You already have your account set up! Now you can just let it work and completely forget about Amazon ads… Right?
This software is a tool, and as such, it will help you eliminate the pain of manually going bid by bid to update them depending on the data you have. But if you want it to help you like a virtual assistant would, you need to monitor your ads every now and then to ensure you are getting the most out of it. By the end of this article you should understand how to perform:
Early troubleshooting of initial set up.
Rule adjustments to adapt to your own particular case.
Ad result analysis to help in strategic decisions regarding the book and Amazon as a platform.
What should you be looking for during the first few days?
Once the tool is set up give it a day or two to get the rules executed. At a quick glance, the most obvious thing is to analyze if any campaigns had a sudden big drop or increase in the ad spend.
If such is the case, you can go into the Bidding History section, select the last execution that took place (on the date where the ad spend changed), and go down to the target level of the campaigns where the ad spend changed suddenly.
For those of you that selected the Quick Rule Setup, a good rule-of-thumb is asking yourself the following questions:
What was the change for targets with more than 20 clicks? Since the Pause and Automated rules get executed for these targets daily, they will be the first to reflect changes. Since these targets are the ad spend drivers, they will likely be the reason for the change.
Do you like the changes it made or were the bids increased further than expected? Or on the contrary, were they lower than expected?
If the bid change was not in line with what you had in mind — and there is no error in the execution — then it's likely that the Metrics were not set up correctly. If such is the case, and you don't know what to modify, feel free to reach out to me at sara@booksflyer.com, and we'll adapt those metrics.
For those under 20 clicks, whether there is a change or not will depend on the day of execution that appears in the increase/decrease rules — since these are executed weekly. You can check it in the bidding rules:
Generally though, if you are happy with the changes made in targets above 20 clicks, then these will work fine for you.
What should you be looking for during the next few weeks?
The next thing you should be looking for, is if you need to add/modify any rules. Examples:
"I have a few targets that get very few impressions, and it's taking forever to get any clicks on them. I'd like to increase a bit their bids to get some clicks." --> Create a new rule, Low impressions, no clicks: Targets with less than 1200 impressions and ACOR = 0. You can set it up with "Manual" frequency, so that you only use it when you want to, or you can set it to weekly, so that it keeps executing on these type of targets.
"I prefer to wait for longer until I pause a keyword, because I want to make sure that I will not get a return from it before pausing it" —> Modify the current Clicks, no interest rule, and increase the amount of clicks to 30.
Whenever you are adding new rules though, please note the following:
1. Set a defined range in which rules should apply. When adding a new rule outside of the existing rules, beware of the minimum and maximum range where it can work. If you see the default rules, there is always a minimum and a maximum. When there is no maximum set, it's because there is no risk of overlap with another rule. Take the two increase rules added as an example:
Until 20 clicks, if the ACOR is more than 0% (notice the use of >, and not >=) and up to 50% included (<= and not <), increase the bid by 15%. If there was just this one rule, once the ACOR went beyond 50% we would not see any increases in the bid. Hence there is a second rule because, in this case, we want to keep increasing bids that are giving us a profit, but in lower increments.
Until 20 clicks, if the ACOR is above 50% (again use of >, and not >=) and below 90%, increase the bid by 10%.
For targets above 20 clicks, the "Automated" rule will apply. This way, none of them have any overlap, and can be executed on different targets. If you don't define clear limits for your rules, you may see unexpected changes in your bids.
Example: If you set up a rule to apply to a range in the ACOR of 0% to 80%, and leave the second to apply from 50% to 90%, then all those targets that have an ACOR between 50% and 80% will increase twice, once for each rule.
2. Your rules should aim to have your campaigns close to a 100% ACOR. This will mean you are spending the money correctly as per your optimization goal.
3. Do not overthink it. The auto-generated rules can already help out with most of the work, so if there is nothing that catches your attention (example: targets that were paused with royalties associated), then there is nothing else to add.
What should you be looking for in the longer term?
Once you are happy with the setup, you should take into account the following tasks:
Keeping target relevancy up. Perhaps some of the targets you included initially may not have worked for your book, hence they will likely be paused. Or they may be less searched for over time, which means that you’ll have to update targets in order to keep ads relevant. You can keep this as a monthly task, to check for additional competitors and interesting keywords that may be good targets for promoting your book, while slowly increasing your exposure.
Assigning new campaigns to metrics and rules. When you add a new campaign, you will have to assign it to one of the group metrics you’ve created (or to a new group of metrics if applicable). If you do not have the "Select All" option marked on your rules, you'll also want to add it to your bidding rules.
Analyzing patterns on Amazon's data. If multiple targets that were supposed to be relevant to your book are not giving you any clicks or sales even though they've been active for more than a couple of months, I'd suggest digging into this a bit further to understand what could be the root cause. If the issue is with the click through rate, look at your cover, title, and review rating. If the issue is one of conversion (sales/reads), check your blurb and top-voted customer reviews.
Analyzing overall revenue vs ad spend. Make sure you keep a track on how much you are spending vs how much you are actually earning. This may lead you to adjust the Revenue Multiplier and be more conservative / aggressive, or even to consider leaving Amazon as a platform.
💡Keep in mind💡
The more you know about how you want your ads optimized, the better the tool will work. This means you’ll have to learn to deal with Amazon ads, what each metric means, and how to optimize it so that you can get the best out of this tool. Make sure you read the article on good practices for Amazon ads for a quick overview on this.