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Experience with Amazon (AMS) advertising
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Robin
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May 05, 2018 02:06PM
Has anyone ever used Black Sun Book Promotions or Insight Book Promotions?
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Has anyone here had glitches in their AMS reports? All of a sudden, my impressions are going backwards instead of forwards. I was kind of po'd when after I contacted Amazon about it, they informed me that the numbers only go up and NEVER go down. Yeah, right. Well, mine did! And then, as I was checking my stats today, I found that in three of my other campaigns, the number of clicks decreased. I have contacted them about all the issues and am waiting to hear back, but I have to say that I'm fast losing faith in Amazon and their record keeping. Too many glitches all at once!
I had the same thing happen. Asked, got the same answer
Are you saying that with each new ad that your stats go down?
Another strange thing about Amazon: the number of reviews fluctuates. It goes up 2 or 3 one day, down 2 or 3 the next, and back up again, with no new reviews coming in. Has anyone else seen this kind of thing?
Robin wrote: "Has anyone ever used Black Sun Book Promotions or Insight Book Promotions?" I have not used either of these, but have used several others with no significant difference in sales compared to when I promote books myself.
Sarina wrote: "Robin wrote: "Has anyone ever used Black Sun Book Promotions or Insight Book Promotions?" I have not used either of these, but have used several others with no significant difference in sales compa..."Thank you, Sarina. I've had a similar experience with promo sites. It seems that most of the followers are authors, and not readers willing to pay for books. Black Sun works a bit differently than most. They audit your website, create back links, optimize SEO , and much more. I'm giving it a try. Will get back to the group on results.
I can't wait to hear I'll have to look into it.
Ann wrote: "Has anyone here had glitches in their AMS reports? All of a sudden, my impressions are going backwards instead of forwards. I was kind of po'd when after I contacted Amazon about it, they informed ..."Hi Ann, I have seen the same thing from time to time. I assume their software has bugs in it.
I've started running AMS adverts about 8 weeks ago.Cost: $18.46
Impressions: 124003
Clicks: 108
Avg cost per click: $0.17
Avg impressions for click: 1148 ( sub 1000 in the last two weeks and trending down over the 8 weeks)
Books sold attributed to adverts: 7
Total net cost after royalties $7.90.
Average cost to sell each book $1.13 (more efficient than any of my promos, but still a negative ROI).
I've now got 11 adverts running for 3 books, still building up my AMS Keywords, (b/w 270 and 440 depending on the advert). I've revised my blurbs, categories, and Amazon 7 Keywords during the last two months.
Sarina wrote: "Are you saying that with each new ad that your stats go down?"No, I'm saying that everything was going along just fine, the impressions were going up each day and then, all of a sudden, they started going backwards. This happened once before but it was just one day and I figured it was a glitch. But this went on for several days in a row on multiple campaigns - either the impressions went backwards or the clicks went backwards. I'm waiting to hear back from them on all fronts. I have been promised that there is a team looking into it. We'll see. Meanwhile, I'm not selling any books because I'm getting no impressions. One of my clicks reappeared.
I'm glad I keep a paper trail. At least I have pictures I can send to support my complaint, particularly after I was told that what I described was impossible.
Robin wrote: "Sarina wrote: "Robin wrote: "Has anyone ever used Black Sun Book Promotions or Insight Book Promotions?" I have not used either of these, but have used several others with no significant difference..."Looking forward to hearing about your experience.
Very informative thread! As I've just launched my first AMS ad campaign for my environmental fantasy, a couple of thoughts/questions...I've moderated my expectations about what an AMS campaign can do for an indie author. Ads - even across several platforms - are just a compliment to other marketing tactics (in-store signings, reviews, word-of-mouth, etc).
It's also apparent that the sheer volume of self-published books has led to a deluge of sponsored product book ads and if yours is buried many pages behind other authors', few potential readers will see it. So, beyond tracking ad performance metrics, it's helpful to see where your ad actually appears relative to competing ads 'in the lineup' at the bottom of the page once your campaign goes live - especially if you used popular genres and authors as your keywords.
