sales. I signed up for Bryan Cohen's "Are your Amazon ads not working" class next week. It will probably be too little too late to launch the new book but I'll see what he has to say.
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My rolling AMS disaster means I'm not fit to give anyone advice but I could offer an observation: My ads - some new or merely refreshed the first of each month - start off very slowly but fruit after a wk or two and build toward month's end. (Holding onto that build is my :confused:.) notthatamanda, you may be experiencing a similar pattern this month.
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Thanks for this. It's been a week and I'm used to things starting to take off by now.
Side note - I got the schedule for Bryan Cohen's free ad course and it's the same one I did in October. I kind of figured that would happen. I don't need to sit through the whole thing again. Not sure what I'm going to do, but maybe I'll set up ads next week for the new release versus book 1.
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I agree there's no point to taking that course again. I did somewhere around 30 total category ads under his tutelage and there weren't any results worth noting. I made some with a short deadline, per his instructions, and some with a much longer one. No difference.
It used to be I could publish a new book and do an AMS ad and the ad would engage and the book would sell. Now, nada. The ad doesn't even get going.
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You're wide right? I think AMS is leaning more towards KU books now, unless you are in a small niche it's tough to make any headway.
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Yes, the majority of the ads I ran were for wide titles. I have two series in KU. The new ad for the first in the western romance series has been both costly and ineffective, so I have reverted to the old ad in hopes of eliminating all the traffic from people looking for sleazy sex in a western. Seems to be working so far.
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Well I think the ads netted me another preorder for my next release. Probably won't be enough to make a difference for the launch.
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Finally had a sale credit to the ads I started this month. That makes a grand total of 2. Profitable, yes. Worth the effort? Not even close.
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My ads were flying last month - enough profit over AMS costs to buy a half dozen Big Macs (tho' not w/cheese). Thought I could see even higher uplands ahead. This month, AMS clawed back all that vast profit and I'm chewing broccoli (ugh). I know a foolish-consistency-is-the-hobgoblin-of-small-minds but this roller-coaster ride? Considering bailing (again).
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I could just never get it to scale up.
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With an ad budget of over $400 a day I spend $15.91, got 90K impressions 51 clicks, 1 sale and 1 possible other sale for the month of April. Campaigns all ended yesterday. All that's left is to make sure everything is archived so nothing mysteriously turns back on. If I ever talk about dabbling in AMS again will someone please quote this back to me. Thanks in advance.
Edit - I messed up my stats so I fixed it.
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After a(nother) pandemic summer suffering the mystery of AMS ads and trying all advice offered here, I decided on a radical new approach - go small, go slow and start over. Result: my sales and reads collapsed to 1/3 of what they had been. But I'm turning a profit after AMS costs. I'll let small and slow ride a bit more to see if the profit holds. Then inject money a little at a time. In 1,000 yrs I should be rich. Or is that another triumph of hope over experience?
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Start Rant
Amazon ADs has become almost useless. How is the little guy supposed to compete with no impressions and competitive bids exceeding the price of the book?
End Rant
Start Praise
In the last week of my books' KDP Select commitment, I ran giveaways and used TheFussyLibrarian to advertise the freebies. Over 5k downloads later, my books are sitting on a lot of readers.
Buys and KENP are both trending positively.
End Praise
R.C.
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Start Rant
Amazon ADs has become almost useless. How is the little guy supposed to compete with no impressions and competitive bids exceeding the price of the book?
End Rant
Start Praise
In the last week of my books' KDP Select commitment, I ran giveaways and used TheFussyLibrarian to advertise the freebies. Over 5k downloads later, my books are sitting on a lot of readers.
Buys and KENP are both trending positively.
End Praise
R.C.
Congratulations! You make it sound like you are moving out of KU, make sure every single little box on every single book is unchecked if that is what you want.
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After a(nother) pandemic summer suffering the mystery of AMS ads and trying all advice offered here, I decided on a radical new approach - go small, go slow and start over. Result: my sales and reads collapsed to 1/3 of what they had been. But I'm turning a profit after AMS costs. I'll let small and slow ride a bit more to see if the profit holds. Then inject money a little at a time. In 1,000 yrs I should be rich. Or is that another triumph of hope over experience?
If find i can do this. Make a small profit, but the minute i start to scale up my profit disappears.
