# Amazon marketing services ads advice for my Kindle book.



## Jimmy (Nov 7, 2012)

Hi there,

My AMS ads got approved on 12/13/2016. I have received 14,312 impressions, 3 clicks and 0 sales so far with my Amazon Marketing Services ads. Each of the clicks came from 3 different keywords. Also, I realized that only about 37 of  my 100 keywords are receiving impressions. 

My current keyword bid is $.04 and daily budget is $1. What do you think I should do now to improve performance?


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

totally normal. 

No one understands why the system performs this way (maybe someone here will). But lots of people get 1 or 2 keywords that get a ton of hits and the rest don't. Eventually the ad will seem to stop working and then you'll have to pause it and start a brand new one in hopes of getting things going again. 

You can try increasing your bids or daily budget to increase impressions, but sometimes nothing helps.


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## ShayneRutherford (Mar 24, 2014)

If your ads have been served 14k times and got only three clicks, that suggests to me that the cover and/or ad copy are not appealing to the right people.


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## sammccoll (Oct 25, 2016)

I'm about to do the same thing - have no idea how to help out. I'm going to go for both sponcored products and product display - no idea how much to bid - it's a trick one - I guess I'll come to kboards for advice. Sorry I can't help but I'll keep my eye on your replies.


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## LadyG (Sep 3, 2015)

Not to hijack the thread, but how can you tell which keywords are being clicked?

Edit: Never mind; I figured it out.


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## D A Bale (Oct 20, 2016)

I too have a SP ad going on Amazon until tomorrow on my second book in my cozy mystery series.  Since 12/7, I've had 38,458 impressions, 12 clicks, and no sales.  Clicks have come from nine different words spread out over 127, some extremely strange or at least surprised me (I took the ones Amazon suggested as well as my own).  Three KW have garnered more than one click, while the rest are just singles.  I started with $2 a day at .02 a click but have been gradually raising my bid on words that have gotten a lot of impressions.  Since this is my first ad, I'm chalking it up to a learning experience at this point, but it's only cost me .58 cents, so silver lining.

Though I think we'd all like to figure this out and make SALES!!


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## Joseph Malik (Jul 12, 2016)

I thought the original ad wasn't performing (I got impatient and had nothing to base its performance on), so I paused it and rewrote the copy. Now I'm getting twice as many clickthrus per impression, but only one sale (it hasn't logged in these metrics yet, but I got one yesterday).

Should I run both ads simultaneously? I'm getting hits on mostly the same keywords for both ads.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Jimmy said:


> My current keyword bid is $.04 and daily budget is $1. What do you think I should do now to improve performance?


I doubt anyone is even seeing your ad. If you want more impressions and clicks, bid higher. A lot higher.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

ShayneRutherford said:


> If your ads have been served 14k times and got only three clicks, that suggests to me that the cover and/or ad copy are not appealing to the right people.


I would agree that something's off on your targeting. I expect my ads/keywords to get at least one click per thousand impressions and I have some keywords that get me more in the range of 7 clicks per thousand although the overall ad is closer to 2 per thousand.



Seneca42 said:


> Eventually the ad will seem to stop working and then you'll have to pause it and start a brand new one in hopes of getting things going again.


My most successful as has been running for months now. I do add words to it and tweak my bids on a regular basis which usually seems to be enough to get an ad running once more for me most of the time although this particular one has never stalled out on me the way a few others have.



Joseph Malik said:


> Should I run both ads simultaneously? I'm getting hits on mostly the same keywords for both ads.


I have two very similar ads (one small wording difference between them) that I'm running right now that have some keyword overlap. Neither one is maxing out its budget but both are running and getting impressions/clicks/sales, so you could, especially if you're not getting as many impressions on the active one as you'd like.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Joseph Malik said:


> I thought the original ad wasn't performing (I got impatient and had nothing to base its performance on), so I paused it and rewrote the copy. Now I'm getting twice as many clickthrus per impression, but only one sale (it hasn't logged in these metrics yet, but I got one yesterday).
> 
> Should I run both ads simultaneously? I'm getting hits on mostly the same keywords for both ads.


Your paused ad was doing amazingly well with spend to sales ratio. I would have just upped the bid and added more keywords.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Jimmy said:


> My AMS ads got approved on 12/13/2016. I have received 14,312 impressions, 3 clicks and 0 sales so far with my Amazon Marketing Services ads.


Keep the following in mind...

"_Campaign metrics may take up to 3 days to appear_."


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

I just watched a webinar by Derek Doepker on AMS SP ads. My takeaways:


There can be a delay in sales report, so don't give up on an ad too soon.
$5/day is a good limit for testing
Don't choose the automatic targeting--choose your own keywords
Have tons of keywords--you only pay be click (I just submitted an ad for my sight-reading book and I have 190 keywords)
Don't make the keywords too broad
Remember to add "book" and "books" e.g. funny tantasy, funny fantasy book, funny fantasy books
You can use the titles of other books. e.g. Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, douglas adams Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Hitchhiker's guide 
Remember that KU downloads are not displayed
A low bid will give you a better ROI, but fewer sales
Experiment a lot and don't give up too early
AMS ads for permafrees are a good idea


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## Craig Andrews (Apr 14, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> I just watched a webinar by Derek Doepker on AMS SP ads. My takeaways:
> 
> 
> There can be a delay in sales report, so don't give up on an ad too soon.
> ...


I've wanted to start pushing my permafree for a little while now, but have been too nervous to begin. This is excellent advice, and I appreciate you posting it here.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> I just watched a webinar by Derek Doepker on AMS SP ads. My takeaways:
> 
> 
> There can be a delay in sales report, so don't give up on an ad too soon.
> ...


Thanks for posting that useful list. Looks like you were taking notes. I watched the two-hour webinar too and was also taking notes. So I would add to your list:

- Can't have "Kindle" as a keyword, but can have "Free".

- Best wait time before evaluating an ad's effectiveness is 1 week.

- To compare different ad features (like in A/B testing), it's best not to run the A & B ads concurrently but to let ad A run for a week and then run ad B. (I didn't get the "why not concurrently?" of that.)

Now to decide whether or not to pay out the $297 for the suite of ninja tricks they offer such as how to scale up the ads. Still haven't decided.

You?

Philip


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## AliceS (Dec 28, 2014)

My first ad just got approved. I'm eager to apply some of this advice.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> - To compare different ad features (like in A/B testing), it's best not to run the A & B ads concurrently but to let ad A run for a week and then run ad B. (I didn't get the "why not concurrently?" of that.)


Yeah, I didn't completely agree with that, but his reasoning was this: When the run concurrently, they might "feed off" on another. That is, sales from one ad might influence sales from the other.

The disadvantage of running them sequentially is that the dates are different. Let's say you ran one from Dec 1 to Dec 15 and the other from Dec 25 to Dec 10. In that case, the dates will have a big influence on sales.



Philip Gibson said:


> Now to decide whether or not to pay out the $297 for the suite of ninja tricks they offer such as how to scale up the ads. Still haven't decided.
> 
> You?


No, I decided not to buy it. The webinar was good at getting me started, but I'm not convinced that the tweaks in the extra course would be worth the money (and time).

Here's the "replay" of the webinar:

http://ebookbestsellersecrets.com/automaticsalesdavereplay/

You can skip ahead to the 36 minutes mark, because everything before that is introduction (who I am, why this is important). Also, the last 30 minutes are the sales pitch for the $297 ninja tricks course.

Anyway, my two ads start this morning. It should be fun to watch what happens. I'm expecting results to be disappointing until I experiment and figure out what works best.


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## quiet chick writes (Oct 19, 2012)

I'm glad you guys are talking about this, because I just started my first ad and I have no clue, lol! 

I'm noticing that nobody else chose the product display ad that targets by genre? Is there a reason that everybody's doing the keyword one? Is the product display ad known not to work? 

I don't seem to be getting many impressions at all (I did get one click, though). How do guys get thousands of impressions? I only have 41 in about a week. My bid is $0.20.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> Now to decide whether or not to pay out the $297 for the suite of ninja tricks they offer such as how to scale up the ads. Still haven't decided.


My opinion...

With AMS in its current form - it's overly-simplistic - there's no need to buy a course. The best education will come from creating, testing, and monitoring the performance of your ads (keep the 3-day data lag in mind).

Investing in a course makes more sense with an ad platform like Facebook. There's more to FB than AMS.

Advertising on FB is akin to cooking a 5-course meal. If you're not a cook, expert guidance is valuable.

Advertising on AMS is like making eggs. Learn the basics (watch a couple of YouTube videos, read a tutorial, etc.), and experiment.

