In the following article, we'll go through the main items that need to be considered when advertising on Amazon ads if we want to increase our chances of success.
Good research
It is always important to search for targets where your book will get exposure, and sell well. For this you need to have a very clear idea of who your competitors are, and the books they write. Check the keywords they use in their blurbs, the type of covers they have, the price they offer their books for and the categories where their books are listed. This not only helps to build your own offer but also to create good advertising campaigns.
Here, we are referring to books that rank above 50,000 on the Amazon bestseller list. When incorporating these books (meaning their ASINs, keywords related or categories) into our advertising campaigns, we first look for impressions obtained, then we analyze whether those impressions will get us clicks, and if those clicks will ultimately get us the orders we are looking for. This will determine if they are really good targets (or a different type of story).
Clear campaign structure and naming convention
A clear campaign structure will always help you keep things tidy on your end. Keeping things organized will make you more efficient when it comes to finding the type of targets and campaign settings that work for you, and scale up on that or scale down, depending on results. In the case of the tool, it will also help you when assigning campaigns to metrics and rules.
Think about it. If you have two groups of balls made out of different materials, and you were trying to tell which material is the strongest, it would be hard to tell with everything mixed together. If you, however, were to separate the balls by the material they are made, it would become easier to determine which material is the strongest almost at first glance.
When you mix up keywords with different match types in the same place, you could be missing out on the specific match type that seems to work better for you. Or if you mix genre keywords with author keywords, you can miss out on the fact that perhaps genre keywords work worse for you than author names.
This also applies to ASINs, and their different match types. Expanded ASINs may help you find additional ASINs that work for your book, while with exact you will always be targeting that exact ASIN. You need to analyze each type separately.
Not only that, but the bids you apply on keywords, on ASINs or on categories will be different. Categories for example are much cheaper than ASINs and keywords.
Even within keywords and ASINs, broad/expanded match types tend to require lower bids to serve impressions than exact match types.
And all this is without factoring in longer series vs shorter ones, or standalones, books in different genres, etc.
As for the naming convention that should be used, a good example could be the following one: CampaignType_SeriesTitle_TypeofTargetsUsed_MatchType_CampaignStrategy.
So, for a Sponsored Products campaign for the book Ready Player One, where we target exact LitRPG ASINs using a Fixed bids campaign strategy, the campaign name would be as follows:
SP_RPO_LitRPG-ASINs_Exact_F
In a nutshell: Make it easy for you to know at a glance what seems to be working (and what is not!). Be the Marie Kondo of your campaigns.
If you keep different targets and advertised products neatly organized across campaigns and ad groups, and use a clear naming convention, the group metrics will be very easy to set up, and so will the rules.
Ensure target exposure
If you want to ensure all your targets get exposure, avoid targeting 999 keywords in one ad group. Hardly more than 50 will get proper exposure, while the rest will sit there and collect dust instead of impressions. It is a much better strategy to create smaller ad groups of no more than 50 targets.
Analyze patterns in the data
This sounds a bit Dan Brown-ish, but the fact that you have a tool that is doing the optimization for you means you have more time to understand the data you get from Amazon. This is one of the best ways to learn how to get better at ads. Some examples:
I barely have any impressions on any of my ads — this can mean that either you are bidding too low for the genre or that no one searches for those keywords/ASINs. If you have already increased the bids to the maximum you can pay for them, there is no need to go beyond that. Include new keywords/ASINs.
I have impressions but no/few clicks — If in addition to that, you are not receiving any royalties from those clicks, does this happen in a good part of your targets? If you have to pay too much to get impressions and clicks (meaning, you tend to consistently loose money with advertising), it's time to analyze your overall marketing strategy and build up your relevance: Promo sites, investment in other ad platforms, write other books in the same genre. Get more reviews!
Additionally, check the keywords and ASINs you've placed as targets. Do you see similar covers or are they quite different? Do not underestimate the value of a good cover when catching the click of a potential reader! Analyze the components of the ad that the users see, and may make their click go away.
I have clicks but few sales/reads — By few I mean less than 1 order/read per 20 clicks. If this happens in targets you believe to be very relevant to your book, it seems that people are liking your ad, but they are not hooked by what they see on the book page. Is it the blurb, the price or perhaps something in the Look-Inside that is not right? Have you compared this with what other books in the same genre have?