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In the last week of my books' KDP Select commitment, I ran giveaways and used TheFussyLibrarian to advertise the freebies. Over 5k downloads later, my books are sitting on a lot of readers.
Early on, I gave away lots of books, too, but never saw reliable follow-on to sales/reads. How do you collect data to prove giveaways are worth doing? I suspect those who grab free books to fill up their Kindles rarely buy.
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I used to add the sales of book 2 and 3 and the money from the KU pages read on those and that would tell me if I made back the money I spent on the promo.
I'm not trying to encourage you to stay in KU, far from it, but I would always do my KU free days in April and get pages read on books 2 and 3 all summer. I think you are right that a high percentage of free downloaders won't buy the rest of the series, you have to really hook them and some won't buy on principle if they like the book because they don't like being tricked into it (despite it being all over the place that it is book 1) but KU readers will check the 2nd and 3rd book if they like it enough and read it there if they can get it.
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Got my invoices from Amazon and Amazon UK ads for October, which advertise only my one nonfiction title. Got my estimate from Book Report on earnings for October, which in my case does not include any wide payments. Despite paltry ad activity, the book being advertised earned twice as much as the ads cost. I am perfectly happy with that.
Now if only I could get Amazon ads for my other books to work again!
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an odd thing happened recently
i've been running dozens of ads on ams since i started publishing books.
none have been profitable. a few got close but mostly i lost lots of money.
until recently.
about a week ago i dropped all but one fb ad, and created a few new ams ads.
all of the sudden all my ams ads are profitable. more than profitable. i made more today than i spent all week on ams ads. dont know what happened.
i have one ad that sells a book with every single click. i just need it to start clicking more.
i expect it to all go away tomorrow, but it's kinda cool.
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:clap:
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an odd thing happened recently...all of the sudden all my ams ads are profitable. more than profitable.
On the off chance that odd is contagious, I'll follow your lead and generate a bunch of new ads. What've I got to lose, money? Ha!
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I dont think any of this matters but if it did here's the ads i created.
First i created a list of authors in my genre. The list has like 40 or so names that were on my now gone also bought list.
Then i created an auto ad with each of my first book in series.
Then i took any author name that sold a book with a click and made an ad with every book they have for sale.
Also oddly the ads that i'm getting cheap clicks dont sell a thing. The ones that are .60cents plus per click are making all the money.
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It's so tempting to plunge into the madness again. :lalala
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I didn't know this was possible!?!?
Nora Roberts/ JD Robb is the biggest romance author (though she might not make the most money)
I digress.
I went to create and ad targeting her name. AMS doesn't recognize it. When i went to check to see if I miss spelled her name, I noticed that there are nooooo sponsored ads on her name. ZERO. ZIp. NADA.
How is it possible to block your name for ads.
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I was curious so I created an ad just to see. Nora Roberts comes up in keywords just fine. Maybe you checked something off wrong?
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does it give you suggested price not found. i could put the name in. but it didn't recognize it for clicks
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It says this:
30 of 30 keywords don't have a suggested bid.
Maybe they set something up in there so that it the suggested bid is greater than $X it doesn't give you anything because people will see it and not bother? Just a guess. There are sponsored ads on Nora Roberts books.
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i dont see them if i search her name. only on the actual book pages which is odd. im spending too much mental energy on this.
thanks for checking.
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i dont see them if i search her name. only on the actual book pages which is odd. im spending too much mental energy on this.
thanks for checking.
Frankly, ignore suggested bids. If a keyword doesn't have suggested bids it could be for multiple reasons (in my experience, when a popular keyword doesn't have a suggested keyword, it's because they are all over the place; less savvy advertisers thinking .50 over the suggested bid is a good idea, savvier advertisers realizing you start with small bids and slowly slip your way up until you find the nice spot that gives you impressions without killing any potential for ROI. JR Ward is one of those authors. Her suggested bids are all over the place, if they exist at all.
In Roberts, case, I would recommend using specific books as keywords. TITLE by AUTHOR for every book that has readers you want to target then low-ball the bid. Impressions will slowly happen. Once they do, slowly inch up the bid by 1 cent until you're at a comfortable spot with impressions/clicks/sales on dash.
However, I did a bunch of testing with different authors. Guess what? I'm not seeing sponsored ads on any author search pages. Looks like big sellers get a better looking page, and there are definitely no sponsored ads. There are other books, but it looks like books that are a better fit from a readers' pov.
