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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.
 
#27 ·
AlexaKang said:
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 p*ssed 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?
I opted out of ED a long time ago. My paperback sales did well with the AMS ads for a while, but the past few months they've died.
 
#29 ·
Is there any advantage to running multiple AMS ad campaigns for one book?

I have a single sponsored product campaign running for each of my books, and I just stuff all the keywords I can think of into those. I don't really monitor those keywords at all.

The ads themselves seem to be performing okay, based on your metrics. One is at 1 click per 331 impressions, with about 1 sale every 26 clicks, and the second is at 1 click per 399 impressions with 1 sale every 22 clicks. Both have a daily cap of $20 ad spend.

Edit: Nevermind! I read back and saw that you've already answered this question.
 
#32 ·
Cassie Leigh said:
Sponsored Product ads (and I think others as well) is that they do interfere with one another.
Is that still the case if you have a SP ad that has reached 1,000 keywords and start a new one to add keywords to, as long as you are sure you don't duplicate keywords between the two of them?
 
#35 ·
Cassie Leigh said:
Others can chime in with their own experiences. It seems that the Product Display ads you can run more than one ad at a time and they won't interfere with one another. My experience with Sponsored Product ads (and I think others as well) is that they do interfere with one another. So if you were going to run another ad, I'd say do a Product Display ad this time around but don't run two Sponsored Product ads at the same time on the same book.
I have 3 sponsored products ads for the same book with identical keywords and bid price, but different ad copy. Each ad gets 20-30 clicks per day.

On the other hand, I recently set up an A/B test for ad copy on a different book with identical keywords and bid price but different ad copy. Only one of the ads took off - the other got almost no impressions.

So like most things AMS, it seems the answer is - No. Identical keywords do not compete with each other.

Except when they do.

Philip
 
#36 ·
Cassie Leigh said:
Others can chime in with their own experiences. It seems that the Product Display ads you can run more than one ad at a time and they won't interfere with one another. My experience with Sponsored Product ads (and I think others as well) is that they do interfere with one another. So if you were going to run another ad, I'd say do a Product Display ad this time around but don't run two Sponsored Product ads at the same time on the same book.
I agree with Cassie here. Best strategy for each book is to run only 1 SP ad, but you can run multiple PD ads. Caveat: you CAN run multiple SP ads if you use different KWs for each ad. I've tried that as an experiment to see if I could get the KWs that didn't take off to get impressions with a new ad. I don't recommend doing this because it drove me crazy when I needed to check if a KW had already been used in my Ad. I used to have to only check one ad. When I had 4 SP ads going I had to check every one of them (to make sure I don't end up with competing KWs and it was the stupidest time suck.)
 
#37 ·
Cassie Leigh said:
I'm not sure Expanded Distribution is the difference. How have the ads been performing overall?
TBH not well. But it's also because I've been way to busy to diligently tweak ads these last 2 months as I'm totally busy with other stuff. Am just now returning to tidy things up and trying some new strategy. But the PB sales died off months before that and I never figured out why, except the only thing I did differently was to turn off ED.

On my fantasy series, I had six sales of book 1 in pb last month, five the month before that, but none this month. Difference there is that the books rolled out of KU and it killed my AMS ads overall.
Are you saying that when you took the books out of KU, the AMS algo actually STOPPEd showing your Ads as frequently???!!! OR that the KU readers stopped checking out the book after seeing the AMS ads because the book is not in KU?

But I know it's not an overall drop off in PB sales, because I launched four Excel guides last month, Excel for Beginners, Intermediate Excel, Excel for Writers, and Excel for Self-Publishers and threw AMS at them. Excel for Beginners has sold 26 copies in paperback since launch and I'd attribute almost all of those to AMS ads. (Some friends have bought the Intermediate Excel titles so harder to say there and I turned off the ads on the others when the StoryBundle started.) So AMS can still work to drive PB sales. But that was a new release/new ad.
So once again we return to: How AMS ads work is all voodoo.
 
#38 ·
AlexaKang said:
I agree with Cassie here. Best strategy for each book is to run only 1 SP ad, but you can run multiple PD ads. Caveat: you CAN run multiple SP ads if you use different KWs for each ad. I've tried that as an experiment to see if I could get the KWs that didn't take off to get impressions with a new ad. I don't recommend doing this because it drove me crazy when I needed to check if a KW had already been used in my Ad. I used to have to only check one ad. When I had 4 SP ads going I had to check every one of them (to make sure I don't end up with competing KWs and it was the stupidest time suck.)
I keep a master spreadsheet of keywords, sorted in alpha order so that I can check it before adding it, to prevent duplicates. You can create it by exporting the keywords in your existing SP ads and merging them. I added columns for date added and to note the ones I've paused so I don't use them again.
 
