Amazon Ads
The two Amazon Ad campaigns that I have tried have been Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. In book terms, product is a book. I decided to use book 1, The Spy who Sank the Armada. In brand terms I’ve used my series, Sir Anthony Standen Adventures.
There’s a fairly simple process that Amazon guides you through to prepare your advertisement, and campaign.
I have run sponsored product campaigns in both the UK and US markets. I have run the brand campaign in the UK market only. For both types of campaign I used Publisher Rocket to find appropriate keywords for my campaigns in each market. Keywords may be as simple as “Historical Fiction” or “A Tale of Two Cities”. For books they’re essentially either genres, authors, or books. You’re looking for the “if you liked that, you’ll love this” that applies to your book(s). The advice I read was to start off a campaign with around 300 target keywords. You set a daily spend limit for each campaign. It’s an auction in which you bid to have your advertisement appear on the screen of people searching for a book using your target keywords as search terms. If you win the auction it’s your ad that they see. If they see it, that’s an impression. If they click on it, that’s a click, and you pay the bid amount for each click. You don’t pay per impression. If they click on it, and order your book, that’s an order.
Your Amazon campaign dashboard give you data like ACOS, Actual Cost of Sales. This is a little misleading as it compares the cost of the sale with the sale price. Of course you will not receive
100% of the sale price as royalty.
How have I been doing? I’ve had a steady stream of sales. The sponsored brand campaign generated the most sales, but at a very high price. My ACOS for the brand campaign was around 1000%. The US sponsored product campaign sold the least books, but at the least cost. I have paused the brand campaign, and begun pausing the keywords within the product campaigns, which have delivered least bang for buck. Sales have gone down, but less than costs.
Conclusions
If you choose to be an Indie Author, you have to sell your own books. Just publishing on KDP and leaving it at that wont sell any books. What has worked for me? Social media sold books to begin with. But how many times do your Facebook friends want to hear you banging on about your books? The Amazon Ad campaigns have been effective in selling books, but haven’t paid for themselves, far from it. The Kirkus Discovery package generated impressions, but no sales. It did however bring emails from several publicists.
What about the free book approach? It doesn’t cost you anything, but it’s not really a “sale”, or is it? What I am now finding is that I’m getting orders even when there haven’t been sales recorded by the Ad campaign. Could those be from readers who have seen the advertisements, done nothing at the time, then ordered the book later? Perhaps. But my guess is that some readers have taken the free book, read it, enjoyed it, and bought other books in the series.