[botolo]

Hello all,

Do you follow Amazon's suggested bid or do you place your own bid? In this case, how much do you bid?

I have heard of authors bidding as low as $0.10. I have tried bidding $0.25 for keywords such as books' titles or authors, and I am not getting so many impressions.

 

[Jena H]

I usually start my bids between .20-.30. Then, after a while (few days or a week) I check to see how they're doing. I run a "search terms" report to see what readers are actually searching for, and then tweak my bids accordingly. For example, if "boys adventure" is a proven search term, then I'll increase my bid on the keywords adventure and boys. Alternatively, if some keywords are running up charges with very few impressions or clicks, then I'll lower the bids on those words.

 

[NikOK]

I'm actually running a little bit of a test right now with two books.  One book is in the heist thriller (I think that's what it was called) category which is pretty small and the other is in sci-fi which is huge.  I noticed that in the smaller category I need a higher bid to get impressions than in sci-fi.  It might have to do with just a smaller pool readers and really needing to outbid people, where when I'm in a large genre I'm bound to hit some people.  Or something else, I'm not really sure why, but I can tell you that I'm seeing more impressions on my 0.25 ad as opposed to my 1.00 ad.

Really, the difference could be a lot of things, they're also very different books.  I just wanted to put in that I've found it takes some playing around with bids in different genres to get to try to hone in on my lowest effective bid.

 

[I am a unicorn]

I'm trying Amazon ads again for the first time in over 6 months. It can turn into a massive money pit (in my experience), so I'm not excited about it. I don't bid more than .40 anymore because it wasn't economical for me to bid twice that just to be seen. Amazon is way too expensive for little fish like me who can't afford a dollar or two bid on the most competitive terms. 

 

[boxer44]

At one point, I recall Amz would take a high bid and lower it to one cent or five cents above the next highest bid.  For example: If you bid $1.00, and the next highest was $.60, then Amz would charge you $.61 or $.65 for that click.

Not sure how it worked exactly, but if true, then it would seem to work for author bids, however, if it did work, then it would seem all authors would just bid high, and hope the next highest was much lower.  Unfortunately, if all authors figured that out and all bid $1.00, the bids would rise significantly.  Not sure if I'm remembering that in Amz, or some other bidding website  

 

[Rick Gualtieri]

Amazon ads are not set it and forget it.  They require a good deal of babysitting to find your sweet spot bid (only for that sweet spot to move). 

Amazon cares about relevancy - ie. people who click and/or buy because of ads.  The higher your relevance the lower you can push your bid and still get tons of impressions / clicks.  But it's all about keeping an eye on your data. 

You don't just pick a bid and walk away. That's a good formula for doing nothing more than writing Amazon a check every month.

 

[J. Tanner]

Amazon ads are not set it and forget it. They require a good deal of babysitting to find your sweet spot bid (only for that sweet spot to move).

Amazon cares about relevancy - ie. people who click and/or buy because of ads. The higher your relevance the lower you can push your bid and still get tons of impressions / clicks. But it's all about keeping an eye on your data.

What should you be looking for, and what should you do when you see it?

 

[Rick Gualtieri]

What should you be looking for, and what should you do when you see it?

There's all sorts of things to look for. Such as:
Keywords that get impressions but no engagement
Keywords that get engagement
Keywords that cost a ton of $$ without resulting in any orders or reads.

All of these are different and require different approaches (ie. increase bid, decrease bid, or pause keyword). Some things I look at daily, others I want either a weekly or monthly view before making any decisions.

 

[鬼]

This is a hard one to answer because there is no definitive answer. You could bid anywhere from 2 cents to $2 and people do. It comes down to your results and whether something is profitable for you. Not only that, but each marketplace is different. You can definitely get away with cheaper bids in the smaller or foreign stores, for example. US, too, but it's just harder to find those keywords/targets due to all the competition.

If you're asking where do you even start? I'd say 30 cents is a good minimum bid. Then move up or down based on what your results turn out to be.

 

[tracygeno]

I recently took a course on Amazon Ads which was sort of basic but I had no idea how to do them so it helped me a lot. I'm following the plan and it does work.

I'm a new author (1st book). My custom bid is .35 because I write a series and my daily limit is $5.00. I've seen a few results but the ads are working. I think I need to work on my blurb more.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do the entire course due to a vacation I HAD to go on But it did at least show me how to do the ads, some things to look for, etc. I'm working on them now and also taking another course. From what I've seen & researched, you should at least take a basic course or read a book on Amazon Ads because there's so much to know. Personally, I hate doing all this. I would just rather write the book. One of my goals is to be able to hire an assistant to do all this stuff.

Now I'm onto Facebook ads because a lot of my genre is on FB. Ugh.