Welcome to my new running blog series here on Kinclond Publishing. So let’s begin by talking about what The Amazon Ads Adventure is all about. If you are an author of fiction or non-fiction books and are responsible for the advertising and marketing of your books or someone else’s books, then hopefully this series of blog posts will be for you. The purpose of The Amazon Ads Adventure is to document my efforts in trying to master Amazon Ads and help drive interested traffic to my books on Amazon.
As an author currently of three books in the Cache Iron Mystery series, one of my daily tasks is working with the various advertising platforms to help move traffic to my books on a host of sales platforms. If you talk to most authors, they will tell you of all the advertising options out there, there are three that perform better than the others for selling books: 1) Facebook 2) BookBub and 3) Amazon.
Let’s begin by talking about BookBub and why I won’t be talking about BookBub, at least not in this series. I spent several months playing around on BookBub, taking the advice of many of the gurus out there. I spent hundreds of dollars finding my ideal comp authors. BookBub is a site for deals on books and its subscribers are looking for book deals. I’ve tried driving traffic to my full priced books using my tested comp authors to find only a few clicks and the odd purchase. Where my ads have done well is when I am running a discount on my books.
The purpose here is to drive traffic to my full price books, which, based on my experiments, leaves BookBub out. With Facebook I could write an entire series on what I have done there and might just do that down the road, but my goal for 2022 is hopefully master Amazon ads and I invite you to come take the journey with me.
Why Amazon Ads?
The first question that you might have is why choose Amazon Ads? Well, Amazon is the biggest online bookstore out there. If you’re exclusive to Amazon and have your books in Kindle Unlimited, then this is your entire world. If your wide like me, I have my books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, AppleBooks, Google and about twenty-six other book retailers around the world but based on my sales experience my two biggest sales channels are Amazon and Barnes & Noble. So even as a wide author, it benefits me greatly in working to master Amazon Ads.
Right now Barnes & Noble provides some promotional opportunities on their platform but they don’t have an advertising option, which leaves me to use Facebook to drive traffic to the B&N site. Here lies the difference between Facebook ads and Amazon Ads. Amazon Ads are displayed on the Amazon platform, where readers who are looking for a book in my selected genre will hopefully see my ads. These people are referred to as a warm audience because they are already open to the idea of purchasing a book, hopefully mine. With Facebook, we are trying to take people off of Facebook who are their to check out their nieces’ latest soccer picks and the trending cat meme. They may not have thought about purchasing a book that day and therefore they are considered a cold audience or a lot less warm audience than the people on Amazon.
Information Resources
What this series of posts won’t do is to teach you how to set up Amazon Ads. There are several excellent books that will teach you how to go about setting up ads or courses you can subscribe to. This blog series shares with you some of the testing that I am doing throughout the year based on information I have gathered and try to let you know what worked for me and what I don’t think is working. I am far from being an expert in Amazon Ads and have learned a lot of what I am deploying from various other authors from around the world. Some resources that I have used to help build a foundation on Amazon Ads include:
- Mark Dawson’s Course – Ads for Authors
- Amazon Decoded by David Gaughran (not about ads but about understanding the Kindle store) **
- Amazon Ads for Indie Authors by Janet Margot (she also teaches in Mark Dawson’s course) **
- Amazon Ads Unleashed by Robert J. Ryan **
- Amazon Ads for Authors by Deb Potter **
** As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Budgets and Bidding
One of the key aspects, well there are many key aspects with Amazon Ads, but one of the common topics is budgets and bidding. The reason I am highlighting this is that I found from different resources that there are different opinions around budgeting and bidding. This is a significant area to highlight something important. What works for one author may not work for others. They may be in a different genre than you and they would have experimented and found what works for them and share that with you, but that might not be what you experience.
In fact, I could find success through my experiments this year and you could do the same thing and not find success. That is how unique this experience is for different authors and why many, after trying Amazon ads for a while, throw up their hands and look elsewhere for advertising options.
The resources listed above, I think, are some of the most popular out there for authors. However, one author suggests small budgets while another supports larger budgets. One author suggests starting at small conservative bids while another suggests going for larger bids. One suggests not using the recommended bids by Amazon and another thinks it’s a great guide to use in your bidding strategy. You know they are all right because whatever tactic they recommend worked for them.
My Ad Set-Ups
I am running ads currently on all three of my books. I am promoting heavily on my first in the series entitled Cold Iron, which I sell for $2.99 USD. I have ads running on the second and third in my series priced at $4.99.
Campaign Type – There are three campaign types of ads on Amazon that you can choose from: 1) Sponsored Products, 2) Sponsored Brands and 3) Lockscreen Ads. I have not yet tried Sponsored Brands and Lockscreen Ads and won’t attempt them until I feel I have mastered Sponsored Ads.
Daily Budget – When you set up your ad, you can set a daily budget. You can also set up an overall budget for a portfolio, which holds all of your ads. I have a different portfolio for each of my books. The daily budget I am using currently is $10.00 per day. So with a default bid of $0.51, this means my maximum clicks per day would only be 19 for each campaign that I run.
Bidding – I am choosing a medium bid price with an initial default bid price of $0.51 per click. In the beginning, I used $0.25 that was recommended but found that it didn’t help to generate a lot of impressions. For yourself, start with a bid that you feel comfortable with. If you find it doesn’t help to generate impressions, then increase it gradually until impressions are generated but don’t choose a bid price that is out of your comfort zone. Also, for me I have three books for sale so the potential profit if someone buys the first and then goes onto the second and then third is ($2.99 x 70%) + ($4.99 x 70%) + ($4.99 x 70%) = $2.09 + $3.49 + $3.49 = $9.07.
Having three books allows me to play with a higher bid. If I only had the first book in the series available. A bid of $0.51 would be 24% of what I would make on the book and if my conversion was over four clicks for every sale, I would lose money every time I sold a book.
Campaign Bidding Strategy
There are three campaign bidding strategies you can choose from: 1) Dynamic Bids – Down Only 2) Dynamic Bids – Up and Down 3) Fixed Bids. I decided to go with Fixed Bids based on feedback from different resources.
Ad Format – Your ad format can be a standard ad or an ad with custom text. For the most part, I have chosen the standard ad format.
Ad Targets
I have several Ad targets I chose for my three books and will go over them in greater detail in future posts, but the list consists of:
- Category Ads
- Automatic Ads
- Keywords Ads – comp book titles, comp authors, ASINS, also bought
This is where I leave you. Check back as I hope to post a blog post weekly about things that I have done and what my experiences have been so far. If you are on your own Amazon Ads journey and would like to share your insights, please leave me a comment down below.