Does anyone have any insight about: 1) how AMS defines an 'impression'? Does it count equally as an impression whether your book is on the first page (where its likely to be seen) vs on page 74 (and hence invisible)? 2) if you're seeing few impressions for keywords that should fit your book like a glove, does boosting your CPC bid enhance your ad's chances of getting more impressions?
Thanks!
In the spirit of sharing tribal lore, a few further notes on Amazon (AMS) book ads after completing an initial campaign for my environmental fantasy thriller…- Expect modest results on this platform especially for indie authors without an established readership; AMS ads compliment (but most certainly don’t replace) other essential efforts to promote a book and build a base (e.g. book signings have been far more successful than AMS ads to date – though signings have their own challenges).
- Though initially, results will be modest, so are costs. For indie authors with a nano-scale budget, AMS ads are a good ‘laboratory’ to test assumptions about a book’s potential readership and how to reach them.
- As many others have noted, the best keywords seem to be genres that you think your book fits within, authors that you assume readers may find similar to your work, and titles of books with motifs/plots/characters similar to your own. There are several paid or free tools to generate the boatloads of keywords that are gist for the mill in determining what ultimately works in connecting a given book to a readership that might actually buy it.
- In experimenting with keywords, we all know that our own work is utterly unique and impossible to categorize (gentle sarcasm intended), but for this exercise, staying humble and looking for genres/titles/authors in spaces similar to our own work is helpful.
- There are any number of places to get free or paid expertise that may (or may not) better inform you about navigating AMS. However, the platform remains something of a black box with regard to how its algorithms translate an author’s keywords and bids into targeted ads for a given book. Predicting what will work and determining whether it was customer psychology or a nuance of AMS (or a combination of the two) that drove a particular keyword’s success is tricky. Even the definition of ‘impression’ isn’t clear – probably it doesn’t mean actual eyeballs on a particular ad given that many sponsored product ads are buried many, many pages deep. Having said that…
- There is value in pouring over the metrics generated by your campaign for leads on who might buy your book and how to reach them with follow-up efforts.
It’s a trial and error process…
Thank you, Peter. It all goes to show just how much time we need to spend on marketing, and the more books you write, the more marketing there is to do!So every bit of tribal lore or any short cuts are very, very welcome.
This seems to be a fairly inactive thread, but in the spirit of continuing to share tribal lore about KDP marketing, I'll share my initial experiences with Kindle Unlimited (KU) over the last three months to support sales of my modern fantasy/action & adventure novel...There are several advantages to using KU. Obviously, it’s one more channel to get your work in front of readers – potentially lots and lots of readers. A recently posted data analysis indicates that there are about 3 million KU readers. Further, these folks appear to both read and review books at higher levels than non-members. In addition, if your book is already published as an Amazon eBook, it’s an extraordinarily easy process to authorize its availability on KU.
However, there are disadvantages that indie authors need to consider before deploying KU. Among these are the potential for cannibalization of actual eBook sales where your profit margins are higher. After all, if you’re a reader using KU, why buy something that you’ve already paid to access with your monthly subscription? This is analogous to a conundrum from the traditional days of hard-copy books which when sold to a library meant potential readers could simply check a book out without buying it. Of course, then as now, many of these readers would only read your book as a library checkout and would never pay to own it.
My own experience is that Amazon eBook sales did indeed drop once I’d made my book available on KU. And while Amazon currently pays a 70% royalty on sales of my $5.95 eBook ($4.17), I only get about $1.25 for every 300 pages read on KU. Naturally, if you price your eBook at $2.99 (the lowest price that Amazon pays a 70% royalty for), the difference between a KU read and an eBook sale is smaller. However, whatever you set your price at, you’ll need to sell enormous numbers of books to make any significant money via KU – no wonder some writers take an almost factory production approach to their writing.