One day, AMS will become much more complicated. It'll pose more features (e.g. a quality score) and offer more targeting options. That's when paying for a course to accelerate the learning cycle will be useful.

Until then, roll up your sleeves and create ads knowing most will fail. Prune the losers, keep the winners, and continue testing more ads (keywords, interests, copy, etc).


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

This is interesting. Here's my dashboard now:










The number of impressions went down. Must be a time warp.


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## mmandolin (Oct 16, 2014)

Anarchist said:


> My opinion...
> 
> With AMS in its current form - it's overly-simplistic - there's no need to buy a course. The best education will come from creating, testing, and monitoring the performance of your ads (keep the 3-day data lag in mind).


Agreed. Derek's advice has often helped me over the years, but $297 for an AMS course seems a bit much.

My advice for AMS, generally, is you have to be willing to think big with it. You spend money to make money (expect to spend at least a hundred dollars a month on this, and you easily could spend thousands if you have a lot of books out there) and use lots of keywords (meaning at least several hundred per campaign.)

Things will change, and AMS will likely get more complicated, as well as competitive. But right now it's pretty straightforward. It's not a magic bullet, just a focused advertising tool.


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

Joseph Malik said:


> I thought the original ad wasn't performing (I got impatient and had nothing to base its performance on), so I paused it and rewrote the copy. Now I'm getting twice as many clickthrus per impression, but only one sale (it hasn't logged in these metrics yet, but I got one yesterday).
> 
> Should I run both ads simultaneously? I'm getting hits on mostly the same keywords for both ads.


Looks like you are getting some cheap click rates  Congrats!


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

mmandolin said:


> Agreed. Derek's advice has often helped me over the years, but $297 for an AMS course seems a bit much.
> 
> My advice for AMS, generally, is you have to be willing to think big with it. You spend money to make money (expect to spend at least a hundred dollars a month on this, and you easily could spend thousands if you have a lot of books out there) and use lots of keywords (meaning at least several hundred per campaign.)
> 
> Things will change, and AMS will likely get more complicated, as well as competitive. But right now it's pretty straightforward. It's not a magic bullet, just a focused advertising tool.


As you're sharp with this stuff, I'm glad you and I are in different markets.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Laura Rae Amos said:


> I'm glad you guys are talking about this, because I just started my first ad and I have no clue, lol!
> 
> I'm noticing that nobody else chose the product display ad that targets by genre? Is there a reason that everybody's doing the keyword one? Is the product display ad known not to work?
> 
> I don't seem to be getting many impressions at all (I did get one click, though). How do guys get thousands of impressions? I only have 41 in about a week. My bid is $0.20.


I set up identical ads, one for sponsored product, the other for product display. After a week I terminated the product display ad. All it provided was a distraction.


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## mmandolin (Oct 16, 2014)

Anarchist said:


> As you're sharp with this stuff, I'm glad you and I are in different markets.


Yeah, Anarchist, we should team up and make a $997 AMS course. 

Kidding, obviously. The larger point is AMS already is saturated with authors (in all markets) desperate to makes sales and willing to throw money at anything they think will help. Just like promo sites. I see a lot of folks on KBoards hoping that AMS (or certain promo sites) will dramatically improve their sales numbers overnight. It rarely happens like that. That's what the $297 price tag doesn't tell you.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

mmandolin said:


> The larger point is AMS already is saturated with authors (in all markets) desperate to makes sales and willing to throw money at anything they think will help. Just like promo sites. I see a lot of folks on KBoards hoping that AMS (or certain promo sites) will dramatically improve their sales numbers overnight. It rarely happens like that. That's what the $297 price tag doesn't tell you.


Indeed. And saturation is likely to increase as authors learn that many low-tier promo sites with poor segmentation (e.g. bknights) screw up also-boughts.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Anarchist said:


> ... many low-tier promo sites with poor segmentation (e.g. bknights) screw up also-boughts.


Interesting.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk


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## geronl (May 7, 2015)

mmandolin said:


> Yeah, Anarchist, we should team up and make a $997 AMS course.
> 
> Kidding, obviously. The larger point is AMS already is saturated with authors (in all markets) desperate to makes sales and willing to throw money at anything they think will help. Just like promo sites. I see a lot of folks on KBoards hoping that AMS (or certain promo sites) will dramatically improve their sales numbers overnight. It rarely happens like that. That's what the $297 price tag doesn't tell you.


$1 a day doesn't sound like it'd do much


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

NeedWant said:


> I doubt anyone is even seeing your ad. If you want more impressions and clicks, bid higher. A lot higher.


Depends of if you want to make a profit or not, or just to have your book and name out there as part of a none return marketing effort. You would be surprised how many scroll through the pages of SAs and then click when they see something interesting.

Bidding higher is not always the way to go for everyone for it to be cost effective. Yes, bidding high will get you noticed earlier, but it still takes around 10 clicks to one sale on average. If your book is say $2,99, then you have $2.00 royalty to play with to break even. The target should really be no more that 10% of retail or 29c to get a return at that royalty. That's an average of 3c per click and 4-6 cent bids will provide that. The trick is more keywords to start with rather than increasing bids. My only advice would be that Amazon's suggested generic keywords are useless. Target your keywords to books and authors of exactly the same genre/sub genre as yours.

I have one book performing [email protected] around 50% of retail with 91 clicks and only 2 sales, but the other four pull it back to around and average of 10% cost of retail for the five books. But then I'm a cheapskate and bid low.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Decon said:


> Depends of if you want to make a profit or not, or just to have your book and name out there as part of a none return marketing effort. You would be surprised how many scroll through the pages of SAs and then click when they see something interesting.
> 
> Bidding higher is not always the way to go for everyone for it to be cost effective. Yes, bidding high will get you noticed earlier, but it still takes around 10 clicks to one sale on average. If your book is say $2,99, then you have $2.00 royalty to play with to break even. The target should really be no more that 10% of retail or 20c to get a return at that royalty. That's an average of 2c per click and 4-6 cent bids will provide that. The trick is more keywords to start with rather than increasing bids.


The book I'm using ads on is a loss leader. I make a healthy profit from the sales and pages read on the subsequent books in the series.

Bidding low won't help your rank that much and any profit made will be minuscule at best.

I don't have any experience with a standalone title yet so that might be a different story.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Not sure if this is any good for standalones or not, but I ain't losing money.

KEYWORDS 300-560 PER BOOK (Gradually increased daily since I started) All books $2.99

Total spend 26.69 total sales 239.67 = 11% cost of sales= $140.98 profit.
That doesn't count anyone who goes on to buy one of my other books

Page reads on those books for last 30 days around 60,000 @ .005 + $300. Not sure how much of this if any can be attributed to SA as I have run a few promos and a considerable amount of page reads were part of the promo tails

As you can see, I have had 816 clicks. If I had bid higher at say 25c and paid 15c per click that would be $122.40 and not 26.99. Not much profit in that unless you have same sort of luck with page reads.

I'm yet to be convinced that increasing my bids will reduce my average click to buy ratio to make it worthwhile.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Decon said:


>


Those are good results but it's all pretty safe. My goal with my ad is to get as many new readers as I can. I accomplish that with higher bids and a higher daily budget (it kept maxing out at $5, $10, $20, etc a day).

I only have one ongoing ad and it's been active for months now. It has 6.6 million impressions and 7,000 clicks. The ACoS is 245%. But once the pages read and the sales from the other books in the series are counted, there's a nice profit at the end of each month. Basically, the more you spend, the more you can earn.


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## IreneP (Jun 19, 2012)

Decon said:


> ould be $122.40 and not 26.99. Not much profit in that unless you have same sort of luck with page reads.
> 
> I'm yet to be convinced that increasing my bids will reduce my average click to buy ratio to make it worthwhile.


This. I've tried higher bids. Although some have worked well for me, there was only benefit if my actual CPC stayed fairly low. My ACoS's are running about the same as yours on one account and a little higher (but still profitable) on another. My click-thrus are a bit better, maybe. I only have one book that is not in the black, and is due to 1)early experimentation and 2)willingness to overspend a little on a newer release. Now that I've figured out better keywords, those costs are coming down, too.

For those of you who are seeing lots of impressions and no click-thrus - it's either your keywords, cover, or ad copy IMO. If people are SEEING your ad and not clicking, you aren't catching their interest. Either the wrong people are seeing it (keywords) or your ad is not appealing to your target audience (cover and copy).

I've seen several people who have been at this a while say CPCs have been rising. With the program open to so many new people, I imagine this trend will continue - so I'm keeping a fairly close eye on any of my bids that are still high.

