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A New AMS Thread

116K views 972 replies 138 participants last post by  A past poster 
#1 ·
Edited to say: Sorry guys. Based on new ownership at this site and their response to legitimate author concerns I've chosen to withdraw from participation here.
 
#3 ·
Pretty much everything you've said agrees with my past experience.

I would also add one inference I've made over the last several months that may (or may not) be true... It seems like new ads tend to get a boost when you first launch them, like a trial period I guess, but that doesn't hold true if you keep launching new ads for the same book repeatedly during a short period of time. There seems to be a diminishing returns thing going on there.

And if you let an ad rest, or stop advertising a particular book for several weeks, when you start advertising again it gets another chance to be brand new.

I've also found that it's a good general practice is to try to keep Amazon's best interests in mind with your ad. Basically, they like ads that make a profit for them. So if your ad is making tons of money for you, but you're using tiny bids and getting a bad CTR, you're probably taking up valuable carousel space, and Amazon will gradually phase your ad out. But that doesn't mean small bids can't work, you just need a good CTR. Sales conversions might even factor into it as well, but it's hard to be sure.

In a weird way, keeping an ad alive and thriving is almost like caring for a plant, and it seems like over time you're fighting against a tide that slowly pushes old ads down in favor of new ads, very similar to the way new release books gradually push older books further down in the charts.

For myself, I haven't been able to achieve anything truly consistent with AMS ads. I've had some ads that did great for a long stretch, others where I lost money. Right now I'm not running any at all, but overall I've made a small profit with my Amazon ads, and I'm getting better with them.

Sometimes I feel like the rules are constantly changing. I think Amazon are still tweaking the baseline algorithm for their ads, so trying to work out a reliable strategy is equivalent to shooting at a moving target.
 
#4 ·
Thanks for summarizing results and starting a new thread.

What is your opinion of running AMS ads for more than one book in a series?

I've run an ad for book one since it launched last fall, and my CTR is not stellar. Around one click per 1500, and I have 1,000 keywords. I've run an ad consistently on book two since the launch this April, with 1000 keywords (for the most part not the same ones used for book one) and the click rate is about the same, but I get less sales attributed to this book. I recently started a new ad for book three, on preorder. Only 150 keywords so far, lol. No sales attributed to this ad yet, although my click rate is about one in 775. Maybe no one buys preorder books from relatively unknown authors via AMS? Am I wasting money running ads for all three books? With all these keywords at work, I hope to drive KU borrows if not a lot of sales.
 
#5 ·
I also read that your ad must comply with Amazon's Book Ads Creative Acceptance Policies and it's better to pause than terminate an ad.

And...
  • If you get no impressions for your ad, check both the quantity and quality of your keywords
  • If you get impressions but no clicks, improve your ad copy
  • If you get clicks but no sales, improve your product page
  • If you get impressions and clicks but no sales, check your target audience and/or keywords.
 
#6 ·
Cassie Leigh said:
- This amount includes ebooks as well as paperbacks sold through KDP Print or CreateSpace. It does not include paperback sales if you're the one responsible for shipping them.
- The AMS dashboard does not account for KU borrows and does not show what you earn for pages read if a book is borrowed after someone clicks on the ad.

Alright. That's a good start. What did I miss or get wrong?
Has anyone determined if audio-book sales are counted?
 
#8 ·
Cassie Leigh said:
I don't think they are. On my romance title my audiobook sales picked up while I was running AMS, but I never saw any sign that those sales were getting credited to the ads.
I just restarted an ad and have only gotten audiobook sales from it. Those sales are definitely not showing up on my AMS dashboard. At least I assume they are coming from AMS because I've been running no other ads on this book and certainly not on the audio version.
 
#11 ·
I got a few books that cover AMS ads.

Mastering Amazon Ads: An Author's Guide by Brian D. Meeks
Learn Amazon Ads: Use AMS to Find More Readers and Sell More Books by Mark J Dawson
How to Sell Fiction on Kindle.... Michael Alvear
Make A Killing on Kindle... Michael Alvear

And I still think getting AMS ads working is a mystical process involving sacrificial offerings and full moons.  :eek:
 
#12 ·
C. Gold said:
And I still think getting AMS ads working is a mystical process involving sacrificial offerings and full moons. :eek:
Amen. Goats, virgins, smoking volcanoes. I'd recommend trying them all.

What are some of the best clicks-to-impressions anyone's heard? Is there such a beast as 1 click per 100 impressions?
 
#13 ·
Excellent summary. I agree with nearly all but am not sure about this:

Cassie Leigh said:
- AMS will also count sales of related books (like book 1 in a series where the ad was for book 3) towards the ad's performance.
I advertise Book 1. Many customers buy all five books in the series, but I do not see this reflected on the AMS reporting, only in my KDP dashboard.

Philip
 
#15 ·
What is with this "edition" keyword?