Tip 1: Always, before making a decision based on data, make sure you have enough data.
Tip 2: Patience. Do not pause a whole campaign just because overall it looks like it's not performing as expected — analyze it at a target-level. Sometimes, especially when starting new campaigns, there will be more spending than revenue.
Be patient
Yes, there is one section to repeat what was said at the end of the previous one. Patience is key in Amazon ads. A lot of people check Amazon Ads daily, and there is no worse mistake than this. Amazon ads can take 3 days to update clicks and impressions, and up to 14 days — though it can get to 30 days in some exceptions — to update reads and sales.
If you make any sudden changes based on what you saw on the past couple of days, you are most likely going to mess up the ads (unless you recently changed a bid from $0.40 to $4 by mistake!). That is why we take into account the last 60 days of data when executing the rules, to make sure we have a complete and recent picture of the target's performance.
Some cases do have to be more patient that others though: If your book is new and/or has fewer than 100-200 good reviews (+4 stars), be ready to spend money without expecting an immediate return. Amazon is a competitive market, and if it does not have a clear picture of how relevant your book will be for your targets, it will make you pay more. The idea behind this strategy is to increase the visibility of your book, and gradually get the relevance that will allow you to get a decent return from your ads. In the next section you can find some tips on increasing your relevance!
Tip 1: If you're particularly budget-conscious, you can limit your exposure by creating smaller and fewer campaigns to avoid a lot of extra spend with no initial return.
Increase your relevance on Amazon
We started the article talking about understanding the relevance of your books, so we assume you have already asked yourself the three key questions to advertise a book. This section is about additional steps you can do to increase your relevance on Amazon:
Get reviews. There are few things that sell better a book than a good amount of good reviews (+4 stars) from other readers. Make sure you promote your book every now and then to give this an extra push. If you are not getting the reviews you expected — either in quantity or in quality — after promoting your book or giving it away to hundreds, perhaps you may want to review once more if your book is fit to market. Does it really have the magic it takes to get readers engaged in your story and willing to recommend it?
Publish more books in the same genre. Series and standalones tend to sell less overtime, especially with the ever increasing offer in books. If you have already done well with your prior books, writing additional ones will give you boosts of visibility with each new launch that can help you reach additional readers. If you do it in the same genre, well, you will already have a fan-base that will be willing to pay, so there could not be any cheaper way of getting early reviews! (Do not take too many months between launches if possible to ensure readers still have you in the back of their mind).
Use other ad platforms. Platforms like Bookbub and Facebook can provide you with additional external traffic free of Amazon's limitations. Test them at times when your Amazon ads spends less money. If you target the right audiences with the right creatives, this should help you improve your sales; ergo, your relevance will increase.
If your book is relevant to your audience, not only will it sell better — you will spend less per bid. Amazon would rather give the impression to books that will get clicks and sales, than to books that won't, even if at a cheaper price.
Test, test, test!
I cannot emphasize this enough. There is no one size-fits-all when it comes to advertising. You need to test, analyze results, decide your next actions. You do not need to begin testing everything, everywhere all at once. In fact, you should not if you want to get clear conclusions.
You can just start small, with 2 or 3 different campaigns to control your spend and be able to afford higher bids. The more data you get, the better decisions you'll be able to take. But don't stick to one way of doing things unless you have actual proof that it works better for you (and even then I would still test new things from time to time!).
If you have done all of the above, have a ton of great reviews, a great cover and blurb, you optimize your Amazon Ads diligently and yet you do not get a good return after a great optimization process — it may be that Amazon is not the right tool for you. For some authors, Facebook and Bookbub offer better results, and that is completely fine. But you need to have data in order to arrive to this conclusion, so do not rush it.
Last but not least...
The more you know about how you want your ads optimized, the better you'll be able to exploit the tool. Hence, for a more detailed understanding of Amazon ads, I tend to recommend Amazon Ads for Authors, by Ricardo Fayet or, if you prefer a more dynamic approach to tackle this, you can enroll in the Self Publishing Formula Ads For Authors course (only opens twice a year).