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.
One possibility is that the sale hasn't shown up yet due to the lag time in reporting.loraininflorida said:According to my AMS graph I sold what was obviously a paperback. However, on my KDP graph, it has not shown up. Anyone know why this happens?
I wonder if someone clicked on your ad, then clicked on the paperback option, and then purchased a "used" copy. Assuming AMS would register that as a sale, it wouldn't result in a paperback being printed because it's already in stock somewhere else.loraininflorida said:According to my AMS graph I sold what was obviously a paperback. However, on my KDP graph, it has not shown up. Anyone know why this happens?
That first sentence above, stated as fact ("of course" ??), may be the first unhelpful or misleading opinion you've provided here. Fake news! Sure, the KDP rep will likely say, "Who?", but she'll be hard-pressed to find a more helpful book on AMS in Amazon's current catalog. I don't expect her to research you, but the name-dropping may inspire her to root out a consensus from her available brain trust. Considering how long those dashes can stay in the impressions column, your theory makes more sense to me than her answer.Cassie Leigh said:...(Of course, just want to point out that my opinion on any of this has no more weight than anyone else's. I have no doubt that there are others who know more about AMS than I do who just chose to write their next book rather than write a book about AMS so that rep might be like, who?)
That is what I was thinking (sans impressions or clicks - my bids are low but it should hit here and there) - it should show regardless, and quickly at that. They were accepted. But the display is a blank screen. Nothing shows up under status. The 14 day thing is weird I agree. Why did she say that?Cassie Leigh said:I don't know what on earth that rep was trying to sell you. As soon as you submit an ad campaign it should be visible in your dashboard right at the top with a status of Pending, I think it is. If that hasn't happened, the ad didn't get submitted for review. Once it's accepted it should show as running in that Status column. At that point, if you need to update your bid, click on the campaign name. This will take you to a detail screen for that campaign. For the PD ads, scroll down and you'll see your bid and can click in that box and change it. For your SP ads, you'll see a listing of your keywords with bids next to them. Click into any of those boxes to change the bid there.
In terms of when information shows up. Generally I see impression and click information showing up same day. Maybe on a slight delay but I don't think it's more than 12 hours or so. Estimated sales take longer and part of that is in how they count a sale. Someone can click on your ad today and not buy for five days but that purchase five days from now may get credited to the ad.
In terms of billing information. When they bill you, they provide a breakdown of spend by ad campaign. So I can take my spend on Book X and compare that to my revenue on book X for the ad period. (I use KDP and CS numbers for that, limited to just the US market.)
Most of my default (starting) bids are .25 or less. Then every few days I check my campaign and sort by # of clicks. Eyeballing the click/impression ratio, I raise or lower bids accordingly. So if a keyword doesn't seem to be doing much except causing me a slow death by pennies, I'll lower the bid by a penny or two. On the flip side, if a keyword seems to be effective, I'll raise the bid by a penny or two. *As it happens, "historical fiction" seems to be one of the more effective keywords for my time-travel books. Therefore the bid has been raised incrementally a number of times.*JRTomlin said:After browsing quite a few pages, I'm not quite sure what the current thinking is on bid amount. For a long time $.25 bids did well for me and rarely hit that amount but for me that has seemed to lose effectiveness. While Historical Fiction isn't the most competitive genre, it is fairly competitive (to some people's surprise ).
So, even after reading the thread or skimming it, I'm not sure exactly how much it would be a good idea to raise bids or if that is the way to go to recover the effectiveness of my ads. Thoughts or suggestions?
If I remember correctly, KDP AMS does not show keywords in auto selected campaigns until a sale is made. I don't recall if it then shows all the keywords or just the ones that made the sale. The ads I did were terminated long ago and there is no data there now so I can't add anything to that.Lyle 007 said:That is what I was thinking (sans impressions or clicks - my bids are low but it should hit here and there) - it should show regardless, and quickly at that. They were accepted. But the display is a blank screen. Nothing shows up under status. The 14 day thing is weird I agree. Why did she say that?
BTW I did auto vs discreet keywords. But that should be no different I would imagine.
Off with another CU...
EDIT update : she backed off on the 14 day thing and now says it takes awhile ... and that my ads should show - and they don't.
And that may be it ... makes sense. Thanks. Not good (I would not have done it if I knew that), as you want to see if you are getting impressions on the bid. I will let it run (can't stop it as I can't see it) until I can stop it. No biggy as it won't cost money - surely they show clicks and impressions on their key words. If it is only sales they show - crap! That could cost you big time and you know nothing.Rising Sun said:If I remember correctly, KDP AMS does not show keywords in auto selected campaigns until a sale is made. I don't recall if it then shows all the keywords or just the ones that made the sale. The ads I did were terminated long ago and there is no data there now so I can't add anything to that.
I imagine that the policy is to preclude folks getting antsy over their arcane choice of keywords. Whether their choice is just plain wrong or it was wisely conditioned and customized to information given by the particular customer browser...I don't know.