I'm glad people are posting their experiences. The kboards threads really helped me with the keywords!


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## Nancy_G (Jun 22, 2015)

Decon said:


> Not sure if this is any good for standalones or not, but I ain't losing money.
> 
> KEYWORDS 300-560 PER BOOK (Gradually increased daily since I started) All books $2.99
> 
> ...


Ok, just went and changed my bids to lower. Thanks for sharing!


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## Jim W. (Mar 17, 2016)

My experience has been similar to Decon's. I started with 0.02 bids and worked up to now a max of 0.10 for super-effective keywords. I see no reason to go any higher.

Here are some of my best performing ads (each has 25-50 keywords). Total Sales/ACoS may seem better than normal but it's cause most of my sales come from Paperback.


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## Nancy_G (Jun 22, 2015)

Jim W. said:


> My experience has been similar to Decon's. I started with 0.02 bids and worked up to now a max of 0.10 for super-effective keywords. I see no reason to go any higher.
> 
> Here are some of my best performing ads (each has 25-50 keywords). Total Sales/ACoS may seem better than normal but it's cause most of my sales come from Paperback.


Amazing and inspiring! What do you consider super-effective keywords - how many impressions, clicks, sales or all of the above? I've upped my bid to .10 on keywords that show sales. I'm also trying to figure out what is the best to spend daily and I see you have yours from $1-3 whereas Decon has $5. Does that all play into the lower bids? I've done 3-4 but now have lowered it.

Thanks for sharing!


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## geronl (May 7, 2015)

I write sci-fi, but the keyword thing is really confusing. Would I actually use "Chris Fox" as a keyword...?


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## Nancy_G (Jun 22, 2015)

geronl said:


> I write sci-fi, but the keyword thing is really confusing. Would I actually use "Chris Fox" as a keyword...?


Yes if you want to be on his page. I use a ton of authors that are similar to my genre. You can use a book's title, too.


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## geronl (May 7, 2015)

Nancy Glynn said:


> Yes if you want to be on his page. I use a ton of authors that are similar to my genre. You can use a book's title, too.


wow. I'll never be able to get it right, lol. I am reticent about using other authors names and titles.


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## Nancy_G (Jun 22, 2015)

geronl said:


> wow. I'll never be able to get it right, lol. I am reticent about using other authors names and titles.


Yeah, it's very cool. I didn't know that until I read a thread about it. After you enter your keyword, give it a little time and then go search your title to see it on that page. It might be down a few pages but should be there! Also, titles with one word like love will show your book. I'm still learning myself as I just started them on the 9th.


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## Jim W. (Mar 17, 2016)

Nancy Glynn said:


> Amazing and inspiring! What do you consider super-effective keywords - how many impressions, clicks, sales or all of the above? I've upped my bid to .10 on keywords that show sales. I'm also trying to figure out what is the best to spend daily and I see you have yours from $1-3 whereas Decon has $5. Does that all play into the lower bids? I've done 3-4 but now have lowered it.
> 
> Thanks for sharing!


I bid at least 0.05 for keywords that show sales, no matter the CTR or ACoS.
I up the bid to 0.10 for keywords with very good ACoS or Sales. For example, one of my keywords have:
impressions = 2,956
clicks = 49
sales = $77.86	
ACoS = 1.34%

I don't think the daily spend really matters. It's whatever you're comfortable spending. I should probably just update the spend to a high amount so the ads don't run out of budget (they have), but I've been too lazy to go through all of them and update, hahaha...

Good luck with your ads!


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## Jim W. (Mar 17, 2016)

geronl said:


> wow. I'll never be able to get it right, lol. I am reticent about using other authors names and titles.


I'm using "national geographic" as a keyword and it's quite effective for my books, to my surprise! So don't be shy haha.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

TromboneAl said:


> A low bid will give you a better ROI, but fewer sales


I guess I didn't really "get" that until I experienced it. Only 800 impressions and one click so far. I've only spent 8 cents. I pictured that I'd automatically end up spending the daily budget amount each day.

I think I will redo my ads with much higher bids. I'd like to at least take advantage of Christmas for the Piano Sight-Reading book.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Can someone explain this?

I automatically generated a lot of keywords by taking a phrase, such as "learn piano sight-reading" and generating a lot of variations. For example

learn keyboard sight-reading
learn keyboard sightreading
learn keyboard sight reading
learn keyboard sight-reading book
learn keyboard sightreading book
learn keyboard sight reading book
learn keyboard sight-reading books
learn keyboard sightreading books
learn keyboard sight reading books
learn keyboards sight-reading
learn keyboards sightreading

etc.

Now, this generated some terms that no one is likely to type and no one will bid on. For example: "how to keyboards sight-read." 

So, I figured that if I search for that string of text on Amazon, I should see my ad. Right? But that was not the case.

For example, I searched for "how to keyboards sight-read." It comes up with 10 results and my ad is nowhere.

What am I misunderstanding?

Thanks.


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## Niles (Mar 22, 2015)

Is there no benefit to tightly targeting with keywords? I mean, if I only pay per click, then I lose nothing if I get the ad in front of 1000 people, 2 of whom are right, instead of whittling down my terms so the ad only appear for 5 people, 2 of whom are right. Yes?

For my anti-Trump book, I thought I'd put in, say, 'Drumpf.' (Among other things!) Anyone who types in Drumpf will have exactly a satirical anti-Trump sensibility. However, almost nobody is going to type that. If I use 'humor books' or something, I'll get far more people, but only a few will be even faintly interested. But still ... that's smarter? I don't want to target too tightly? I should use 'Drumpf' and 'humor,' because a million displays of 'humor' that don't result in clicks don't actually weaken my ROI?

Two, my keywords default to 'broad' and I don't know how to make them 'exact match.' Is that possible?

Three, do you put quotes around multiple words in the same keyword? If I want to target books by Jon Stewart should I type in "Jon Stewart" or Jon Stewart? I don't want to appear on every page with a 'Jon' on it! (Unless, depending on the answer to #1, maybe I _do_ want to appear as widely as possible.)


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Are people using keyword generators?  I've been looking for a good (free) one.

Any suggestions?  Other comments on using keyword generators?

Philip


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

TromboneAl said:


> Can someone explain this?
> 
> I automatically generated a lot of keywords by taking a phrase, such as "learn piano sight-reading" and generating a lot of variations. For example
> 
> ...


You could have misunderstood how sponsored ad keywords work. You'd probably have better results only using "Keyboard" or "Piano" "music" if it works the same as say using "Crime" as a generic keyword for a sponsored ad.

It is not what a customer searches for you to get on a book page, but the meta data tag words and genre traits that authors use when they upload their book. For a string of words to be specific, it would only really work on say an exact title match. So unless an author has used your exact string of words as a tag at upload, or the string is a genre, you will miss the mark with what you are trying to do.

What you should use those keywords for that you have generated is to search Amazon as you have done, then use the results to add the titles from that search to your keywords for you to stand a chance of getting on their pages. Even then, there is no guarantee you will get on the page as Amazon rotate placement if they are popular book pages. Where generic keywords can fall down is with such as "crime" If you crime story is gritty and uses profanity, it will also get onto cozy mystery book pages and those readers don't usually like to read books have graphic violence or profanity, so the likely hood of converting clicks to sales would be low.

Not sure if that makes sense as I had a bad night's sleep.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Niles said:


> Is there no benefit to tightly targeting with keywords? I mean, if I only pay per click, then I lose nothing if I get the ad in front of 1000 people, 2 of whom are right, instead of whittling down my terms so the ad only appear for 5 people, 2 of whom are right. Yes?


From my understanding, here's the big benefit of a tightly-targeted keyword: Your book will be exactly what the reader is looking for, so he/she will be more likely to buy it.

For example, if someone searches for "Detective romance with fish-eating gerbils," and your book is about that, and you had that keyword phrase, that reader will probably buy your book ("Wow, that's just what I was looking for!").

Did I understand your question correctly?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Niles said:


> Is there no benefit to tightly targeting with keywords? I mean, if I only pay per click, then I lose nothing if I get the ad in front of 1000 people, 2 of whom are right, instead of whittling down my terms so the ad only appear for 5 people, 2 of whom are right. Yes?
> 
> For my anti-Trump book, I thought I'd put in, say, 'Drumpf.' (Among other things!) Anyone who types in Drumpf will have exactly a satirical anti-Trump sensibility. However, almost nobody is going to type that. If I use 'humor books' or something, I'll get far more people, but only a few will be even faintly interested. But still ... that's smarter? I don't want to target too tightly? I should use 'Drumpf' and 'humor,' because a million displays of 'humor' that don't result in clicks don't actually weaken my ROI?
> 
> ...


