My next Amazon experiment

[Demesnedenoir]

So, one of the most annoying things about Amazon Ads is that you have zero control over any creative except the little Blurb, and you can't change that blurb once you've created an ad. This provides pretty much no opportunity to test. Therefore, now that I'm going after Amazon ads in a serious way for the time, I'm going to do this:

I'm going to run Dynamic Creative ads on FB with everything identical except for Blurbs and see what data I can pull. This might be flawed, so if I don't get good data from that, I will run a multiple ad campaign with forced equal spending on the varied blurbs to see if there is a superior Blurb.

One thing I'm very curious about is what works better: Review Style, Award Win, or Story Style Blurbs.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

This will be kind of fun, so I'll just use MythicScribes as my notebook, LOL. So, (very) early dynamic text test leaders...

#1 — "Great for fans of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing series."—Booklife by Publishers Weekly

#2 — "Although there is action and peril enough for the casual fan, the true depth of the world Rice has created unfolds with careful perusal."—John L. Rak, Jr. NGI Book Awards Judge

#3— "Gripping action scenes, evocative writing, and steady story momentum make the pages fly."—Booklife by Publishers Weekly.

The funny thing is, I always kid of thought of using #1 as cheesy. It seems I might be wrong, LOL.

HEADLINE LEADERS

#1: Discover the Epic Saga Today

#2: Award-Winning Epic Fantasy

#3: Guaranteed to Earn Diehard Fans

#1 and #2 both are semi-generic but seem to work, while #3 is part of a Booklife quote. I'm also running #3 in another test as: "Guaranteed to Earn Diehard Fans"— Editor's Pick Booklife by Publishers Weekly

 

[Prince of Spires]

Sounds like a fun experiment. I've got the idea that not even Amazon knows for certain if the custom blurbs add all that much. Reason is that you can only add them to ads in the .com store. All other countries don't have them. And while Amazon does forget sometimes that there are other countries out there, I can imagine that if the custom blurbs changed results in a massive way that they would have added them to the other countries ad platforms by now.

I'm keeping an eye on your notebook here to see what results you get. It's already interesting to see if you can get Amazon to serve some of them. They sometimes are overly cautious with people mentioning other authors or awards in blurbs and ads. Though I must say, I did like Bakker and Martin, so I might just have to give your book a look

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I've never had an Amazon ad run well without some sort of blurb. The amount of difference between one blurb to another on FB makes a point toward this. It would make sense on the deception side, making the customer think it isn't an ad. Difficult, considering the prominent "sponsored". I will say that the ads as designed aren't that conducive to blurbs, but from what I can tell, they still count.

Personally, I don't think Amazon cares much if you succeed. I've seen people praise Amazon's product pages as the most successful in the history of mankind! But successful for whom? Amazon. If they were trying to sell your book they wouldn't have an untold number of ads on your product page. They are out to sell something and they don't really care what. I think Amazon's advice is a bit more like several advice columns I've seen, who suggest starting out with no Blurb, it's so you don't screw it up, LOL.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Amazon only really cares about one thing, and that is to make their customers happy. That's how they make their money. And offering them lots of choices when looking at a book is one of the ways to make those customers happy. They test pretty much everything they do all the time, and apparently they found that having lot's of alternatives increases their sales. And indeed, it probably decreases the sales of the specific author, but they don't care all that much about that.

As for a blurb, I think on Amazon it's one of those things where if you do it well it really helps, if you do it badly it hurts a lot, but if you just do it okay it doesn't have all that much impact. But that's just a hunch without having tested it.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I would turn that around, Amazon only cares about making money, and making the customer happy helps that, heh heh. Circularity. I remember how I got sucked into Amazon Prime. There were these shade sails I wanted, and Amazon was not only the cheapest place to get them, but with Prime's trial free shipping, I saved about 50% because the danged things are heavy. I shop Amazon for a lot of things, but books? I go to Apple, they're less cluttered. I don't like Amazon's noise. As for the blurb, I think you're spot on.

I've never actually run an ad using multiple books where they require you to not have a blurb.

The Biggest thing I want to see from Amazon has been in Beta forever, Amazon Attribution, where you could actually track where your sales come from offsite. THAT would be huge.

Blurb test: Targeting a GRRM audience, the Booklife quote I have up recommending EoS for fans of GRRM is doing about 10x better on CTR than my other blurb did with the same audience. So, it's something people pay attention to, which of course can be Good or Bad... and maybe even Ugly.

Amazon only really cares about one thing, and that is to make their customers happy. That's how they make their money. And offering them lots of choices when looking at a book is one of the ways to make those customers happy. They test pretty much everything they do all the time, and apparently they found that having lot's of alternatives increases their sales. And indeed, it probably decreases the sales of the specific author, but they don't care all that much about that.

As for a blurb, I think on Amazon it's one of those things where if you do it well it really helps, if you do it badly it hurts a lot, but if you just do it okay it doesn't have all that much impact. But that's just a hunch without having tested it.