My experiences with the 5-Day Amazon Ad Profit Challenge

The 5-Day Amazon Ad Profit Challenge is a free course run by Bryan Cohen from bestpageforward.net, focusing on how to set up and run Amazon adverts for your books. But how does it work, and is it worth your time ? Read on to find out!

Course contents

The course takes you from the first principles from setting up your first adverts and bidding limits, to creating good ad copy and blurbs, and everything in between. Wondering how to get keywords without having to splash out on expensive scraping software? The course covers that too.

What you need

To get the most out of the course, you’ll need the following:

TimeEach video is about an hour long, plus that again in homework and any additional time you spend on the FB group.Making ads, especially keyword ads, can also take a while until you get used to it, or if you are grabbing a load of keywords for multiple adverts. I made a template for tracking ads for a previous challenge, which you can get here!Inclination.Learning is hard, but also fun. Even so, no one can do it for you. To get the most out of the course, you’ll really need to follow the advice and do your homework.It’s easy to dismiss Amazon ads as something that doesn’t work, and we’ve probably all been there (I know I have). My book is fine – the system is broken. And perhaps it is. But without everything in place, it’s never going to work. This will involve taking a step back and critically evaluating your ads and book.If you think of the act of selling as a chain of targeting >> cover >> ad copy >>blurb then if any of those are not optimal, the whole thing collapses.A budgetAmazon is, fortunately, fairly frugal when it comes to spending your money, especially when compared to other platforms. This gives you some time to play around with various things without spending too much.You’ll be making multiple ads with a budget for each, and your first thoughts will probably be “OMG I’ll be spending hundreds of dollars!!”. Fortunately, with the bid rates they recommend, you should be fine and the actual spend will be very low.PatienceNow this is the really tricky part. It’s easy to get super-enthusiastic setting up an advert then get instantly disheartened when nothing happens. But this is fairly normal. Ads take a while to serve and impressions (which are free) may crawl out a snail’s pace, with clicks even slower. This is mainly due to the low bid amount Bryan recommends, but the temptation to up the bid to gain speed on an unoptimised ad set could cost you in the short and long term.It’s also easy to make rash decisions based on not enough data (especially when it’s costing you money). As a scientist, I know all too well the dangers of relying on a small sample number to base your conclusions on.While you might get great results straight away, some books will be slow burners and it will take a while for sales to catch on at all. Ask yourself: how many ads on Amazon do you ignore? Probably most of them, and it may take several views of an advert before you’re intrigued enough to click on it to find out more. Project that behaviour on to the rest of the customers on Amazon and you can seen why several thousand impressions may not be enough.Is it really free?

The course itself is high quality and completely free, so there’s nothing really to lose apart from whatever budget you set for yourself for the various tasks and beyond. There is some upsell for their paid Amazon Ad School membership, but it’s up to you to decide whether you’re ready for the next step. Many people take the free course multiple times with different books, and there’s always something new to learn.

Added wizard value

As well as the course videos, there are several Q&A sessions which can be viewed later if you can’t make them at the time. The real meat and potatoes of the added experience, however, is the Facebook group. Here, a veritable army of helpful admin wizards are on call to help out with pretty much any related query you may have. Want opinions and advice on your ad copy or cover, or wondering why your blurb isn’t converting clicks to purchases? The wizards are always more than happy to help out, as are other group members.

The Facebook groups is also a good place to share your experiences as the course unfolds. As usual, some people will have instant success, others will see nothing, and everyone else will fit somewhere in the middle. With most information online these days only showing how successful someone has been, it’s comforting to know that you’re not alone if things aren’t going well.

Does it work? My experiences

I’ve taken the course twice now, once for In Vitro Lottery, and the other for Jack Gilmour: Wish Lawyer. It’s taken a while, but I’m finally seeing some. Here are my results for the last 30 days for both books combined:

This isn’t the whole story, of course, as the real value of interest is royalties. Getting this out of KDP isn’t very straightforward, but using the getbookreport app, my royalties for the last 30 days across all three of my books (Wish Lawyer books 1 and 2, and In Vitro Lottery) is ~$64. This isn’t all from Amazon ads, as I had a couple of other things going on this last month, but it gives a good indicator of the overall impact. These numbers aren’t exactly huge, of course, but compared to what my sales were over the previous year (ie pretty much zero) this is a huge improvement. For once, I’m actually getting more in sales than I’m spending on clicks.

Conclusions

I’d recommend this course to anyone thinking of setting up some Amazon ads, or who tried for a while but gave up when nothing converted to sales. You might still not get any results (and certainly not instantly), but you’ll get plenty of help trying to work out why.

The course is just the beginning

Like learning to drive, the 5-day profit challenge gives you the tools you need to get started. Since the course is only 5 days long, your ads will be running for a lot longer than that so it’s important to keep to hand what you’ve learnt as the ads progress hopefully into sales.

What I stopped doing

Although international (ie non-US) ads are covered Bryan, he recommends that new users stay away from them. From my experience with UK adverts, I tend to agree. Although the impressions I got were massively higher than the US version per advert, and I got more clicks, the conversion rate was so low that I’ve now switched them off.

What I need to do next

I’ve had feedback from various sources that my cover for Jack Gilmour: Wish Lawyer isn’t ‘urban fantasy’ enough for the target audience, so that will be something to look at next. On the plus side, it’s averaging 4.3/5 on Amazon from 23 reviews, so the people who are reading it seem to like it. Hopefully this will inspire them to read the next in the series: Demons in the Details.

Ed Ryder is a research scientist by day and writes in the evening when he can fit it in.
Like a bit of fun urban fantasy or fancy some hardcore dystopia? Check out his books from the links below!

Jack Gilmour: Wish Lawyer on Amazon 

In Vitro Lottery is out now on Amazon