If I thought for a minute that he could still be unaware of KDP's AMS support failings, I would forward. I suspect the ones who speak better English generally land higher-paying jobs than KDP provides. Since self-pubbers are dreamers, and most of us nothing more than that, we are not Amazon's first choice for investment. In Amazons favor, and in spite of their primitive metrics and poor support, their enormous customer base and sophisticated algos seem to provide our best chance of breaking even or making a little money with our advertising dollars. Still not a great chance for the average kboards skimmer with the average KDP book, but maybe the best chance around. Bookbub CPC ads are easy to understand, their reporting is great and includes specific time-frame settings options, and their support reads like native English. But their ACOS is much higher in my experience. Since they have no title or descriptive keyword options, everybody's bidding on the same few dozen authors or categories. You can advertise wide with them, but they don't track sales for you.LilyBLily said:You should forward the most incoherent answer to Bezos. There are something like 100 million people in India who speak English, so why is Amazon hiring people who can't?
Perhaps, but I doubt that one-one hundredth of them speak it like a native.LilyBLily said:You should forward the most incoherent answer to Bezos. There are something like 100 million people in India who speak English, so why is Amazon hiring people who can't?
The expiration date is misleading. You can extend the date over and over.Jena H said:2) When setting up the details of the ad, I can either "run ad as quickly as possible" or "spread campaign evenly over duration." When I clicked on the latter option, I get a calendar to choose from, but it seems like the PD ad is limited to a maximum of 6 months. I hadn't thought about it, and I was surprised that this type of ad has an 'expiration date.' Guess it makes sense, though. I went for the full six months.
Anarchist said:The expiration date is misleading. You can extend the date over and over.
Thanks. I did go with the "specific products" option.Cassie Leigh said:As Anarchist mentioned, you can extend the expiration date on PD ads up to six months from the day you go in to edit it. So you initially have to set it up for six months, but if it's doing well, you can go in at the end of that period and extend it another six months from the date you edit it. (Something I hadn't realized until earlier this week.)
In terms of related category. This ties in to your book categories on Amazon. It's a pretty limited list, but at least for non-fiction it has options sometimes that aren't listed under the By Interest option. For what you've said you're trying to do it sounds like the product option is your best bet, though, because then you can target the very specific products you think will relate to your book.
Well I brought the thread back ... sorryCassie Leigh said:From my perspective, sometimes AMS spending your money is a bad thing. I've had ads that spent $40-$50 in the first few days and never showed as having a sale credited to them. Or showed as having one sale for $4.99 credited to them. And I wasn't seeing KU page reads to make up for that difference. So if you have a new ad that isn't targeted well, it can be costly. I know some think any impression is great, so they may disagree. For me if impressions aren't leading to clicks AND then leading to sales, I don't consider that a successful ad.
Usually it is hard to get AMS to spend your budget, but not always.Newer ads are one example. If I start a new ad on my first-in-series romance title that ad almost always will max out a $5 budget on the first day. I actually did that this week and by the end of the day it was up to a $40 budget for the day. (I upped it by $5 each time it maxed out. Total spend for the day ended up being about $26.) That doesn't mean it was a good ad, though. I paused that ad for a few days because it wasn't looking good in terms of sales/borrows.
I have about five ads that are currently maxing out their $5/day budget. Since I price my books at $4.99, if I have one sale on one of those books and see that the ad has hit its budget, I up the budget. But sometimes I hit the budget for a day and there are no sales and no rank boost (for a KU title) and no paperback sales. In those cases, I'm spending on ads but not making anything back. I'll usually bump it once to $10/day, but I won't go past that until I can see some sign that those clicks are resulting in borrows or sales. But if I'm seeing enough sales for a day to show that I'm making my money back on that ad spend? I'll keep bumping that budget throughout the day. (Those ads seem to max out around $40/day in ad spend.)
In terms of running multiple ads...For users of Product Display ads, it seems to be common to run multiple ads. I'm not sure if it was in this thread or the other, but there's one user on here who starts two to three new ads each day on the same books. In that situation, I'd assume you monitor total ad spend versus ebook and paperback sales and estimated borrows for that day or ad period and don't worry about individual ads. (If that were me, I'd probably use the billing history to give me a summary of ad spend for the period rather than monitor on an ad-by-ad basis.)
I don't use that approach, but I'd assume that you only care about an individual ad if it gets out of control and spends too much, but otherwise you don't care about individual ads. I could be wrong and hopefully someone who uses that approach can chime in. Ultimately, for books that aren't in KU, the dashboard will eventually show gross sales amounts credited to that ad and you can see individual ad performance that way. (With all the caveats that whole series purchases aren't reflected in that number and neither are KU page reads.) If you're in KU, then you need to adjust what Amazon tells you for your estimated page reads that also came from the ad.