See what I say above as to the difference between keywords that a reader uses to search Amazon and their relevance to sponsored ad keywords that are tied to meta data.

Only my opinion as others could have a different experience, but the whole point of keywords is to tightly target to get a result for you to get on a book page where the reader will likely have an interest in your story for them to explore further and to buy. If you add "Jon Stewart" it won't add your book to every "Jon" or "Stewart" only the targeted name of Jon Stewart. If your author uses initials, J. Stewart and you type J Stewart without the period, it won't get on his page, so the name is very specific.

As you say, not all his books could be specific or a story match to your book, so I imagine in that case it would be better to list the titles that are specific to your story, rather than his name.

Targeting might not always be about being specific to a genre. For example if you have cook book, then books in any genre that women would be likely to read, then the cover would stand out, but it could be lost in a sea of other cook books.


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## Craig Andrews (Apr 14, 2013)

Seems like kind of a funny question, but for those of you who are writing in series, do you have ads for books beyond Book #1?


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## Niles (Mar 22, 2015)

Yeah, Trombone Al, thanks. That's what I didn't get. I mean, if I'm selling "Detective romance with fish-eating gerbils" I want to totally nail the DRWFEG audience. But I can do that just as well by using 'Detective' as a keyword (or, for that matter, gerbil) to catch everyone who enters "Detective romance with fish-eating gerbils." Most people who type in 'detective' won't be interested in my DRWFEG book, but that doesn't cost me anything. As long as the few pesceterian rodent fans see the ads ...

I wish I could spell pescetarian. Piscetarian. No idea.

Decon: this is HUGE, thanks! "It is not what a customer searches for you to get on a book page, but the meta data tag words and genre traits that authors use when they upload their book."

I wonder if that's why people report such better results with author names. Because those are metadata? Thanks so much.


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

Craig Andrews said:


> Seems like kind of a funny question, but for those of you who are writing in series, do you have ads for books beyond Book #1?


I was running ads for book 2 and 3 in my series since book 1 is permafree. But...I am starting to think I should be running ads to my permafree. Kinda makes more sense the more I think about it. Amazon ads to book 2 and 3 are for sure creating some buys/reads though. But...I think running to book 1 might be more effective. I am about to try it.


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## Nancy_G (Jun 22, 2015)

Craig Andrews said:


> Seems like kind of a funny question, but for those of you who are writing in series, do you have ads for books beyond Book #1?


I will be only because mine are standalones all in the same town but different couples. I just put my preorder (3rd) book in and have had a couple sales, not sure how successful a preorder would be since they can't go Look Inside and taking a chance. I'm now waiting for my other book to be approved so will have all 3 in. I think for yours that you would do just the first one since they're continuations of the same story.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Niles said:


> But I can do that just as well by using 'Detective' as a keyword (or, for that matter, gerbil) to catch everyone who enters "Detective romance with fish-eating gerbils." Most people who type in 'detective' won't be interested in my DRWFEG book, but that doesn't cost me anything.


Ah, but it does cost you something. If 1,000 searchers for "detective" click your ad, you will pay for those clicks, yet they will be less likely to buy your book.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk


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## Niles (Mar 22, 2015)

TromboneAl said:


> Ah, but it does cost you something. If 1,000 searchers for "detective" click your ad, you will pay for those clicks, yet they will be less likely to buy your book.


Oh. Right. Huh. In my head, I was making perfect sense. Thanks.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Decon said:


> It is not what a customer searches for you to get on a book page, but the meta data tag words and genre traits that authors use when they upload their book. For a string of words to be specific, it would only really work on say an exact title match. So unless an author has used your exact string of words as a tag at upload, or the string is a genre, you will miss the mark with what you are trying to do.


Well, if that's correct, then I'm definitely misunderstanding how the system works. But obviously, based on my early test search, some of my gears aren't meshing.

If I pay for, and bid high for, a search like "Zombie Millipedes," then I will be pretty PO'd if a customer types in "Zombie Millipedes" and my sponsored listing doesn't come up.

I submitted a new ad, and one of the keywords I chose was "SRTestxyz." When it's live, I'll search for that and see if my ad comes up.


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

Decon said:


> It is not what a customer searches for you to get on a book page, but the meta data tag words and genre traits that authors use when they upload their book. For a string of words to be specific, it would only really work on say an exact title match. So unless an author has used your exact string of words as a tag at upload, or the string is a genre, you will miss the mark with what you are trying to do.


I think there may be some confusion here.Sponsored Product ads may be displayed in one of two places. One is on a book's detail page. I believe that is what Declan is referring to in the observation above. The second place is in search results. That's where TromboneAl was looking for his book. I have an ad set up for the "conspiracy thriller" keyword. If I do a search in the Kindle store for "conspiracy thriller," my book appears at the end of the second page of results as a Sponsored ad. However, just because you choose a keyword like that and bid high does not mean your book will appear in the search results for that keyword. At one point I had a bid of $1.00 for the keyword "action thriller" (I did this as a test) and after checking for forty-eight hours, my book still never appeared on the action thriller search results, at least not in the first 20 pages of them. I am certain that all the other sponsored ad books that did appear on those pages did not bid over $1.00, so clearly Amazon has some logic beyond just what you bid and what the keyword is. It has to do with sales of the book and effectiveness of the ad - kind of like the "algorithms" we always talk about.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

So does it work like this?  My most clicked on keyword for one of my books is "war books".

When a customer enters that in search, a list of books comes up.  There's a (slight) chance that it would display my book on the first page customers see, but most likely not.

Instead, it will display a list of the (most popular?) books that have that phrase somewhere in their metadata (like in the keywords the author listed when uploading their book).  When customers click on one of those books, my book will (always?) be somewhere in the sponsored products pages.  Maybe not on page 1 (due to...?) but it should appear somewhere in the sponsored products pages.  While some of those books have only one or two pages of sponsored products, 'The Art of War' by Sun Tzu has 13 pages, which makes me think that all books using that keyword in their ads should appear.

Is that somewhere near right?


Philip


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## jaglionpress (Oct 5, 2016)

Does anyone know how long it takes for the Total Sales/ACoS fields to populate? I have a campaign that has been running about two weeks, generated nearly 18000 impressions and 30 clicks, and...nothing in those two fields. I can see from my main dashboard that I've made sales during that time, although they could have been from a multi author promo I was in for part of that period, or the couple of welcome emails I sent out to new mailing list subscribers during that period. Amazon says it takes up to three days for the sales to populate in the AMS area, and I've also seen people here basically saying "ignore the sales area in AMS, it's always way behind," or words to that effect.

Should I start worrying that I'm getting clicks and no sales, or sit tight for a while yet?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Okay, had a better nights sleep, so maybe I can state this more clearly.

The keywords you use for sponsored ads are part of the equation or algos that Amazon use for including your book on a book page. They are not the only criteria to get on a book page. There is no guarantee you will be included every time a book is located by you or a customer.

1, Keyword matches to target book or books in genre in relation to other authors participating and their closeness of keywords chosen are a factor. An exact title would be the closest match, and author name second, a genre keyword third. A generic keyword fourth

2, Numbers of authors bidding on a certain title.  If a thousand authors bid on the same title, with only 8 ads per page amazon have to cut it off somewhere for books to be included. If a book has no other sponsored ads bidding, then it is likely they will have a minimum number to start sponsored ads on the page.

3. The bidding determines which page you end up on if successful. You can still bid high and be rotated off the page. Or, you could be one of thousands bidding the same price per click and be left out sometimes. If you bid over their default expected bids of 50c, Amazon will usually ignore the bid

4. Amazon rotate what they include on pages to give all the authors bidding a chance. Sometimes you will be on there, other times you won't.

5. I imagine they will consider your click to buy ratio, or impression to click ratio. In other words, the more successful you are the more they will place your ad as it makes them money only when a customer clicks.

6. If you make an error in typing a title or an author name, it will never have any impressions.

7. If you reach your daily limit, the ad will be paused until the following day.

If you use the scatter gun approach and say use "shifter or say werewolf" as a keyword, you might get tens of thousands of impressions and no clicks, or many clicks and no sales and wonder why. If your book has creatures that can transform, it is a sci-fi book, and your price is say$2.99, when you look closer, you could find that keyword is a total mismatch as most of the books in that genre have a bare-chested cover, a romance or erotic element, with many books at 99c.

---------------------------------------------------

Ordinary searches on Amazon.