This is interesting. Going to have to dig deeper, but it looks like Amazon is actually cleaning up some of the detritus AMS caused.
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Good? Bad? or too soon to tell
AMS isnt my friend.
But i'm kind of starting to see a response to an ad. The bids are high but i have a long series and a decent read through rate, so the cost per click isnt scaring me as much as it was.
here are my stats
8.7k impressions 11clicks 2orders 1+full read through in KENP
for me that seems amazing, but i might just be fooling myself.
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If the roughly accepted rough standard for an AMS ad's success remains you need 1,000 impressions to produce one click and ten clicks to yield one sale, then you've made AMS your friend and how did you manage that?
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no idea?!?! :shrug
I just ran a promo the week after xmas. Which didnt result in a ton of 'sale' on ams. 17clicks 5'sales'
Then after that i raised the click price to one that made my head hurt. Reasonably i need 1 out of ever 5 people that purchase my book to read though and I've made a good profit, so i'm trying not to stress about how much im spending per click.
Amazon encouraged me to raise the budget today so i did. ugh i hate ams.
Edited to add: my book clicked over 100 reviews thanks to this promo. the star rank surprisingly stayed the same. I still have a good chunk of people that 1* because it ends in a cliffhanger even though it's clearly labelled.
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What are the clicks actually costing you versus your bid price? Once you get some traction, via sales, if the algos like the results you may start getting cheaper clicks as the algos will take the odds of a click/sale = money for amazon = a good bet for an impression. I've been out of AMS for a year + but that was how it used to go. Maybe that will make your head hurt less.
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If the roughly accepted rough standard for an AMS ad's success remains you need 1,000 impressions to produce one click and ten clicks to yield one sale, then you've made AMS your friend and how did you manage that?
It's usually a matter of relevance.
Not what (general) you consider to be relevant. But what Amazon believes to be relevant.
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My history with AMS is long and chequered. For years I experimented and at times did well with ads. At the start of the pandemic, my AMS ads were ticking a small but consistent profit. With events... I kind of stopped paying attention. Bad idea because a bit more than a year ago the same ads that I had left alone started losing money. Regularly. That added up. 🙄
So at the start of last year, I started paying attention. I experimented with some ads, different targets, different tag lines or no tag line. Nothing worked. After a couple of months, I said F* it. I cancelled all my ads and walked away from AMS.
Long story even longer, I was watching this thread and decided to try another ad. I already had a list of every medieval historical fiction author who had been on my AB list who I know for a fact are relevant and appear on my Also Read list when that decides to show up. 22 total targeting only authors. I checked to see if it looked like there was anyone I should add, made it standard with no tag line, stuck the bids at what I consider the medium. (50¢) Two days ago the ad went live. I figured at least I would gather some data and maybe it might worth dipping my toe back in.
*scratches head* Of course as soon as I say it is doing well all impressions, clicks, etc. will disappear but today I went and looked at it for the first time.
Impressions 267 Clicks 3 CTR 1.12% CPC $0.24 Orders 1 ACOS 14.23%
Impressions are low though. Still... *scratches head some more*
I assume that ACOS won't last, and damned if I will ever understand AMS. What does it mean? Does it in fact mean anything. Who knows? 🤷♀️
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Ams has lost its mind.
So i have one ad and its working. Spending all its budget. Sales are up. Rank is fairly steady between 30-60k through the day occasionally dippign but thats usually when it pops up to 30k again. It's still profitable.
But now it's saying to raise my budget from $20 to 70 a day!!!!! I'm not sure i want to gamble with that much. But i certainly don't want to tank my best ad. Nor do i want to leave money on the table if it really thinks i could be making more.
What do i do? Leave it at twenty. Move it up to 30, 40, 50. Or go buck wild and turn that bad boy up to 70 a day. I think i might throw up. :icon_think: :shocked: :n2Str17: :help :help
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Do not raise the budget. It's always a waste to do it in response to Amazon saying you should.
If you run out of budget several days in a row and you're actually selling books, well, that's interesting, but what time of day do you run out? Are you really willing to blow your profit on potential late night or west coast sales?
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Is there something wrong with late-night or west coast sales? :icon_think: I'll take those if I can get them.
I don't think I'd raise the amount that drastically but might try raising it to $30 to see how it works. If you have an ad that is actually spending out and getting sales, it is worth testing. But I'd keep a close eye on it.
