In our first two posts, I discussed keywords and some ads that I have run for the Cache Iron mystery series. In this post, I want to talk about relevance and then metadata and how metadata can help with your relevance. Then I will talk about some benefits of looking at the search reports that you can run on Amazon.
Relevance
One of the key topics that most people talk about when they talk about what advertisements Amazon serves up is relevance. Simply, Amazon wants to show something that is relevant to the person doing the search. So, for example, if you did some research into keywords and found that the keyword combination “Texas Detective Mystery” had a lot of searches per month but had little competition, you might zero in on that as a keyword combination. If the book that you are running the ads for is a romantic story set in Venice, Italy, your book would not apply to those searching for Texas Detective Mystery. First, your book is not a Detective Mystery and second, it doesn’t take place in Texas. That keyword combination is not relevant to your book and may frustrate visitors to Amazon if it was being served up when they were looking for a mystery story taking place in Texas.
No matter what you were bidding on the keywords Texas Detective Mystery, Amazon would probably not want it served if your book is anything but a detective story in Texas. Hence, relevance helps determine if your ads display when you choose to run ads against keywords.
Metadata
So how do you influence your relevance with your ads being served? One answer comes from your metadata. Your metadata for your book encompasses several things:
- The title of your book
- The sub-title of your book
- Your book description and the words being used in the description
- Your seven keywords that you selected for your book
- The 2 + 8 categories that you selected for your book.
For my book Cold Iron, the title doesn’t convey what the book is about. I may have done better with Murder in Montana, but I decided I wanted the last name of my protagonist to appear in every book title I write about her. So that is probably one strike against me. The sub-title for the book series is a Cache Iron Mystery, so right there we are signalling to Amazon that the book is part of the mystery genre.
The book description which was crafted by Best Page Forward helps to convey the detective mystery genre of the story.
I recently re-did my keywords for the book, in fact all the books in the series. Once I read Amazon Decoded, I saw the importance of both the keywords and categories being consistent across all of my books. In my last post I discussed the 110 keywords that I came up with that someone might use when looking for books like mine. I used Publisher Rocket that I also previously talked about to pair that 110 genre keywords to 7 that I thought were highly relevant to my books that were not already being reflected in the title, sub-title or category. Once I had that seven word list, I updated Cold Iron, Hot Iron and Iron Proof to all have the same keywords and will use them in the upcoming release of Charged Iron.
One of the last areas of metadata that you can influence is what categories are you listing your book in. You can have up to ten categories provided they apply to what your story is about. You can enter up to two categories when you set up your book and another eight categories afterwards. The folks over at Kindlepreneur have an excellent video if you want to learn more about adding more categories for your books, and you can check that out by clicking here.
Once again, based on what I read in Amazon Decoded, I chose the same ten categories for all three of my ebooks and a separate list of ten categories for my paperbacks. I hope that the signals that I am sending Amazon around my books screams Women Sleuths and it serves up those ads anytime someone is searching for a book in this genre.
Search Reports
One other thing I wanted to briefly mention is that the Amazon Ads section has a reporting feature. I find the reports handy to identify keywords or ASINS that I may not have thought about that resulted in someone actually seeing my ad in a previous period and clicking on it. It also helps to identify terms you may want to show in your negative terms area of your ads. For example, when I ran the report at the end of January before I paired down my keywords in February, I found that the following keyword combination had two impressions and one click in January: “new victorian murder mystery romance.”
Now with only two impressions, it wasn’t getting a lot of impressions, but that one click cost me $0.50. My books do not take place in the Victorian era and are not part of the mystery romance genre. I know my book is not relevant to this keyword combination. It resulted from a Phrase match on one of my keywords, Murder Mystery. By including the phrase “new victorian murder mystery romance,” in my negative keywords I can help to ensure that my ads will not be served the next time someone types this into the search box.
Wrapping Up
That is everything I wanted to talk about this week. At the time of writing this, my new ads for Cold Iron have been running for seventeen days. I am just in the process of reviewing the ads and tweaking the budgets for them. In my next post I will share with you some results that I am seeing so far.