It’s tricky to quantitate exactly how many shoppers would have bought my eBook had it not also been available on KU given that I couldn’t control key variables including seasonal sales fluctuations, introduction of competing books by other authors, and changes in my advertising. However, a review of the profits before and after KU availability indicates reduced income. This implies that though KU may well have expanded my reader base (yeah!), this didn’t offset the drop in profitability (sigh!).
I’ll plan to observe this effect for several more months to better quantitate the net impact of the competing effects of expanded readership vs reduced profitability.
Another disadvantage for authors considering KU is Amazon’s prohibition against using other platforms to sell electronic versions of your book (at the moment, hard-copy sales are unaffected by this requirement). Of course, this creates a dependency on a single channel for your book’s electronic sales. However competing distribution channels for eBook distribution come with their own set of challenges including the need to format your book to meet their platform’s standards and the lack of compatibility across platforms. Further, at the moment, Amazon’s rivals simply can’t compete on reaching readers. Perhaps if Apple makes a serious effort with its Apple Books platform, this will introduce needed competition into this space.
Conclusion
For indie authors with micro scale operating and marketing budgets, KU offers a chance to dramatically increase your ability to potentially get your work in front of interested readers’ eyeballs. And you may derive some modest income from this effort at the expense of more profitable sales in other formats. In fact, this is a classic business challenge: do you opt for market share or higher margins. Anyway, for writers with little name recognition, KU is a useful distribution conduit though you’ll still need to market like crazy to get anyone to actually be aware of your book(s) and leverage this channel’s capabilities.
Thank you, Peter.I find that KU offers income that I probably would not get through sales. Sometimes i.e. when I bother to monitor these things, I can see from the number of page reads in a single day that there must be at least X people reading a particular book and I have not had to do any extra marketing. My small budget for ebook and paperback sales does not need to be increased to cover KU nor do I need to spend even more precious time on visibility.
On the other hand, I am tied to Amazon. That suits me as a fairly new author (first book published in 2012).
I've used Amazon Advertising quite a lot and struggled to find out whether an ad was gaining or costing money i.e. Return on Investment positive or negative. However, the new layout is a big help. I have found the 'average cost per sale' figure to be particularly useless for me, because two books I have been advertising have many images (99 and 45 respectively). Despite doing all I can to reduce image size, this results in massive download charges of $1.60 and 85c respectively. Until the new dashboard was introduced, I tried to keep a spreadsheet that calculated ROI monthly, but it was a lot of work.
The two advantages for me of the new layout are: showing each campaign separately; and being able to sort by column. None of you is my grandmother and you probably already know how to suck eggs, but I'll explain in detail what I do:
1. Calculate revenue per sale for each book (from Book Report or from the KDP dashboard). They turn out to be $3.04 and $3.77 respectively for the two Kindle books. Revenues for the paperbacks are $3.03 and $3.74 respectively.
2. Click the 'Columns' button and make sure that the 'Spend' and 'Orders' columns are displayed.
3. Click the 'Spend' column header once or twice until the highest spending campaign is at the top.
4. Compare Spend and Orders for each campaign where money has been spent. If no orders at all, make a judgement whether the campaign is worth keeping. If not, cancel or pause it. If some orders are shown, divide Spend by Orders to show the cost per order. If this is less than the revenue per sale, the ROI is positive. 'Orders' includes both Kindle and paperback, so I use the lower revenue figure (which in the above case is the paperback, $3.03 and £3.74) to compare with.
I usually check this at a glance and try to make sure the revenue is comfortably above the spend when deciding whether to keep an ad going. However, one can no doubt use it to do a proper calculation of ROI.
I need to be aware of weaknesses in this approach:
- I think 'Orders' includes KU downloads. Their revenue is much lower (about $1 per completed book) so the 'comfortably above' is important.
- The Spend and Orders figures are for the life of the ad, rather than e.g. last 30 days, but - time permitting - one can check out different periods.
Earlier in this thread, we've discussed clicks per 1,000 impressions, conversion rates, the need for lots of keywords and the advantages of trying and testing lots of ads.
I hope these comments on using the new dashboard are of interest.
