[miss_fletcher]

I am attempting to up my promotional game, and keep reading about Tagging on Amazon. Could someone explain to me exactly what the benifit of doing this practice is (I don't like doing thing unless I understand them).

Product placement? Product placement where? Or is this purely a random search thing. As in I search "fairy" and my book props up higher ... or lower if my tags are low?

My understanding: We have space for tags on our Amazon Pages. Readers can use these to note what themes/genres the book portrays. Other readers can agree/disagree by clicking on these. These tags then ....

Having a look around at other books my tag numbers are nonexistent, but this isn't impacting my book sales (is it?) Could someone break it down for me, please. Virtual high-five up for grabs.

 

[Seeker]

Hello Miss Fletcher,

Here is the link to Amazon's site, which provides all the details about tagging!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=tag_dp_wt?ie=UTF8&nodeId=16238571

I hope this helps!

Regards,

Seeker

 

[miss_fletcher]

Here is the link to Amazon's site, which provides all the details about tagging!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=tag_dp_wt?ie=UTF8&nodeId=16238571

Thank you *highfive*

But this info leads me to more questions:

"Get recommendations based on items you've tagged. Items you tag will be used as sources from which to make personalized recommendations."

Am starting to understand why people are tagging their asses off. So there is a direct correlation between how many times a tag has been clicked and how often the product is reccomended? As in, I have more tags so my book gets reccomended more?

Can anybody report increased sales because of tagging? But then wouldn't unique tags work better? Or is the idea volume so your book is seen more?

It seems everybody does this (one thread I saw has over 15k respones for tagging) and that suggests increased sales/book visability directly becasue of this...?

How popular is this with readers ... because for the tag reccomendations to kick in a reader would have to at least click on a tag once, right? I ask because I have decent sales numbers and reviews via kindle and less than 50 tags total ... suggesting readers don't tag that often. And looking at a few popular trad pub'd books the tags are low in number too.

Or (in true Fletcher style) am I missing a big point and have gotten this wrong (see how I confuse myself)?

 

[Klip]

That page is giving information purely from the customer's point of view.  So that bit about the recommendations is saying that if you create a tag for a product - let's say you tag a product as "romance" - then the recommendations that Amazon makes to you as a customer are more likely to be based around other products with the tag "romance"

It does not really tell us much about the purpose of tags from the seller's point of view - for example, from this page you cannot tell whether the number of people who have tagged a product with the same tag, makes a difference to how that product appears in the search rankings.  But all the same, I assume it does.

I suspect that a book with a greater number of "romance" tags is going to appear higher in the results that appears when you click on that tag.
For example, when I'm on the page for "A Modern Witch" I can see that there are 6 tags attached for the word "witch".  If I click on that tag, the first book that appears in the results page is something called "Ultimate Power(Special Edition)"  .  When I check how many tags that has, it has 91 "witch" tags.  "A Modern Witch" appears way down on that list, as it has fewer tags.

 

[Klip]

Oh - and I must say - it may be worth noting that there is a difference between "checking" a tag, which is marking a product with a tag, and "clicking" a tag, which is following the tag link to see other products with that tag.  Hope that does not come across as too pedantic! 

 

[miss_fletcher]

Oh - and I must say - it may be worth noting that there is a difference between "checking" a tag, which is marking a product with a tag, and "clicking" a tag, which is following the tag link to see other products with that tag. Hope that does not come across as too pedantic!

Not at all, makes sense. Thanks.

I think my main wonder was how much everyday readers use the tags for the recommendations to be effective. The searching aspects (clicking through the tag links) makes complete sense.

When the tags disappeared (I saw some panic around this) it be interesting to know if anybody's sales dropped off at all.

 

[Klip]

I suspect that not that many people make use of tags in terms of adding them to products, but it is more likely that they use them to find things on a particular topic by clicking on them.  That is pure speculation though.