Keywords in relation to sponsored ads are nothing to do with placement of your book on search pages as a result of customer searches on Amazon.

If you use "xtraepicdolit" as a keyword,then you only have a chance of getting onto a book page of that specific worded title, or if say, an author has used that as a specific search tag.  That's not to say that if you type in such a word it won't throw up some books in a search, but unless you have used that word at upload for a tag word, your book won't show up in customer searches. But again, that has nothing to do with finding your sponsored ads.
------------------------------------------------------


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

Decon said:


> Ordinary searches on Amazon.
> 
> Keywords in relation to sponsored ads are nothing to do with placement of your book on search pages as a result of customer searches on Amazon.
> 
> ...


Declan, I am pretty sure you are incorrect about search results. When you click to add a new campaign, here is the text of what it says under the option for a "Sponsored Products" campaign:

"Keyword targeted ads can display in search results and on product detail pages."

If you click through to the FAQ, it says this several more times, including this under the heading "Where do ads typically appear on Amazon"

"Below search results, Below the fold on product detail pages"

Here's the link to the FAQ page:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/AdProductsWebsite/downloads/AMS_Book_Ads_FAQ.pdf

My book was not in the top 25 search results pages when I did a conspiracy thrillers search before I put in an AMS ad with this keyword. After I put in the ad - with no change in sales or ranking - it moved up to the bottom of page two and it now has "Sponsored" on it.

So yes, at a bare minimum doing a Sponsored Products campaign CAN make your book appear as a sponsored product in the search results. I have three or four keywords where my book now appears in the first three pages of search results. However, it is correct that there is no guarantee your book will appear in the search results for any keyword you choose in your campaign. I have a number of keywords - relatively obscure though legitimate ones - where I tested bidding high, and still my book didn't appear on the search results. My working theory is that this only works for keywords where your book would have appeared anyway and the sponsored ad simply moves the book up from the depths of the search results to one of the first few pages (with a "Sponsored" tag on it). But there's no way to really validate that theory.

A couple other notes:
-I have seen several books that appeared both in the regular search results for a given keyword without "Sponsored" tag AND at below the actual search results in the "Sponsored" area with the tag.

-After several weeks, I have spent very little money but also had very few clicks and no sales. This is for a book that hadn't sold anything for over a month anyway. At this point, I'm just about ready to go back to bidding very low and thinking of it as long term exposure where I spent $5 a month or something. On the other hand, yesterday I put up my first Facebook ad since last year and I already have three sales of a $4.99 book on $6.00 of ad spending! FB ads require more work and close monitoring of budget and results, though.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

edwardgtalbot said:


> I have a number of keywords - relatively obscure though legitimate ones - where I tested bidding high, and still my book didn't appear on the search results. My working theory is that this only works for keywords where your book would have appeared anyway and the sponsored ad simply moves the book up from the depths of the search results to one of the first few pages (with a "Sponsored" tag on it). But there's no way to really validate that theory.


Interesting theory. Maybe this result is a test of that theory:

Searching for "christmas present for piano player" resulted in no results in books, but my book appears as a sponsored ad on the first page. IOW, that term would not have (did not) find my book, but it did bring up my sponsored ad. Disproves the theory??

My new ad just started, with $.30 per click bids. I searched for "Keyboard sight reading" and my sponsored ad was there at the bottom of the first page.

Searched for "how to piano sight-read book" (a keyword): only five results come up. Mine doesn't show up in regular or sponsored displays.

"learn piano sight-reading": my book appears as the second book, and my sponsored ad appears as #13 (on the first page).

"piano sight-read book": Six pages of results, my book not there.

"piano sight-reading" My book is on page 4, but not the sponsored ad.

"srtestxyz" (a test keyword): No results.

So, yeah, I haven't grokked this thing yet. If I (the author) pay to have my ad appear when a searcher searches for a given term, even if it isn't in my title, subtitle, etc., why wouldn't Amazon want to display it?

Anyone check out this book?

Thanks for the help!


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## Niles (Mar 22, 2015)

TromboneAl said:


> "srtestxyz" (a test keyword): No results.


Your test keyword is already live? I've been waiting two days for my ad to get approved!

(Interesting-looking book, but I need more About the Author before I plunk down $.)


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Decon said:


> If you bid over their default expected bids of 50c, Amazon will usually ignore the bid


What makes you say this? Doesn't match my experience at all.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

NeedWant said:


> What makes you say this? Doesn't match my experience at all.


From bidders on amazon customer forums for other than books when it first started. It could have changed


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Decon said:


> From bidders on amazon customer forums for other than books when it first started. It could have changed


Interesting. Never had that problem with my bids.


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

TromboneAl said:


> Searching for "christmas present for piano player" resulted in no results in books, but my book appears as a sponsored ad on the first page. IOW, that term would not have (did not) find my book, but it did bring up my sponsored ad. Disproves the theory??


Yep, that disproves my theory. So we're back to it being a crapshoot whether a keyword results in a promoted book appearing on the search results page for that book. Bid price seems to have some impact, but a very high bid certainly doesn't seem to guarantee it. I'm sure there is logic behind it on Amazon's part, we just don't know what that logic is.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

edwardgtalbot said:


> Declan, I am pretty sure you are incorrect about search results. When you click to add a new campaign, here is the text of what it says under the option for a "Sponsored Products" campaign:
> 
> "Keyword targeted ads can display in search results and on product detail pages."
> 
> ...


No problem. We just beg to differ. Before I used sponsored ads, I had "chimera" as a tag word at upload for The Killers Amongst US. After I uploaded my book was on there when searched and as I made sales and page reads, I moved up the pages to nearer the front.

If you do a customer search for "chimera" there are only 42 pages of kindle books that have that as a tag word or title because it is niche as a subject. My book is on there and the only difference from when I uploaded it was that it now says "sponsored ad" and includes the short ad blurb. It isn't more prominent than it used to be. So just because it is a sponsored ad book, it doesn't seem to be getting any favors in searches other than the more sales you get and the more page reads you get, the nearer the front pages it shows, which would happen anyway if you were making sales, and drop back when it falters.

Now if you type in "Alliance" which is a book title I have used as a sponsored ad keyword on the same book, but not as a tag word at upload, you will find 145 pages. I wanted to be proven wrong, but having gone through all 145, my book is not on there. So with this and what others have said, it seems clear to me that when Amazon from your link say "Delivers relevant ads in search results based on keyword searches" I would say it is badly worded and gives the wrong impression. The get out is maybe "relevant" because from what I can see, the only search criteria is what we already know, and that is - Title, author name, genre or sub genre, and tag words or a combination of the same at upload.Sponsored ad keywords do not seem to be a factor at all other than they add the short blurb ad it says sponsored title when you find your book.

I could be wrong, but that is the way I see it


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

Decon said:


> If you do a customer search for "chimera" there are only 42 pages of kindle books that have that as a tag word or title because it is niche as a subject. My book is on there and the only difference from when I uploaded it was that it now says "sponsored ad" and includes the short ad blurb. It isn't more prominent than it used to be. So just because it is a sponsored ad book, it doesn't seem to be getting any favors in searches other than the more sales you get and the more page reads you get, the nearer the front pages it shows, which would happen anyway if you were making sales, and drop back when it falters.


Well, as I noted, immediately before I started AMS, my book did not appear anywhere in the first 25 pages of conspiracy thriller. A day after I started AMS ads - with no change in rank or sales or pages read - it started appearing on page two. My book hadn't had any sales or rank increases for several weeks before I started so it's as good a test as you could get. Obviously your experience is that it did not change the location of your book in the results. My experience has been that it is a crapshoot, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.

And if you look back a few posts at Trombone Al's post about searching for "Christmas present for piano player" in Books, you can in fact do this search yourself and see what he is talking about and this pretty much proves that it can have an impact on placement. Doesn't prove that it *will* have an impact for any given author or book, but it proves that it does in some cases.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Niles said:


> Your test keyword is already live? I've been waiting two days for my ad to get approved!


Submitted Dec 17, 7 AM -- Approved Dec 18, 12:24 PM. Probably fast because they recognize a sucker.



> (Interesting-looking book, but I need more About the Author before I plunk down $.)


Thanks for the heads-up/tip. I'm on it. I assume you mean the _Contact Us_ book (the sight-reading book has a big About the Author section).


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

TromboneAl said:


> Interesting theory. Maybe this result is a test of that theory:
> 
> Searching for "christmas present for piano player" resulted in no results in books, but my book appears as a sponsored ad on the first page. IOW, that term would not have (did not) find my book, but it did bring up my sponsored ad. Disproves the theory??
> 
> ...