I may as I mentioned above have an ad that may be doing drip sales and that is better than any have mine done in a couple of years so YAY YOU for getting one to work!! 👍
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It's been running out of budget consistently since it started preforming well. I've raised it every time ams suggested (but they've been small increments) and the sales increased along with the costs. I'm still profitable.
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:clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:
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Is there something wrong with late-night or west coast sales? :icon_think: I'll take those if I can get them.
I don't think I'd raise the amount that drastically but might try raising it to $30 to see how it works. If you have an ad that is actually spending out and getting sales, it is worth testing. But I'd keep a close eye on it.
I may as I mentioned above have an ad that will do drip sales and that is better than any have mine done in a couple of years so YAY YOU for getting one to work!! 👍
Yeah i think i'll try the inbetween number!
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Do not raise the budget. It's always a waste to do it in response to Amazon saying you should.
Not in my experience.
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Do not raise the budget. It's always a waste to do it in response to Amazon saying you should.
Not in my experience.
That's my experience, however. All I can do is relate what happened in my case. When I used to get those notices, I did raise my budget. That did not result in additional sales or page reads; I simply spent more money on the ads. After a while, I gave up on responding since clearly I was just throwing money away.
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Do not raise the budget. It's always a waste to do it in response to Amazon saying you should.
Not in my experience.
That's my experience, however. All I can do is relate what happened in my case.
If you don't state as much, inexperienced advertisers may take your assertion as a universal truth.
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Fair enough.
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What do i do? Leave it at twenty. Move it up to 30, 40, 50. Or go buck wild and turn that bad boy up to 70 a day. I think i might throw up. :icon_think: :shocked: :n2Str17: :help :help
I would raise it slowly. Profiting spending this much is totally awesome. Congrats! But you're at risk at potentially losing $50/day if you go up from 20 to 70 and it doesn't lead to sales. That'd be up to $1500/month. I'd tread carefully and raise slowly. With my ads, when I used to do AMS, I never found an improved profit by ratcheting up my spending based on Amazon's advice.
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So i decided to create a new ad. This time instead of more obscure authors I choose the biggest names in my genres. All but 2 authors had surprisingly reasonable clicks especially compared to the ones i've been using so far.
Within 10minutes my ad was delivering which is odd in itself usually amazon takes a long afternoon/evening. Even odder is it immediately got clicks. Like within 1 hour I had 6 clicks all on different authors (except 1) since they've only had like 30-400 impressions each (the author with 400 has had 3 clicks).
Is your head ready to explode? mine is.
Now i have a few of the authors with no clicks but one shows a sale.
AMS makes my head hurt. :HB :icon_think: :n2Str17: :dizzy
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AMS makes my head hurt.
I'm beyond the head-hurting stage, I'm brain-numbed: Per various advices this and other threads, I raised AMS bids (a positive?) and jacked up book prices (a negative?) and suddenly began to see AMS sales, tho' not on a grand scale. Why, how, what???
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AMS makes my head hurt.
I'm beyond the head-hurting stage, I'm brain-numbed: Per various advices this and other threads, I raised AMS bids (a positive?) and jacked up book prices (a negative?) and suddenly began to see AMS sales, tho' not on a grand scale. Why, how, what???
Remember, relevance is critical.
Here's an example for a small paperback I published (click the image to enlarge)...
(https://i.imgur.com/2gFUDnU.png)
These metrics are for one keyword. I bid on a ton of keywords, find the gems (those with high relevance evidenced by high CTR, high conversion rate, and low CPC compared to the "suggested bid"), and quickly prune the rest.
I don't even mess with Facebook ads or Bookbub ads these days outside of launches. There's too much unexploited opportunity with AMS.
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ive never heard of anyone getting 1 click for every 2.5 impressions thats mind boggling.
my best ads (which isn't saying much) is about 300 impresisons per click and 3 clicks per sale. Which is about where i'm staying at 3 clicks per sale/download for both ads that are sort of working.
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AMS makes my head hurt.
I'm beyond the head-hurting stage, I'm brain-numbed: Per various advices this and other threads, I raised AMS bids (a positive?) and jacked up book prices (a negative?) and suddenly began to see AMS sales, tho' not on a grand scale. Why, how, what???
Raising books prices makes the algos more willing to take a shot on a book, IMO. I could never get any placement with my standalone romances, way too much competition. But I raised the price to $7.99 and the algos put it in the first slot on the first page of the sponsored carousel. That was proof enough for me, but it is still just a theory. I did it more than a couple of times to experiment.
