[Ed Nelson]

The Amazon ad control panel now shows pages read through KU. Are these only pages read because a KU person clicked on a sponsored ad? Also I noticed that when I looked up my series on Amazon.com the first book which is what is being advertised shows up at the top of the page as sponsored. You have to go down half the page or more to see unsponsored. So is Amazon putting that first so people will click on it, falsely inflating ad related sales and pages read. Not that they would do something like that deliberately! BTW I think Amazon and their system has done very well by me.

 

[Rick Gualtieri]

Yes. The KENP pages reads are (supposed to be anyway) only from those who have clicked on your keywords.

And also yes. Amazon adding sponsored products to their search pages has effectively made it so that you could defensively target your own books. Thus essentially paying for the privilege of them being seen.

That said, I offer you this logic:  Bidding high on your own name / series makes little sense.  Why?  Because someone specifically searching for you or your series is most likely intent on looking at your books.  The chances of you losing them because someone else bid higher for your name exists, yes, but I'd argue it's reasonably slim due to the specificity of their search.  Whereas if you're constantly bidding high on your own name, you could very well end up doing nothing more than paying Amazon for sales you were going to get anyway. 

 

[kwest]

Another thing to think about: selfie ads are very cheap because they are highly relevant. And honestly they might be the most important type of ad you can run, because they ARE so cheap. I have a single AMS ad that's only my name and book, and I negative that in my other ads.

I see them as insurance. I'm not paying a whole lot and it makes certain that my books are shown when my name is typed in. Over the years, I'm sure I've lost a lot of sales along the way. It's hard to quantify that, of course, but I don't want to leave anything to chance.

 

[Rick Gualtieri]

I see them as insurance. I'm not paying a whole lot and it makes certain that my books are shown when my name is typed in. Over the years, I'm sure I've lost a lot of sales along the way. It's hard to quantify that, of course, but I don't want to leave anything to chance.

It's worth testing. I did some A/B testing of suggested bid amounts for my name / series vs. no bids for my name / series and the results were VERY close. In fact, any extra sales brought in by the high bids were easily offset by the cost of them.