AMS advice for the comically inept

[Simon Haynes]

Here you go.

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[TimothyEllis]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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]

[TimothyEllis]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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.)

[TimothyEllis]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[LilyBLily]

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?

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[TimothyEllis]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

More like that would be nice...

(Not related to my recently increased bids.)

[notthatamanda]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[notthatamanda]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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?

[notthatamanda]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[notthatamanda]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

I still can't get to my reports page on the US site.

[notthatamanda]

Oh crap, what happens when you try that?

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[Anarchist]

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.

[Lu Kudzoza]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

That's a good idea, thanks

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[LilyBLily]

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.  

Maybe I'm one indie who ought to invest in having others write my ad and blurb copy for them.
 

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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 ;-)

[notthatamanda]

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.

[Anarchist]

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.

[Anarchist]

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.

[notthatamanda]

Asinine Extractor (because you shouldn't need to do this.)

[Jeff Tanyard]

Asinilator.

Because resistance is futile.

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[R. C.]

...

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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?

[TimothyEllis]

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. 

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[TimothyEllis]

Shared help system, I'm guessing.

Help system written by a different department. And no-one checking how accurate it is elsewhere.

[notthatamanda]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[Simon Haynes]

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.

[notthatamanda]

It will be interesting to see if it keeps going down.

[Simon Haynes]

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.