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AMS makes my head hurt.
I'm beyond the head-hurting stage, I'm brain-numbed: Per various advices this and other threads, I raised AMS bids (a positive?) and jacked up book prices (a negative?) and suddenly began to see AMS sales, tho' not on a grand scale. Why, how, what???
Remember, relevance is critical.
Here's an example for a small paperback I published (click the image to enlarge)...
(https://i.imgur.com/2gFUDnU.png)
These metrics are for one keyword. I bid on a ton of keywords, find the gems (those with high relevance evidenced by high CTR, high conversion rate, and low CPC compared to the "suggested bid"), and quickly prune the rest.
I don't even mess with Facebook ads or Bookbub ads these days outside of launches. There's too much unexploited opportunity with AMS.
Is bid amount important in this? Because you've blanked it out, and I'm not sure why?
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AMS makes my head hurt.
I'm beyond the head-hurting stage, I'm brain-numbed: Per various advices this and other threads, I raised AMS bids (a positive?) and jacked up book prices (a negative?) and suddenly began to see AMS sales, tho' not on a grand scale. Why, how, what???
Remember, relevance is critical.
Here's an example for a small paperback I published (click the image to enlarge)...
(https://i.imgur.com/2gFUDnU.png)
These metrics are for one keyword. I bid on a ton of keywords, find the gems (those with high relevance evidenced by high CTR, high conversion rate, and low CPC compared to the "suggested bid"), and quickly prune the rest.
I don't even mess with Facebook ads or Bookbub ads these days outside of launches. There's too much unexploited opportunity with AMS.
Is bid amount important in this? Because you've blanked it out, and I'm not sure why?
My data show that bid is important.
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I know it's criminal to revive on old(er) thread but :help My sales/reads via AMS remain peanuts after 6mos' trial & error using all of your advice here. Should I continue trying to suss out the AMS magic and stick w/KU or abandon AMS and KU to go wide + other ad programs? Or take up a new career in ant-farming?
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I vote for the ant-farming. You can turn them into chocolate-covered ants and make a fortune.
:hehe
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Ant-farming... I've eaten ants in the Australian rainforest. Tasty like candy. There's money to be made if you can replicate candy ants.
Oooo. Candy Ants. I think I found a title in need of a story. BRB, I have an outline to create.
R.C.
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Worm-farming. Farmers are in need of fertilizer. Worms help turn compost into fertilizer. Sell worms and fertilizer. Win-win.
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Sorry. It's Friday afternoon where I am, and getting serious about throwing away more money on ads just does not appeal. At least, not giving that money directly to Amazon.
:Healing:
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For a fee, I'll be happy to tell a friend about your book(s).
For a larger fee, I'll pick friends that aren't illiterate.
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:icon_lol2: y'all!
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I had an ant farm when I was a kid. It was pretty fascinating for the few days that the ants lived.
I was probably not the best ant farmer.
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I had an ant farm when I was a kid. It was pretty fascinating for the few days that the ants lived.
I was probably not the best ant farmer.
Did you have a queen?
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I had an ant farm when I was a kid. It was pretty fascinating for the few days that the ants lived.
I was probably not the best ant farmer.
Did you have a queen?
No. I think those cost extra.
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I give up trying to out-think AMS's calculated lunacy. So far as I can see, my organic sales outrun AMS sales. Tho' who really can tell? :confused: I'm bailing for the summer to concentrate on my ant farm. And to see what happens to my total sales w/o AMS.
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I was having modest success with AMS and bought Amazon Ads Unleashed by Robert J Ryan to understand more and it is the weirdest business book I have ever read. I have no idea what he is talking about. With one strategy he swears by, I'll try to lose money or break even for big rewards later. But then he says turn off the keywords that are money losers - so which is it?
Has anyone read this book?
I cleaned out all the non-performing keywords and upped the bids on the promising ones. Impressions went up dramatically and so has the spend. I have a limit and I'll dial it all down if sales and reads don't kick in sufficiently. But at the moment, it looks to me like AMS works fine with a low bid method supplemented by newsletter promotions every now and again. It's not sexy. It's not a "firehose of money" but it turns a profit while I continue writing.
