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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.
 
#127 ·
Can anyone explain what "CPC bid" is? The standard seems to be 25c? Not sure whether I should increase it or decrease it?

The following makes no sense to me:

"Daily budgets can be exceeded as a result of a rapid accumulation of clicks on a campaign as the campaign approaches the daily limit. During high traffic seasons, it is recommended that you adjust your daily budgets and CPCs to accommodate increased traffic and avoid overages. If overages to a daily budget occur, you will be charged only the maximum budget of the day. The difference will not be charged."
 
#129 ·
LilyBLily said:
CPC = cost per click This is an average over time from the moment you start the ad, so not to be trusted completely.

When you look at your billing history, click on the month just billed and you'll see how much you were charged for each ad and how much Amazon refunded to you for getting overenthusiastic.

BTW, I've never noticed it was necessary to increase my daily budget for a holiday season or special buying period. If you know the time of day you make most of your sales, you can keep your budget higher at that time of day and reduce it for other times of day. Or, if that's too much fiddling, just make sure your budget is a dollar more than it was before you saw/got a Daily Budget Spent notice.
Wow, thank you! So glad I found this website.

I will be keeping a close eye on if it hits my daily budget.
 
#130 ·
From the prior posts it appears that Sponsored Products ads are being seen by people using Internet Explorer or Opera (which I imagine is why we are still seeing our clicks and impressions go up), but are not being seen by people using Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.

This has been going on for at least two days now from what I've seen. I guess the Amazon employees probably hit the wrong switch before leaving for the weekend. Or maybe it was like that twitter employee who turned off Trump's account before leaving... :-X
 
#132 ·
martysouth said:
I received a reply from Amazon, but she clearly thought I was saying that I couldn't see my ad. I've written back explaining that I couldn't see any ads, and that this made me wonder about the reach and effectiveness of AMS ads if some people could see them and others couldn't.
I got the same answer and responded as you did. Watching my clicks now to see if they are drastically reduced due to lack of exposure.

Philip
 
#134 ·
Marian said:
I have been trying without success to get product interest ads. I have some dating back to mid-September, and they still haven't run. Is anyone else having this problem?
Yes.

I'm not patient enough to wait so long and have returned to only using Sponsored Product ads which usually turn on in less than a day.

Philip
 
#137 ·
Rob Tran said:
So another new question: Do you guys prefer "Sponsored Ads" or "Product Display Ads"
Mostly sponsored but it's a topic of much debate. I recommend reading through this thread and the older "AMS Learning" thread here, as well as some of the books by the folks who hang out here, such as Cassie. It's all been hashed out on a regular basis several times. Brian Meeks is a proponent of PDA but many (including me) have tried his technique (in his book and discussed in threads here) to no avail.

AMS is a confusing, convoluted crap shoot for the most part, unless you've done the trial and error thing long enough to cultivate your own particular mix of bids and keywords that work well for your particular book and even then it's a chaotic, changing unpredictable environment (Amazon is always changing the algorithms and site in stealth mode, without the consideration of a heads up to those of us who are throwing money at them).

There's no magic formula. Test, test, test on your own book(s). With only one book, the numbers are against you, most folks only make their advertising money back by the ads pushing their read-through on other titles. Sorry to sound negative, but I'm increasingly frustrated by this experience.
 
#139 ·
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.
Sorry to rehash this, but I'm not clear what you mean by "interfer with one another."

If I have two ads targeting the same product pages, wouldn't they definitely be bidding against each other?

I suppose it might be that if the ad space goes for $.65 normally, you may only add a penny to that.

I have a series and have several books in it I'd like to run Product Display ads for, but if I run them simultaneously, shouldn't I target them differently?
 
#140 ·
So, I decided to try some Product Display ads just to see how they'd do. I've had them running for a few days now and most of them show zero impressions, the only one that has any, it's around 40. I have my bid price set relatively high for this experiment... I know people have said it can take a while for them to get going, but how long is "a while"? Is it normal for there to be no impressions at all for 3-4 days?
 
#145 ·
I read the Meeks book and put up a PDP ad and a PDI ad at low bid. They sat without any activity about a month. I changed the bids to .59 and two weeks later one has 221 impressions and the other (product display by interest) has just one. I set them both at $500 and spend budget as quickly as possible. Amazon sure leaves a lot of money on the table it seems, but perhaps there are only so many placement opportunities that all of us are competing for.
 
#146 ·
Cassie Leigh said:
...so you could theoretically target them identically and it's sort of like putting in three possible ad images and having Amazon randomly pick one of the three to display. From what others have said in these threads, there are folks running hundreds of PD ads on their books at a time.
But unless Amazon pre-selects among my ads before putting them into the bidding, I will be bidding against myself.

If I put in three ads targeting the same products, it may only increment the bid a little from what it would have been with just one. But if everyone does multiple ads like that, we'd be raising the CPC substantially.
 
#151 ·
Cassie Leigh said:
I threw a couple low-bid PD ads up about a week ago and just checked them and they all have less than 100 impressions right now. I haven't read the book that says this, but from other comments in the thread, it can take 4-6 weeks for a low PD ad to start running. If you want them to run faster, I've had success bumping up the bids. I don't know where you've set yours, but Amazon did just send out a guide to AMS this last week recommending that people bump their bids for the holiday season, so what might've been a high bid two weeks ago may no longer be high enough.
I just put them up to $1 for one and $0.80 for the others this morning. No new impressions since then. If I'd have to pay more than that per click then it's definite not worth it, as I'd only be making $2 per sale and even 1 out of 2 clicks resulting in a purchase would be an incredible result. :p It's too bad, because I was really hoping to at least A/B test some different ad text.
 
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