I'm trying to get my head around this. You don't have to, but if possible could you list the tag words you used at upload and include any hyphens if used.

When I change read to reading as in" how to piano sight-reading book" your kindle book comes up 1st on the list, but not as a sponsored ad. It seems from what you say that "reading" is the word that is getting a result and not read.

This post is all about searches on Amazon.

The only book I have on a first or second page is a search for murder or kidnapping and that book is one that sold big numbers two weeks ago, but has sold the least on sponsored ads. The other 4 I have in sponsored ads are beyond page 10 and upwards in searches. (I gave up at page 10) and yet I sold 53 books of one of them yesterday after a promo. Missing: The Body of Evidence was on many front search pages a month ago after selling 63 in a day after a promo and crazy page reads, but that was a month ago and now it's way down the pages.

It could be that Amazon give you a boost when you first join, but my experience is that it doesn't last if that's the case, though I didn't notice that was the case, and then it's back to performance, unless you are in a niche market with not many pages.

I can't believe that they would shuffle anyone to the front page of search results just because they have joined sponsored ads, unless maybe clicks are part of the algos for page placement with searches. There must be a thousand thriller authors using sponsored ads and that would mean pages of them one after the other from the first page, but of course that isn't happening. I would think that the publishers of Lee Child and Stephen King would be up in arms if that were the case.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Decon said:


> I'm trying to get my head around this. You don't have to, but if possible could you list the tag words you used at upload and include any hyphens if used.


Well, gee, this embarrassing. This was the first book I wrote, and I set the keywords not knowing what I know now. I'll be going back and improving these, but these are the ones currently set for that book:


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> Anyone check out this book?


 I looked at the book description and was a bit put off by the fact the author only has one book out. Although since it's a generic AMS guide, I guess that's reasonable. I'd like to see an independent guide to AMS that focuses entirely on books.

That book features the following:



> How to Generate Three Dozen Keywords in 10 Minutes


I'd imagine there are better keyword generators than that. Anyone know of any good ones?

Philip


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## AliceS (Dec 28, 2014)

While searching for good keywords I followed a trail of also-boughts and sponsored ads through to various books and I am amazed at the mismatch. There are sponsored books that have absolutely no correlation. Like romance books advertising on Atlas Shrugged... That's made me a little paranoid about using books I haven't read as keywords.


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## WRPursche (Feb 18, 2011)

Very interesting posts, thank you all for sharing.

Two questions:

1. For those of you who increase your bids: Is there any reason to increase a bid if your average CPC is already much less than your bid? In other words, if your average cost per click is 7 cents, and your bid is already 15 cents, does increasing the bid do anything at all for impressions/impression placement?  I'm trying to figure out why some people said they increase their bids for 'high performing' ads if they are already performing (unless of course their CPC is equal to their bid).

2. Does Amazon count 'impressions' on ads actually seen on pages, or just whenever they appear in the sponsored ad listing? In other words, if your add is on page 5 of the sponsored ad, but the customer only looks at page 1, does your add get an 'impression'?


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

WRPursche said:


> Very interesting posts, thank you all for sharing.
> 
> Two questions:
> 
> ...


Here are some reasoned guesses:

1: The average cost per click is only for clicks that you got. That is, only for bidding competitions that you won. You might have won 5 bids and paid 3, 3, 7, and 15 cents respectively, but you might have lost the bidding in forty competitions in which the winning bid was, say, 20 cents. IOW, if you had bid 21 cents, you would have gotten 44 impressions instead of 4.

2: Good question. I'd guess that you only get an impression if it's on a page that's viewed. Not so fair otherwise, but possible. Related to that, if your ad appears but the customer doesn't scroll down to make it visible is it an impression?


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

TromboneAl said:


> Related to that, if your ad appears but the customer doesn't scroll down to make it visible is it an impression?


No idea about exactly what counts as an impression, but from a technical standpoint (I'm a web coder), I'd say there's a 99% chance that Amazon does not use whether a customer scrolls down or not to determine whether it's an impression or not. I doubt they even track whether a customer scrolls down or not - it's doable and would be good info for Amazon to have but the code to do so also introduces a small but not miniscule risk of interfering with how the page behaves.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

How can we increase the number of impressions our ads get?  I'd imagine the big companies using AMS for their various products wouldn't be interested in ads that get just a few thousand impressions with handfulls of clicks resulting in daily spends of 2 or 3 dollars like I get.  I'd imagine they aim for hundreds of thousands, or millions, of impressions and hundreds or thousands of clicks.

But how can they achieve that?  I don't see how.

Philip


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## WRPursche (Feb 18, 2011)

TromboneAl said:


> Here are some reasoned guesses:
> 
> 1: The average cost per click is only for clicks that you got. That is, only for bidding competitions that you won. You might have won 5 bids and paid 3, 3, 7, and 15 cents respectively, but you might have lost the bidding in forty competitions in which the winning bid was, say, 20 cents. IOW, if you had bid 21 cents, you would have gotten 44 impressions instead of 4.
> 
> 2: Good question. I'd guess that you only get an impression if it's on a page that's viewed. Not so fair otherwise, but possible. Related to that, if your ad appears but the customer doesn't scroll down to make it visible is it an impression?


That makes sense, thanks a bunch. I'm going to try to increase my bids on a few keywords just to see how it affects me.

As for the impressions, I'm going to assume that it 'counts' on a page that's viewed if it's on the first page, and also counts if the customer scrolls to it. I guess this could be tested -- put in a very low bid keyword of a book title with lots of sponsored ads, see if you get an impression without looking through them, and then scroll through. Not perfect, since someone else might have gone to page 18 of the sponsored ads before I got there...

On the other hand, the very large number of impressions I get could mean I'm buried on page 18, and no one has actually scrolled that far...


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## IreneP (Jun 19, 2012)

TromboneAl said:


> 2: Good question. I'd guess that you only get an impression if it's on a page that's viewed. Not so fair otherwise, but possible. Related to that, if your ad appears but the customer doesn't scroll down to make it visible is it an impression?


I would guess yes. Most advertisers, if the ad loads it is an impression. Since you are paying per click, this is not such a big issue as if you were paying per impression.

BookBub CPM ads, for example, charge per impression. And when I told my writing partner I was running a campaign, she literally said, "there are ads down there?" - like, she almost never even scrolls to the bottom. And, of course, impressions is better than a lot of newsletter blasts who charge a flat fee and you never know how many people even open the mail. So....


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## Joseph Malik (Jul 12, 2016)

You also have to take your ad copy into account. Words are powerful; choose them wisely. With only 150 characters including spaces, every single character counts.

I cribbed the following ad from my blurb, and ran it alongside another ad:

_A down-and-out stuntman accepts a gig from a sorcerer looking for a hero. He learns the enemy is also from Earth, and is planning a new kind of war._

I ran it for a few days: 5,500 impressions, 3 clicks, no sales.

I tweaked the wording and submitted it, using the same keywords and bids. The new ad reads:

_A down-and-out stuntman accepts a gig from a sorcerer looking for a hero. He learns his enemy is also from Earth, and is planning a new kind of war._

When it was green-lighted, I paused the other ad, still running the original, because it's doing pretty well. The revised ad generated 5 clicks and 2 sales on 2,200 impressions in the first day or so. 3 of those 5 clicks were on the same keywords as the previous ad.

Did you see the difference?

Using a possessive instead of a definite article makes the struggle personal; it tells the reader that this is a character-driven novel. It's _his_ enemy.

This is important because if I was writing pure epic fantasy -- sweeping, grandiose tales with massive armies and dozens of faceless heroes with multisyllabic apostrophe'd names who die gloriously in multisyllabic apostrophe'd places (I love those books, I just don't write 'em) -- and appealing to those readers with my keywords, then it might have worked better the other way. But I don't write those kinds of books, and more to it, the ad wasn't producing, so I had to deconstruct it to figure out why. I determined that it came down to that one word. No joke; two letters of difference and a change that most people would never notice, and the ad went from being a money sink to producing a 4.9% ACoS.

