Welcome to this week’s post on the Amazon Ads Adventure. In the last post we talked about why Amazon Ads. This week I want to talk about why you should be advertising in the first place and then begin the discussion on keywords which drive your ads.
Why Advertise at All?
If you walk into a traditional bookstore, you are usually greeted with a table or several, right at the front of the store displaying a selection of books. At the ends of the aisles, you may see a selection of other books and other strategic locations in the stores. In each case, they will display the front cover of the book to catch your eye. They will file other books in the store on the racks with the spines facing out. The publishing companies pay for those locations that you spot at the front of the store or at the end of aisles. They know the best to chance to sell that book to you is if you spot it and it catches your eye. You pick it up, read the book description, maybe read a few pages, and if you like it, you put it under your arm and take it up to the cash register to pay for it.
Advertising on any book platform is no different. You are paying to be discovered by readers. No different from those strategic locations in the bookstore paid for by the publishing companies. Ask yourself, with no advertising and no strategic locations, how many books do you think you would sell in a traditional bookstore with only the spine of your book facing out with dozens of other books on either side of yours? If your book is going to have a chance to sell on Amazon, you need to consider advertising so that potential readers can notice your book.
Keywords
Let’s begin by talking about the overall goal before wading into what they are and where you might find them. The goal for every author is to find those keywords that serve up your ads at an affordable bid rate that leads to clicks and then sales of your book(s). So now let’s try to talk about what they are.
This can be a monstrous topic and the view points around keywords are ever changing. A few years ago, it was being suggested that you should put together extensive collections of keywords to determine which keywords are best for you. A campaign can have up to a 1,000 keywords and many authors will use various tools to mine for keywords to develop those long lists. This week I jumped on a webinar about Amazon Ads for 2022 and they suggested that our group of keywords should be no more than 40 keywords in a campaign. Think about that. A few years ago, it was being suggested to have around 1,000 keywords and now less than a 100 keywords per campaign. I’ve read other authors who share that same viewpoint, to have small clusters of keywords which provided a greater chance of them being served and the author having a better chance to determine if the keyword is good for them or not.
If you look at the math, it makes sense. In my case, my daily budget is $10.00. Some authors will go even lower with daily budgets of $5.00. If I am bidding $0.50 per click as a default bid, the maximum number of clicks a particular ad would see daily is 20. If your campaign is testing a thousand keywords and that 20 clicks is spread across those 1,000 keywords, it’s going to take a long time before you have any meaningful data to evaluate whether those keywords are effective.
What are Keywords?
So what are keywords? Well, quite simply, it’s those words that a potential customer enters into the search box on Amazon when searching in the Kindle store or in the books category. So for my novels things they may enter could be my name, Alex Blakely, one of my book titles, like Cold Iron. They could enter “women sleuths,” “female sleuths,” “hard-boiled mystery.” Whatever they enter in is a potential keyword that you may want to consider that would trigger one of your ads being displayed.
Other things you will consider are book titles and authors that are comparable to your books in your genre. So if a reader types in the author name of a popular mystery author, then I may also want my books to appear in the results to give them an option they might not have considered. Think about it: a brand new author’s mystery book appearing alongside one by James Patterson. Exposure, that is what you’re paying for. The reader will see your cover, how many stars it is rated and if it looks intriguing to them, they may click on it. Then they read your blurb, maybe some reviews you have received and maybe, just maybe, they will buy your book. Without that ad, what is the chance of that happening?
So the challenge for all of us working with Amazon Ads is to gather relevant keywords that we can bid on at an auction that Amazon has when it decides what ads it will serve based on whatever criteria the potential customer entered into the search box.
The Starting Process
Genre Based Keywords
This is how I cultivated a list of words to consider. At the time of this writing, I have actually turned off several of my ads for Cold Iron because they comprised hundreds of keywords. I am now relaunching ads for Cold Iron this month with a maximum of 40 keywords in a campaign. So I purchased a tool about three years ago called Publisher Rocket. Publisher Rocket pulls information from Amazon and provides insight into different keywords being used on Amazon. Recently I went back to revamp my metadata for my books based on something I read in “Amazon Decoded.” I will talk more about metadata in my next post. Using Publisher Rocket, I found about 110 keywords related to my genre that people use to find books like mine. Originally, these 110 keywords were part of a campaign with hundreds of keywords. Now at the time of this writing, they are part of three campaigns of 40 keywords, 40 keywords and 30 keywords.
Also Boughts
Another list I compiled came from my “Also Bought.” After your books have been selling for a while, a list of “also bought” will appear on your book’s product page. It shows potential customers other books people purchased, who also purchased your book. I went through this list for all of my books and documented the name of the book, the author’s name, the ASIN and their sales rank at the time I compiled the list. I also went onto their page as recommended by someone else and looked at their also bought and documented the same information. I noted the categories the books were found in and then used the categories later to help filter out books I didn’t believe were a good fit for Cold Iron. As an example, my books are about a “woman sleuth,” so it wouldn’t be a good fit for someone looking for a “cozy mystery,” or a “legal thriller.” Once I had my list in the categories that I thought was a good match, I then sorted them by Sales Rank. Until I read Amazon Ads Unleashed, I hadn’t brought Sales Rank in to my analysis. If one book you are considering for your ads has a sales rank of 100,000, where 1 is the best, it suggests that this author doesn’t currently sell a lot of this particular title. If they are not selling a lot of this title, it may mean that people aren’t looking for it. If people aren’t looking for it and your bidding to show your book when they do, it will mean that your ad won’t receive a lot of impressions. So I use the guidelines Robert Ryan recommended and paired my list down. That gave me about 80 book titles that might apply to Cold Iron. From that I can put together two campaigns on book titles, two campaigns on their related ASINS, and two campaigns on the author’s names. From one list, I could generate 6 different campaigns.
Now What? – Tending the Garden
With those keywords that you have picked, you will now want to create ads around them. From those ads, you may find more keywords based on search reports that Amazon makes available to you. Once a keyword has had enough impressions, based on results, you will want to make a decision on whether to leave the keyword on or turn it off.
To begin with, every time your ad is shown on Amazon, that is an impression. In the purchasing process, it’s the first step. Potential customers can not click on your ad if they don’t see it, so you want to ensure your getting impressions to those keywords. The rule of thumb that I have heard from many authors is that you should have at least one click on your ad for every 1,000 impressions. These same authors believe you should have one sale for every 10 clicks your ad receives.
Back to impressions. Once your ad has been running for a while, you will want to check to see how your campaign is doing. If you have a keyword that is getting a lot of impressions but no clicks, you might turn it off because it may not be relevant to your book title. If you are getting clicks, then you will want to determine your own benchmark, on whether the percent of clicks are satisfactory to you or consider turning it off.
So for me, I am in the process of redoing some of my ads, so my campaign keyword clusters are smaller. Once those are complete, I will run those ads with “no end dates” and evaluate periodically through the month, adjusting the bids where necessary if they are not receiving enough impressions. For keywords that receive a 1,000 impressions, I will review the CTR (click through ratio) to ensure that it is where I want it to be. If it’s lower or zero, I will turn the keyword off, so Amazon can focus on the other keywords in the cluster. This process can take months to go through your campaigns and prune back the non-performing keywords looking for the golden ones.
The gold keywords are the ones that are going to have a high CTR and subsequently convert to high sales. I will then harvest these keywords into a separate campaign with a higher budget that can be scaled up to maximize sales.
Question for You?
How many keywords are you using per campaign? What sources have you used to curate your collection, please leave me a comment below?
