When you have a series published, in your Amazon campaigns you can either advertise book one in a series, or advertise all books in your series in your campaigns. Find below how Amazon shows data depending on this along with its pros and cons:
Advertising just book one in a series
When you're just advertising the first book in a series, only the sales and reads related to that book will be recorded in your Amazon Advertising console, and this will make it easier to estimate the expected revenue earned from each sale.
In the campaign shown below, we are only advertising ebook 1 in a series. We can see how, if we divide sales between orders we get $2.99 — the exact price of ebook 1 in this series. This proves that only sales associated to book 1 are being collected:
Based on how information is collected when advertising all books in a series, you should aim to break even on your expected revenue after read-through.
Pros and cons of advertising book one
Pros:
It simplifies campaign creation because you only need to add one book.
All your ad traffic is sent straight to book one, which is the most logical entry point into your series.
It's easier to estimate the expected lifetime revenue of a series when we only take into account sales from book one: it's always the same per each sale that takes place.
When aiming to break even on your expected revenue after read-through, you're bidding at the maximum you can. If you have a particularly long series with great read-through, you are likely to outbid most of your competitors, and earn the lion's share of impressions for the first book in series.
Cons:
Although it would be ideal, it is hard to breakeven on just book one’s ad spend given how competitive the market is. Your bids will likely not be competitive if we just take into consideration the royalties earned on one book in your series — hence why the best option is to breakeven for expected revenue, even though it can get scary when you see way more spend than income on the dashboard.
You won't be able to see any sales or reads that take place in the rest of the series in your Amazon dashboard.
Read-through may vary from time to time, and from one marketing channel to another, so there is a risk of overspending without knowing if the expected results will materialize. Always monitor your sales, profit, and read-through to ensure your ad spend isn't eroding your returns.
It can be harder to scale campaigns up, since having only book 1 in the campaigns will mean less sales/reads data associated with them.
In BooksFlyer: You’ll need to calculate the Revenue Multiplier to have an Adjusted Revenue that shows your expected revenue.Â
Advertising all books in a series
When you advertise all the books in your series:
Cross-sales/reads between books included in the campaign are recorded. Meaning, if I click on the ad of book 1 and end up purchasing book 5 (or vice versa) this sale will be recorded — as opposed to just advertising book one.
Even if you pause all books but for book one, their sales and reads will still reflect on the dashboard.
Sales and reads of other books advertised that happened within the next 14 days after the click was recorded
Let’s take the following example:
Here, I’m advertising multiple eBooks in another series and, as you can see:
Book 4 (offer price $4.99) is the one generating the majority of conversions. You may think that this is because these come from terms related to book 4 in the series, but it’s not the case. The search terms mostly show genre keywords as well as comp titles. If you divide sales between orders, the price obtained is quite lower ($4.39), which means that book 1 sales ($3.99) have taken place through this ad.
Book 1 is actually showing the worst conversion, even though it’s the one that is getting the most clicks and impressions.
In this case, what could have happened is that book 4 had the most attractive cover, which got people to purchase book 1 and keep reading the series. We can also assume that some of these readers have purchased additional books in less than 14 days after they clicked on the ad, in which case part of the orders we see come from additional purchases in the rest of the series.
Because of how information is collected when advertising all books in a series, you should aim to break even with your immediate revenue as seen on the dashboard.
Pros and cons of advertising all books
Pros:
You get a better sense of how much actual revenue your ads generate in the short term: cross-sales between advertised books are recorded as well as additional sales or reads in the series for the next 14 days after the click that brought in the sales.
You can advertise more books, thus occupying more advertising real estate, which can lead to a higher conversion for the series.
You can re-target people that stopped reading your series by showing them the additional books that have been published.
Your campaigns are more likely to scale faster. The more sales/reads data Amazon sees in the console, the better your conversion will look like, and the more inclined they’ll be to deliver your ads.
Once you have gathered multiple months of data, it can be interesting to see if there are covers or titles that have a higher click-through rate (CTR) than others — and take this into account for future releases.
Cons:
For longer series (more than 3 books) it is rarely the case that people will read your books in 14 days or less. So there will still be sales/reads that the dashboard will not show you.
Because we will advertise to break even on the immediate revenue, and the dashboard will only show part of the read-through picture, the resulting bids may be lower than when advertising book one and breaking even on your expected revenue.
Amazon may show ads for any book in your series, not just book one. As such:
New readers interested in one of your books will have to do one extra click to get to book one.
There is a higher chance that current readers may click on ads that lead them to the rest of books in the series, as opposed to clicking on them through organic (non-paid) search results.
A trick to only show book one in your ads while collecting the sales / borrows data from the rest of books is to pause all books but for book one in your campaigns.Â
For ongoing series, you have to remember to add the new books in the series as they launch.
What methodology should you use?
A good rule of thumb could be that for longer series, where a large part of the read-through will not be reflected in your dashboard even if you include all books, advertise book 1, whereas for shorter series that can be read faster you can advertise all books.
Regardless of this, the best option is to experiment with both approaches and see which works best for you — ideally each at a separate time. Keep in mind, though, that a successful advertising strategy requires monthly monitoring and optimization to ensure that your ad spend isn't eating into your profits.
In both cases, the following factors will determine the success of your strategy (assuming you’ve already taken care of everything on your Amazon product pages — eye-catching covers, engaging descriptions, great titles, pricing and numerous, positive reviews):
High read-through and/or sale-through. Meaning that at least 50% of people continue to read book 2 and this percentage only slowly goes down with the rest of the books.
A longer series vs a shorter series. A longer series will let you bid higher than a shorter one for the simple reason that you will be able to make that money back. If you have a shorter series, you’ll likely need to bid lower and be more patient if you want to get a return from your ad spend. Let your campaigns run for longer in order to build relevance rather than bid high.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to write them in the comment section below or reach out to me at sara@booksflyer.com.