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I was having modest success with AMS and bought Amazon Ads Unleashed by Robert J Ryan to understand more and it is the weirdest business book I have ever read. I have no idea what he is talking about. With one strategy he swears by, I'll try to lose money or break even for big rewards later. But then he says turn off the keywords that are money losers - so which is it?
Has anyone read this book?
I cleaned out all the non-performing keywords and upped the bids on the promising ones. Impressions went up dramatically and so has the spend. I have a limit and I'll dial it all down if sales and reads don't kick in sufficiently. But at the moment, it looks to me like AMS works fine with a low bid method supplemented by newsletter promotions every now and again. It's not sexy. It's not a "firehose of money" but it turns a profit while I continue writing.
I'm pretty sure I have Ryan's book on my Kindle and haven't read it. Great. Another flimflam man. (Rich Dad is the worst, though.)
I started a brand new Amazon ad recently and somehow the keyword bid price I wrote in did not end up as the final one Amazon is using. Amazon is going 21 cents higher. Hardly matters, since so far the ad has barely been served. I'm using a $10-a-day budget. Too low?
Maybe I'll go wild and toss some money at Facebook ads again to see if outside agitation will get the Amazon ad working.
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I was having modest success with AMS and bought Amazon Ads Unleashed by Robert J Ryan to understand more and it is the weirdest business book I have ever read. I have no idea what he is talking about. With one strategy he swears by, I'll try to lose money or break even for big rewards later. But then he says turn off the keywords that are money losers - so which is it?
Has anyone read this book?
I cleaned out all the non-performing keywords and upped the bids on the promising ones. Impressions went up dramatically and so has the spend. I have a limit and I'll dial it all down if sales and reads don't kick in sufficiently. But at the moment, it looks to me like AMS works fine with a low bid method supplemented by newsletter promotions every now and again. It's not sexy. It's not a "firehose of money" but it turns a profit while I continue writing.
I'm pretty sure I have Ryan's book on my Kindle and haven't read it. Great. Another flimflam man. (Rich Dad is the worst, though.)
I started a brand new Amazon ad recently and somehow the keyword bid price I wrote in did not end up as the final one Amazon is using. Amazon is going 21 cents higher. Hardly matters, since so far the ad has barely been served. I'm using a $10-a-day budget. Too low?
Maybe I'll go wild and toss some money at Facebook ads again to see if outside agitation will get the Amazon ad working.
When you set your bid choose Custom (I think it's called) and then set your bid again in Default. Both places. I made this mistake of setting in it one place when I started and money caught on fire. And always choose Bid Down Only (I think that's what it's called)
I use a $5/day budget for some books that I'm just trying to get out of Amazon's basement and $10 for my new series. The ads take a good long while to start serving. I started ads in mid-Jan that I only just now pruned for non-performers. I don't think budget has as much impact as Bid but I would start low and go high as the months progress.
Another thing that's rarely talked about is advertising in other markets. Canada is cheap and so is Australia. They're smaller but my rank really improved there. Readers outside of the US have slightly different literary tastes so books that struggle in the US might do well in Canada, UK or Australia.
I think Ryan's problem is he needs an editor to get him on track and convey the bloody information. He can sneer at "gurus" (and he does) but at least they know how to teach a concept. *rant over* (Totally agree about Poor Dad Rich Dad. Oh-and The Secret. Ugh.)
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Something interesting is happening with my ams ads.
For a while i left some auto ads running with low bids, because basically they did nothing but sit there collecting dust.
For the last month... month and a half, I've tried a new ish marketing strategy. Which is having moderate results, but i think stuff like this takes time to build. Especially since i have a long series and read through for the average person can take months and months.
In the last weeks my ams auto ads just started producing, very small but still profitable results. It's like they woke up and said hey lets sell her books out of the blue. This is in every country i have auto ads running in.
Has anyone ever heard of auto ads just spontaneously working?
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Has anyone ever heard of auto ads just spontaneously working?
No. But I've had ads randomly take off way better than others (successful ads with the same creatives/genre/authors as failed ones). Once an ad picks up with computer AI algorithms, I say run with it. Good luck!
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To add to the mystery of AMS: I dropped all AMS ads June/July/August as a test and found that my ebook sales collapsed by 2/3 and my ppbk sales by 1/2. I'm a lousy ad-maker - despite trying every bit of AMS advice offered here. But this test tells me that even my comically inept ad-making skills have some impact. I'm going back into AMS, hammer and tongs.