#40 ·
Being totally new to all this management of ads, question; when it says your daily budget is spent, does that mean that your ad campaign is suspended? I am running a SP ad with some fairly high bids to get some exposure and I have got that twice. Upped daily spend, then found that it did not have my upped amount, but the old, lower amount.
at any rate, despite higher bids I am not seeing my ads anywhere, not the PD ads either. When my daily budget is reached I am assuming that the ads stop?
 
#43 ·
Cassie Leigh said:
When it says "daily budget spent" the ad will stop running until the next morning unless you up your budget on the ad. (I can confirm this because my romance ad did this often and I'd see a rank drop and then go to AMS and see that the ad had run out of budget for the day.)

Not sure about why you're not seeing your ads. Obviously they won't show all the time, but if the ads are active and you're bidding high you should see them either on the pages of books or authors you're bidding on or in search results for them. For PD ads, they should also be on book pages or they show up on Kindles which you probably won't see. Also not sure why your change to your budget didn't stick unless you changed it but didn't save? I've done that with individual bids before.
Thanks Cassie, exactly what I needed to know.
 
#47 ·
Question for those more savvy than I am, which includes anybody reading this! 

I'm currently running my first AMS ad for my debut novel.  I started the campaign on the 10th of this month and so far I have a little over 10,000 impressions but only two clicks.  My understanding is a good ad should get at least one click for every 1000 impressions.  Should I let the ad ride for a time given it's only four days in or should I consider it a failure and start over?

Thanks!
 
#48 ·
JDMatheny said:
Question for those more savvy than I am, which includes anybody reading this!

I'm currently running my first AMS ad for my debut novel. I started the campaign on the 10th of this month and so far I have a little over 10,000 impressions but only two clicks. My understanding is a good ad should get at least one click for every 1000 impressions. Should I let the ad ride for a time given it's only four days in or should I consider it a failure and start over?

Thanks!
Let it ride, it's too soon to make a judgment. I think the algos take some time to kick in, and Amazon's reporting is notoriously behind by days. The Product Display ads take a very long time to kick in. Sponsored product ads are preferred by most here and are definitely more active. You didn't state which one you ran. I recommend reading the previous (very) long AMS Ads thread here, at least the last year or so of posts.
 
#49 ·
BillyDeCarlo said:
Let it ride, it's too soon to make a judgment. I think the algos take some time to kick in, and Amazon's reporting is notoriously behind by days. The Product Display ads take a very long time to kick in. Sponsored product ads are preferred by most here and are definitely more active. You didn't state which one you ran. I recommend reading the previous (very) long AMS Ads thread here, at least the last year or so of posts.
Thanks for the response! I ran a Sponsored product ad. I'll work my way through the other thread, thanks.
 
#50 ·
JDMatheny said:
Question for those more savvy than I am, which includes anybody reading this!

I'm currently running my first AMS ad for my debut novel. I started the campaign on the 10th of this month and so far I have a little over 10,000 impressions but only two clicks. My understanding is a good ad should get at least one click for every 1000 impressions. Should I let the ad ride for a time given it's only four days in or should I consider it a failure and start over?

Thanks!
I'm not savvy, but I just put up AMS ads for my first novel (in a new genre; basically a fresh start) on the 10th as well, so I'll mention my stats in case you find that useful.

I'm running both a sponsored products and a product display ad. I don't know if it's partly Amazon's reporting being slow for product display ads or not, but for my sponsored products ad, I have about 4,900 impressions, and for my product display ad I only have about 50. The latter is set to showcase on 36 books that I believe are very relevant to my book, and I have a $2.00 bid, which I think is high, but maybe it's not.

All together, though, I have just shy of 5,000 impressions and 26 clicks, which I feel is pretty good. Amazon tells me I don't have any sales yet, but my ranking has jumped up from where it started, so that's either from organic sales or maybe someone borrowed the book after seeing the ad, which Amazon doesn't report.

2 clicks for 10,000 impressions seems pretty low. That suggests to me that either the ad isn't good enough (cover and tiny blurb), or maybe you're not targeting relevant keywords. If you're getting a fair amount of clicks but no sales, it's probably a case of the blurb or start of the book not being compelling enough.

Anyway, I'm new to this too, but there's my two cents.
 
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