Amazon Ads

[ThinkerX]

For tax purposes, I just tallied up my writerly expenses for 2022. The total tab topped $4700 - with almost three grand of that in promotions and ads. Three grand on ads...that mostly flopped.

Makes me wonder if I shouldn't just fork over $749 for a $0.99 Book Bub promo slot...assuming I could be one of those lucky enough to get picked. Heck, that three grand would buy me four $0.99 promos. Many more flops, and I might just bite the bullet, howl at the moon, and give it a shot...

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Good luck with Bookbub! Here's the deal, though... Get the Bookbub and be ready to pound that other 3k in Amazon ads. When I got my BB promo I wasn't expecting to get it at all, so my war chest wasn't full when yikes! They accepted me!? Shit! That is the third blown opportunity I had with EoS. It's a bitch to get into, but it will move books.

For tax purposes, I just tallied up my writerly expenses for 2022. The total tab topped $4700 - with almost three grand of that in promotions and ads. Three grand on ads...that mostly flopped.

Makes me wonder if I shouldn't just fork over $749 for a $0.99 Book Bub promo slot...assuming I could be one of those lucky enough to get picked. Heck, that three grand would buy me four $0.99 promos. Many more flops, and I might just bite the bullet, howl at the moon, and give it a shot...

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I've now shutdown all my other ads and am starting a new Amazon ad... I hate to do that, it loses a whole lot of data those ads collected and Amazon uses, but! I can always bring those back after I gut them and clean them up, heh heh. And I wanted to use new ad copy on this one.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

So! Today was fun. Amazon denied my brand new ad because... because... because... I don't know why. It said I couldn't advertise Whispers of Ghosts, but I'm already advertising Whispers of Ghosts in another campaign. I appealed that stupidity and I'm still awaiting that ad to go live. Maybe.

So! I restarted another ad after a little cleanup to see what happened. One of ye olde Amazon numbers passed around is that 1 click in 1000 impressions is "good". This always felt a bit silly to me, but hey, I ran with it in general. Today's cleaned-up ad ran at 1 click for every 250 impressions. On keywords that got clicks, the worst was 1:55. This should only get leaner as I trim more fat. No conversions yet, but those tend to lag, and the budget was real low so there wasn't a pile of clicks.

So! Bored, I started playing around with Amazon Attributions and linked a FB ad to it, and fired that up, mostly to test the system.

More thoughts will come as things move along.

 

[Prince of Spires]

advertising remains a big black mystery box somehow. It very much feels like the succesful people are those who keep trying stuff until they stumble upon something that works and then they double down on that. And from your list of winner and loser keywords, that seems pretty much the case. I've even seen a discussion about a service that ran AMZ ads for you. And their strategy was to simply go for the cheapest keywords they could find, like "book book book". Yes, they got a lot of crap for that in the discussion, but (according to them) it did move a lot of books for some people...

Same with the number of clics per impressions. I think 1:1000 is not so much good as good enough for many people. To get better numbers you probably need a better book and better targeting. And you can get there, it just also involves time and money. And since impressions are free, many people probably just target more keywords instead of removing underperforming ones.

Do you use ad-copy for your AMZ ads?

For tax purposes, I just tallied up my writerly expenses for 2022. The total tab topped $4700 - with almost three grand of that in promotions and ads. Three grand on ads...that mostly flopped.

Makes me wonder if I shouldn't just fork over $749 for a $0.99 Book Bub promo slot...assuming I could be one of those lucky enough to get picked. Heck, that three grand would buy me four $0.99 promos. Many more flops, and I might just bite the bullet, howl at the moon, and give it a shot...

I agree with Demesnedenoir that if you can get it, a Bookbub is probably worth it, and more so than all the small ones combined. Getting it is the hard part though. Since it's the one that works for almost everyone who can get it, a lot of people want it. Which means they actually can chose who gets a Bookbub.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Amazon is a black box, and I've never seen a guru who spouts off in such a way that matches my experience in every way. But, wait, that's not all you get for your advertising dollars! Think for a second on what all three of my "weird" examples have in common: they are Author versus Title. If I then pull up the Sales column lifetime on the ad I'm running now I can note an interesting thing: All of the highest Sales #'s (not the most profit, BTW, because the numbers are raw) are Paperbacks and the keywords are Authors. As someone pointed out to me the other day, there's no way to force Author keywords to serve to digital products. And, Amazon is always looking to poach sales from Big Five publishers.

Another fun note, not guaranteed to be true but likely true, is that Amazon is a Black Box for security reasons. Scammers and over-the-top manipulation of their algorithm is always a concern.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

"Books books books" is the utter crap that Amazon will throw out there if you don't use manual targeting. Can it work? Ummmmmmm, try it and find out. Can it pull some sales? Sure. I've had sales via "book" and similar keywords. So too the word "snow" for my books. Why? Well, Snow has more connection to than "book" which can apply to millions of... books. Why would this somehow get a sale? Explain that to me.

The only rational explanation I've heard for "book" would work is that it's either random as hell, OR that the Amazon Algorithm has your book pegged to a particular reader already and is serving it to them as someone who the algorithm believes is a match already. Any company serving up "book book book" is one I wouldn't use.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Another fun note, not guaranteed to be true but likely true, is that Amazon is a Black Box for security reasons. Scammers and over-the-top manipulation of their algorithm is always a concern.

I can definitely see that being true. Another reason is I think that it's part of their competitive advantage. They're a giant search engine. They don't want to explain to their competitors (including google and apple) what the best way to search for books is and how to rank them.

It's probably also subject to change. Which means that you would have to explain it differently every few weeks. If you don't explain anything at all, you never have to update your public documentation. And from experience I know that programmers don't like updating documentation...

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Amazon Attributions work as I expected... how about that? Wow. That's so rare in indie publishing.