It's not like this is making me a Rockefeller; this is all reindeer games right now. I get my first "real" Amazon royalty check next month (I got one this month for one day! Yay!), so until then I can't really do much other than proof-of-concept and the occasional low-key promo, and I'm saving most of my net until I get back on the convention circuit and get the second book out later next year. But I have plenty of time to tinker, and it's fascinating what one word can do. You can really fine-tune this stuff.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

TromboneAl said:


> Well, gee, this embarrassing. This was the first book I wrote, and I set the keywords not knowing what I know now. I'll be going back and improving these, but these are the ones currently set for that book:


Thanks for posting this. This sort of backs up what I am saying and that is that keywords used in sponsored ads have no bearing at all on customer searches for books, only the title, author name, genre and sub genres and the tags you use at upload. The exception to this would be if you say had kidnapping as both a tag word and as a keyword, but it would be the tag word that gave it inclusion in searches and not the keyword. As you can see, you don't have "read" as a tag word, but you do have "reading" So if you have "sight-read" as a keyword via sponsored ads, then it tells me that that wording as a keyword has no bearing on ordinary searches, because when you use that combination in searches as you did, it doesn't find your book.

I said "When I change read to reading as in 'how to piano sight-reading book' your kindle book comes up 1st on the list, but not as a sponsored ad." It seems from what you say in your previous post that "reading" is the word that is getting results and not "read." If you look at your post then "sight-read" brought no search results, but site-reading that you use as a tag at upload and is included in your phrase that I used as a search did produce a result.

Just a suggestion but you are allowed up to a certain amount of characters in each of the seven sections without commas (others will know the figure) 
Repeating "reading" "lessons" and "piano" are a waste of characters. You at least need to add "read" and I don't see "keyboard" or say "accordion" or even "tuition" anywhere. A reader might also use "learning" in their search


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

Decon said:


> Thanks for posting this. This sort of backs up what I am saying and that is that keywords used in sponsored ads have no bearing at all on customer searches for books, only the title, author name, genre and sub genres and the tags you use at upload. The exception to this would be if you say had kidnapping as both a tag word and as a keyword, but it would be the tag word that gave it inclusion in searches and not the keyword. As you can see, you don't have "read" as a tag word, but you do have "reading" So if you have "sight-read" as a keyword via sponsored ads, then it tells me that that wording as a keyword has no bearing on ordinary searches, because when you use that combination in searches as you did, it doesn't find your book.
> 
> I said "When I change read to reading as in 'how to piano sight-reading book' your kindle book comes up 1st on the list, but not as a sponsored ad." It seems from what you say in your previous post that "reading" is the word that is getting results and not "read." If you look at your post then "sight-read" brought no search results, but site-reading that you use as a tag at upload and is included in your phrase that I used as a search did produce a result.
> 
> ...


excellent follow-up! This would mean my original hypothesis could still be accurate - ad keywords will not make you appear in any search results for which you would not normally appear, but they may make you appear higher in the results and with "Sponsored" on the result. I known Declan you have not seen the latter, but my book with no sales for a month appearing nowhere in the top 25 pages and then jumping to page two with no sales, page reads or ranking improvement has satisfied me that at least it can happen, even if it doesn't always. As a side note, I re-launched some FB ads two days ago and now my book has some sales so it's no longer going to be as good a test of this if I were to play around more. I would have to pick another book to do more testing.

A final thought is that if this is true, then what Declan said upthread is accurate, which is that ad keywords should primarily be selected with the books in mind for which you want your book ad to appear on their detail pages. Not exactly the same approach as if you were primarily focused on getting your book to appear on the search results screen.


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## thewitt (Dec 5, 2014)

I disagree with this completely, and my hits and keywords show that I am appearing in many places where I would not appear in a normal search...  Sorry.  I'm getting 300-400% return on my ads at the moment, and fine tuning keywords is the key to success.  I wish I could get them to take more of my money...


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

thewitt said:


> I disagree with this completely, and my hits and keywords show that I am appearing in many places where I would not appear in a normal search... Sorry. I'm getting 300-400% return on my ads at the moment, and fine tuning keywords is the key to success. I wish I could get them to take more of my money...


Hi Tim!

Could you give us a couple of examples of keywords which are not in your keywords on KDP for the book but which when used for a search will cause your book to appear in the results?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

edwardgtalbot said:


> Hi Tim!
> 
> Could you give us a couple of examples of keywords which are not in your keywords on KDP for the book but which when used for a search will cause your book to appear in the results?


That's what I was gong to ask. Also which of the books are in sponsored ads. This is all about sharing experiences to get a handle on how it all works for the benefit of everyone.


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Joseph Malik said:


> You also have to take your ad copy into account. Words are powerful; choose them wisely. With only 150 characters including spaces, every single character counts.
> 
> I cribbed the following ad from my blurb, and ran it alongside another ad:
> 
> ...


Am I understanding this correctly: were you briefly running two ads for the same book before you paused the original ad?


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## thewitt (Dec 5, 2014)

Your KDP keywords have nothing to do with where you ad is going to be displayed.  Only your AMS keywords.

Enter "Lord of the Rings" as one of your AMS keywords. Let the ad run for a day. You will have several thousand impressions, however you will likely have very few clicks...

Same will be true if you use "Game of Thrones" or any other high profile search on Amazon.

Create a bunch of relative keywords, run the ad for a few days, look at them and see which ones are getting high impressions and which ones are getting clicks, and decide which combination is interesting.

I have one ad that I'm running now where I started with 20 keywords and I'm down to 2, as these two resulted in the highest click to impression ratio and the best sales.  My AcOS is 4% on this ad.


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## Joseph Malik (Jul 12, 2016)

Marian said:


> Am I understanding this correctly: were you briefly running two ads for the same book before you paused the original ad?


More or less. I had an ad that had copy that I liked, and was producing -- I thought it wasn't doing well, but it actually was (I had nothing to compare my numbers against until I saw this thread; it turns out it was doing really well and I'm just impatient) -- but I decided to go another way with the ad copy, so I wrote a second ad, and ran it beside the first one, and it died on the vine. So I tweaked the one word as I'd said above, then paused the second ad and ran the newer one as soon as it was approved, and it went on to crush the original, currently producing at around a ~5% ACoS. I've terminated that second ad, now.

At the moment I'm running both the original ad and the newer one.

I now have an even newer ad that I'm waiting for approval on; I'll likely let these two run for a bit and then pause them both and run this upcoming ad solo for a few days and see what it does on its own. Once I get it all dialed in I'll start throwing real money at it. This is just playing penny stocks right now, getting a feel for the market.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

thewitt said:


> Your KDP keywords have nothing to do with where you ad is going to be displayed. Only your AMS keywords.
> 
> Enter "Lord of the Rings" as one of your AMS keywords. Let the ad run for a day. You will have several thousand impressions, however you will likely have very few clicks...
> 
> ...


I think we're talking at cross purposes here. And from what you say you seem to be agreeing with me if it was me you were replying to. We were talking about the effect or none effect of sponsored ads on customer searches. You appear to be talking about what we already know and that is sponsored keywords get you onto other books sales pages to give you visibility if your bid is right and you are rotated in. The tag words you use at upload are a different animal and serve the sole purpose of customers finding you book in customer searches. That's what I was saying anyway.

Some books that are found in searches that are in the sponsored program at times show that they are a sponsored ad, with the short blurb, but at other times they don't. Takes some figuring out.

I assume, but I don't know for certain if when it shows as a sponsored book on an ordinary search page, that if a customer clicks on your book from there if you are charged. I suspect we are charged if that's the case when I look at one of my books that was on the front search page and it showed as a sponsored ad. That book had a rush of clicks until it dropped further back on the search pages.


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## Jimmy (Nov 7, 2012)

Thank you all for the inputs.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

thewitt said:


> Sorry. I'm getting 300-400% return on my ads at the moment, and fine tuning keywords is the key to success. I wish I could get them to take more of my money...


That's great! Congratulations.

In what way/s do you "fine tune" your keywords?

As a newcomer to AMS, it seems to me there are only 6 variables we can adjust to improve our ads' effectiveness:

1. Book cover
2. The very short AMS book description
3. Quantity of keywords
4. Quality of keywords
5. Bid price for keywords
6. Daily spend limit

Did I miss any?

1 & 2 need to be high quality and most genre-obvious possible.

3. I had thought the more keywords the better since we only pay if a keyword produces clicks, but reading the posts above I'm not so sure now.

4. Seems to me that the keywords I choose are better than the automatically generated ones.

5. Is there any benefit in increasing the bid for the more effective keywords, even if they are already getting clicks way below the existing bid price?

6. Is there any benefit in increasing the daily spend limit if (as in my case) the daily limit is never spent?

Any answers/comments most appreciated.

Philip


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

Joseph Malik said:


> You also have to take your ad copy into account. Words are powerful; choose them wisely. With only 150 characters including spaces, every single character counts.
> 
> I cribbed the following ad from my blurb, and ran it alongside another ad:
> 
> ...


I think this is a good point.

