C.L.’s Comments (group member since Jan 14, 2017)

C.L.’s comments from the Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie group.

Alex, yes, the offer is still open. Just tell me what your genre is and where i can email the keywords.

DJ - a useful thing it to calculate the clicks to download ratio. If you are in KDP, that means sales plus page reads. If you aren't then you only have sales which makes it harder to make a profit, but is still possible esp on Amazon UK.

You need to convert every 10-20 clicks into a sale. If you're gettig lots of clicks but not many sales, then you need to improve your book description. If you aren't getting at least one click per 1000 impressions then you need to improve your cover.

You do not. But amazon ads are MUCH more profitable if you are in KU. I usually make maybe $20 in sales in a day, but $30-50 in KDP page reads.

When I was wide I was making maybe a few dollars a MONTH from wide sales, and wasn't getting paid page reads, so KU is vastly more profitable for me.

For Amazon UK, though, I find that most of my sales actually come from paperback. So I think UK is a good marketplace for paperback sales.

Glad you got it working!

Good ad copy, like good blurb copy, tells people why they should buy the book. Like, "You won't be able to put down this tense scifi mystery."

I think that there are a lot of people out there who are wary of free, though. Certain genres, like romance, depend on free reads but other genres have more discerning readers who want to believe this book is "legit".

Only judge an ad once it starts running. An ad isn't really running until it's getting thousands of impressions a day. They tend to trickle along until BAM - they go. And then in less than a week they die down to a trickle again. No one knows why.

My sales have died down immensely because despite having like 15 ads "running" only one or two are ACTUALLY running right now.

Keep a spreadsheet of your AMS clicks and sales (from KDP, not AMS dashboard) on, say, a weekly basis. See how many clicks it takes to make a sale. You should be able to figure that out after a couple of weeks or a month. Then you can figure out how much you can afford to spend per click.

So if it takes 30 clicks to make a sale, and you make one pound per sale, then you can afford to spend 0.03 per click. If you tweak your blurb so you get one sale per 15 clicks, you can spend 0.06. If you raise your price to get a 2 GBP royalty per sale, you could spend 0.12. And so on.

In general, AMS seems to spend about half of your bid on average. So if you big 0.10 per click your cost per click is usually around 0.05-0.06. Not always. But usually.

Well and think of it this way. You just made a sale, right? So how much royalty did you get for your sale? Now compare that to the 53 p you've spent in ads. That's your profit. As long as that number stays in the black, you're golden. You're making money.

D.J. wrote: "I don't suppose there's any way to tell if the sale I had at the weekend was as a result of the adverts. The adverts say no, but if their reporting is that bad, how do we really know?

Oh and I hav..."

Their reporting is terrible. Totally ignore. It'll take a month or so to know. Run ads for a month. See how many sales you got compared to what you sold before.

AMS sucks at many things, reporting is one of them, and taking your money is another. It can get quite frustrating when you find the sweet spot and know how to double your money but AMS won't spend it!

Probably not, that's my complaint. In AMS US you can write copy for all kinds of ads. In AMS UK only certain ads have room for copy. It's hard because you have to run off the strength of your cover alone.

In general, if you aren't getting clicks (one click to a 1000 impressions is considered average) then it's either your cover or your copy. If you are getting clicks but no sales (1:30 is average, 1:10 is your goal) your blurb needs improving.

I sent you some keyword lists, DJ.

On of my complaints about AMS UK is that you can't write ad copy for several ad types. I feel like good copy can really increase click rates.

D.J. wrote: "C.L. wrote: "I have KDP rocket so if anyone wants me to generate keywords for them let me know - tell me the genre or keyword you'd like to build off of and your email and I'll send you the spreads..."

Sure just tell me where to email them

Carmel wrote: "C.L. wrote: "It's also really important to keep an excel spreadsheet tracking your sales compared to your clicks for each day. Amazon is terrible at letting you know which ads are working and which..."

Exactly. Plus they don't track KDP downloads/page reads which if you're in KDP is half of your income or more. So ignore. Watch your dashboard. Remember that if you are in KDP, your spike in page reads will come a few days after your spike in clicks.

Sent you one back!

It's also really important to keep an excel spreadsheet tracking your sales compared to your clicks for each day. Amazon is terrible at letting you know which ads are working and which don't. Ignore the Acos. Pay attention to your KDP dashboard.

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Hey guys - some tips:

4 ads of 100 keywords each do better than one ad with 400 keywords

Display - interest ads work well, product keyword displays not so much. The interest ads pop up on people's kindles based on the genres they read.

Most ads don't do much until suddenly they do and you get a spike of a few days thne it goes back to a trickle. If you line up ten ads you'll get ten spikes, but if you just do one and wait six weeks not much is going to happen for most of that time.

I have KDP rocket so if anyone wants me to generate keywords for them let me know - tell me the genre or keyword you'd like to build off of and your email and I'll send you the spreadsheet.

Well, I have a bunch of episodes queued... I wonder how long it takes for someone to actually find it on the app...

D.J. wrote: "I need take time to get my head around this. At the moment it’s flying way above my head. I need to promote effectively in a long term kind of way!"

Pick up Brian Meeks' Amazon Ads for Authors. It's readable, entertaining, useful, and comes with a link to a facebook group that is very helpufl.