Writer Sanctum

Writer's Haven => Marketing Loft [Public] => Topic started by: JRTomlin on September 23, 2020, 04:23:27 AM

Title: AMS ad
Post by: JRTomlin on September 23, 2020, 04:23:27 AM
I had run the same AMS ad for about six months and it worked well. For the first in my trilogy it cost just a bit under the amount I made on the novel and since the trilogy has good sell-through was nicely profitable as well as serving as an introduction to my backlist.

A month ago BOOM it continued getting clicks but totally stopped getting sales. I tweaked the list. Nothing. I rewrote the tagline. Nothing. Tried a couple more times. I just gave up and stopped my AMS ads (which so far has had  no affect on my sales confirming that it was not providing sales). In a few months I'll probably give it another try but I have rarely been so baffled at advertising results.
Title: Re: AMS ad
Post by: LilyBLily on September 23, 2020, 05:39:43 AM
I am similarly baffled that about a month ago Amazon clearly stopped showing my ads. Sales have dried up and I have been too busy to deal with what on earth to do next. For four years, my first-in-series ad has reliably brought me sales and reads. Now, nothing. I boosted the daily budget very substantially, but nothing happened. I re-enabled a bunch of my Amazon ads for the other books in that series, including a series ad, but again, nothing.

I obviously have to pause that ad and write a new one and that's something I have not been looking forward to. Plus, a new ad might not work, so then I'll have to try a Facebook ad, hoping to bump sales enough so Amazon will again show my ad. Arggh.
Title: Re: AMS ad
Post by: JRTomlin on September 23, 2020, 05:56:28 AM
Sounds very similar to what I experienced, Lily, although judging by their reports of exposures and clicks they were still showing it -- unless those were wrong. The funny thing is that my sales are (so far) are even up very slightly. I may wait until after the holidays since I have other advertising planned. I haven't used Facebook in a couple of years, but I may decide to give that another try as well.
Title: Re: AMS ad
Post by: notthatamanda on September 23, 2020, 08:50:32 PM
All the research I did when I started doing AMS said AMS favored the long game. If your ad sold books, it was supposed to keep giving it priority and create a positive feedback loop to keep selling. And it worked, until it didn't. I would like a different explanation but I keep coming back to a very tin foil hat based one. I don't know enough about advertising or AMS to come up with something different.
Title: Re: AMS ad
Post by: LilyBLily on September 23, 2020, 10:43:56 PM
All the research I did when I started doing AMS said AMS favored the long game. If your ad sold books, it was supposed to keep giving it priority and create a positive feedback loop to keep selling. And it worked, until it didn't. I would like a different explanation but I keep coming back to a very tin foil hat based one. I don't know enough about advertising or AMS to come up with something different.

I assume my ads got pushed out of the way for ads that were more profitable. No tin hat needed for Amazon to dump ads performing below some arbitrary percentage.
Title: Re: AMS ad
Post by: notthatamanda on September 23, 2020, 11:08:08 PM
Tin foil hat is for still getting clicks with no sales.