I've just started Cassie's book and notice she got a sale from the keyword "edition" .  So have I.  I think others have mentioned it, too.  I'd love to know how this comes about.  Cassie removed the keyword, as have I in the past, but maybe it's more worthwhile to keep it even though it's a head scratcher.  Same with other Amazon-suggested, but odd, keywords like "1 1".

When we set up keywords, Amazon sometimes lets apostrophes through.  Sometimes not.  I just had "now I'm reading" rejected twice, but when I submitted it as "now i'm reading" it went through.

Philip

 
#17 ·
Cassie Leigh said:
I figure the cover of my book still drew in potential customers even though the "edition" keyword had nothing to do with the book. Most of those bizarre keywords don't generate a lot of impressions for me, but this one had 4531 impressions by the time I shut it down and only that one click that also resulted in a sale. I personally don't like to keep any keyword going that doesn't generate at least one click per 2,500 impressions even if it's generated sales for me because I think there is a performance factor in which ads continue to run.
I suspect odd, Amazon-suggested keywords, like edition and 11, are code for something else. Curious to know what.

What is your view of the method of running hundreds of ads at a time? I know this is what Mark Dawson and Brian Meeks do, but to me it is too much to track since I like to get into and alter individual ads, often at the keyword level. I currently have 23 ads running across 3 books.

Philip
 
#19 ·
R.E.Conary said:
I'm running an AMS Sponsored Products pre-order campaign for my Rachel Cord Mysteries collection. The campaign started Sept. 10 and runs through Oct. 15. The collection release date is Oct. 15 for regular purchase and for KU readers.

This is my first major AMS campaign. I tried it a couple times before (too timidly, :-[ I admit) with little result. Because the collection will be available for KU, my goal is to maximize impressions (get seen as widely as possible). I think the majority of clicks I'm getting are KU readers checking it out and, hopefully, they'll come back after the 15th.

Here's the results of the campaign as of Oct. 7 at 4:30 p.m. (EDT) with 1 week remaining:

Number of Impressions: 457,981

Number of clicks: 191 from 104 of 855 keywords with an average per click (ACPC) of $0.63.

Highest ACPC: $1.41 :eek:

Lowest ACPC: $0.11 :)

Highest # of Impressions is 46,038 for keyword "series."

88 keywords have ZERO impressions; 7 are paused.

Highest # of clicks is 18 for keywords "series" and "Steven King" (a misspelling but defaults to all the Stephen King books. Which is good because the ACPC is a low $0.28, whereas keyword "Stephen King" is averaging $0.76 per click).

So far, there are 8 pre-order purchases. 8)

I've just added another 105 keywords for 960 total.
Thanks for sharing your data. I have an ad running on a preorder, with no sales showing on the dashboard after ten days, so I assume none of my preorders are attributable to AMS. In any case, I'm hoping as you are that KU borrowers are taking note.
 
#21 ·
Cassie Leigh said:
I think most of the people who advocate multiple ads on a book are running Product Display ads, but I'm not 100% sure of that.
Makes sense.

I'm half way going very slowly through your excellent AMS ads book and much appreciating it. I have my own primitive manual system for evaluating ads' performance and only use Excel spreadsheets for downloading keywords and pasting them into new ads. All the other columns and how to use the spreadsheets for analyses are a mystery to me.

Guess I need your Excel book too, but this bit in the book description makes me think it might be beyond me at the moment:

This guide will walk you through how to do that. It assumes you know the basics of using Excel already
I don't know the basics and only recently found the download button on my AMS dashboard.

Philip
 
#24 ·
Has anyone found a viable way of A/B testing different ad copy? The last time I tried running ads with the same keyword targets but different text, one got all the impressions, so there was no way of telling how the others would have performed in comparison (since no one saw them). I'm assuming they were competing against each other, but it's frustrating because if I use different keywords for each, there's no way of knowing whether differences in performance are due to the targeting or the ad copy. :p
 
#26 ·
KEYWORD: Paperbacks

Let's talk PBs.

When I started running AMS SP ads last year, sales of my PBs bloomed. Wayne Stinnett said the same thing on a podcast.

This year, my PB sales reverted back to before I started running SP ads -- meaning: oh yes that's cute you've got a few PB sales here and there. And I look more professional having a PB option but that's certainly no bread and butter.

I'd assumed that it was just AMS ads losing effectiveness. But it occurred to me that sometime this year, I'd also stopped Expanded Distributions because Amazon decided to show the "lowest priced" retailer instead of my CS offer, if the retailer offers a lower retail price. I make next to nothing with Expanded Distribution and that pissed me off. So I stopped Expanded Distribution.

Now I'm wondering, was the end of the PB bloom a result of my stopping Expanded Distribution? After all, what if ED got my book shown in a lot of platforms, but the readers realize it's cheaper to order from me through CS when taking into account the cost of shipping and handling by Expanded Distributors?

So now, I've put all my books back to ED again. Problem is, I also raised the PB price from $12.99 to $14.99. This is going directly against DWS's advice about keeping PB prices low, but I don't want to make 0-5c per book through ED.

What have been happening with you all as to PB sales? Has it slow down to a halt?
 
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