On the other hand, I don't think the statistics are there to evidence it yet. Several thousand impressions and a few clicks aren't enough. Also, you have to be careful comparing one ad to another. An ad can perform really well, and you can copy it and set it loose a little down the track only to find it's a dud the second time around. Amazon throws more variables into the mix than just the ad copy, as important as that is.

To be honest, although the change to the copy is an improvement, I'm doubtful that it's responsible for the different stats.


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

Do you guys ever run several books in the same series under the same keyword? Sometimes I see book one, two and three all under the same book page on the first row. Is this a good idea or bad? I suppose it could be good for exposure, but maybe it's a waste of money? Besides that, people could click on all 3 books just out of curiosity. Should I make sure each book targets a different keywords?


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

dragontucker said:


> Do you guys ever run several books in the same series under the same keyword? Sometimes I see book one, two and three all under the same book page on the first row. Is this a good idea or bad? I suppose it could be good for exposure, but maybe it's a waste of money? Besides that, people could click on all 3 books just out of curiosity. Should I make sure each book targets a different keywords?


I have one series where I use the same keywords for both books in the series on the theory that the cover for book 2 may draw a different potential audience than the cover for book 1.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

The keyword results can be an eye-opening learning experience. Here are the results for my _Contact Us_ ad:










If I just increase the bid for the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ keyword, I should get more impressions. I just increased it from .10 to .35 on the fly.

Think how much fun this will be if I get some actual sales!


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> If I just increase the bid for the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ keyword, I should get more impressions. I just increased it from .10 to .35 on the fly.


In my experience it doesn't actually work that way, but will be interested to see what your result is.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

TromboneAl said:


> The keyword results can be an eye-opening learning experience. Here are the results for my _Contact Us_ ad:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


LOL. I just clicked on Contact Us and I could see 2 pages of sponsored ads on the page. I'm the last on the 1st page of yours with Missing: the Body of Evidence, so some authors have bid more than my 6 cents. I didn't know I had your title as a keyword. Went over and looked and I've had 4003 impressions with your title on an ad that's run for about a month. Sadly, no clicks, or sales. It just shows how many people have landed on your page. Thought that info might be useful.

Just adding The Killers Amongst Us which is sci-fi at 8c to see if that gets in front of Missing: the Body of Evidence. It probably won't take effect until tomorrow.

Talking about popular books and authors as keywords, I've been updating mine today. I went to an author called Blake and he has 69 pages of sponsored ads on a few of his books. I decided not to up my bid as it would likely take 50c to get to the front. I was on the next to last page so I cancelled it, because I could see readers scrolling through 68 pages to get to mine. All it was doing was boosting my impressions with no results.

Then I looked at a Stephen King book and I was first out of 4 pages. When I looked again I wasn't on there and there were 39 pages on the same book. I've given up trying to work it out.

*Edit. The Killers Amongst us is now 4th on you first page with bid of 8c, but that's pushed my Missing: the Body of Evidence onto the second page.* Think I'll experiment some more and see what it takes to get to first on the first page..


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## Niles (Mar 22, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> 5. Is there any benefit in increasing the bid for the more effective keywords, even if they are already getting clicks way below the existing bid price?
> 
> 6. Is there any benefit in increasing the daily spend limit if (as in my case) the daily limit is never spent?


I've been wondering about 5 and 6, myself. I _think_ the answers are no, but I know absolutely nothing. I'm hoping someone with experience will chime in.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Niles said:


> I've been wondering about 5 and 6, myself. I _think_ the answers are no, but I know absolutely nothing. I'm hoping someone with experience will chime in.


I think with number 5 it's a case of looking at each book you have as a keyword. I've been doing that today. Sometimes I noticed that it wasn't worth changing my bid as I was on the front page, or 4 pages in, so clicks would likely continue with my low bid. On others, while they looked to be successful with clicks and buys, because so many have jumped on sponsored ads, I was way down the pages and current clicks could have stopped, because I don't look at it and take note every day. I worked out that my clicks to buys made it worthwhile to bid higher to get back to a visible page on some books.

With regards to number 6, I have a daily $5 limit on each of my 5 books and I've never got anywhere near. If I do get near, I would increase my daily limit providing I was making a profit. Others could see it differently and throw a high daily limit at it and bid very high regardless of profit to get exposure as part of a marketing budget to get things going and their name in front of readers. Others on a really tight personal budget at home, might not want to risk it as it takes 60 days to get the income and the funds might not be at the bank to cover it when Amazon makes the debit.

I would add number 7. And that is to consider increasing the price of your eBook if you are to bid higher. At 99c, your royalty will soon be eaten up by clicks. At $2,99 you only have $2.00 to play with and ideally you shouldn't spend more that 10% or 20c of your royalty to get one sale. That could be eaten up with one click if you bid high. Just something to think about as I am considering doing so and going from $2,99 to $4.99 on at least one book, then bidding high on all keywords as a trial,


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Yeah, almost every book I'm running ads on is priced at $4.99 because my cheaper titles wouldn't be worth it, I don't think.

I had an ad that was originally set at $5/day and it was occasionally maxing out when I checked it at night, so I upped it but I kept upping it and finally hit a point where the ad seemed to stop running at all.  Could've been the age of the ad, since I'd been running it for a while, but backed it down some and it started getting hits again.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Decon said:


> LOL. I just clicked on Contact Us and I could see 2 pages of sponsored ads on the page. I'm the last on the 1st page of yours with Missing: the Body of Evidence, so some authors have bid more than my 6 cents. I didn't know I had your title as a keyword. Went over and looked and I've had 4003 impressions with your title on an ad that's run for about a month. Sadly, no clicks, or sales. It just shows how many people have landed on your page. Thought that info might be useful.


LOL. I bet that just means that some people search for "Contact Us" because they want to get to Amazon customer support. I can not believe that 4003 people were searching for my book like that.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

TromboneAl said:


> LOL. I bet that just means that some people search for "Contact Us" because they want to get to Amazon customer support. I can not believe that 4003 people were searching for my book like that.


There it is, Now 4007 impressions, but I've looked twice since I increased my bids. Increasing from 6c to 9c got me back on the first page with Missing the Body of Evidence. 11c got me to third place on the first page With The Killers Amongst Us. I've now tried 15c to see if that will get me to first. If not I'll drop it back to 11c. Not sure how much that guy with a 99c book in first place is going to make a profit unless every click is a sale.


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## Niles (Mar 22, 2015)

Thanks for the reply about #5 and #6, Decon. V. interesting.


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

Do you guys mainly only advertise book 1 in your series? I am thinking maybe I am wasting money advertising all 3 books in my series.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

dragontucker said:


> Do you guys mainly only advertise book 1 in your series? I am thinking maybe I am wasting money advertising all 3 books in my series.


I'm running ads on my series books, and I've used many of the same keywords in each book.

Which makes me wonder if I might be bidding against myself somehow.

Philip


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## DerekD (Sep 28, 2012)

TromboneAl said:


> I just watched a webinar by Derek Doepker on AMS SP ads. My takeaways:
> 
> 
> There can be a delay in sales report, so don't give up on an ad too soon.
> ...


This is an awesome summary. Thanks Al!



TromboneAl said:


> No, I decided not to buy it. The webinar was good at getting me started, but I'm not convinced that the tweaks in the extra course would be worth the money (and time).


Obviously I'm going to be a little biased and think the course is "worth it." 

I wanted to chime in and mention this is more of a complete self-publishing training (that includes ads) + coaching + personalized help and more. A key benefit is students get help optimizing their ads, feedback on their title and blurb, and assistance with a lot of other areas of self-publishing and marketing.

If you're rocking ads already and have a highly successful self-publishing business, then we can work together and if I help you make an extra $10 a day, it pays for itself within a month. If not, then 30 day refund. It's not for everyone, however the time saving factors alone make it worth it for those who recognize time can be far more valuable than money.

Plus, as I'll cover in my next post, there's a "potential loss" to factor in. If you could be making $500 more dollars this month and every month that follows with ads, but it takes you a month to figure out how, then in essence you've "lost" $500 this month even if overall you're in profit. Not out of the ordinary with advertising to have those kinds of numbers with the right type of book.


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## DerekD (Sep 28, 2012)

Anarchist said:


> My opinion...
> 
> With AMS in its current form - it's overly-simplistic - there's no need to buy a course. The best education will come from creating, testing, and monitoring the performance of your ads (keep the 3-day data lag in mind).
> 
> Until then, roll up your sleeves and create ads knowing most will fail. Prune the losers, keep the winners, and continue testing more ads (keywords, interests, copy, etc).


I kind of chuckle when someone mentions how simple it is, and then see five pages of posts with questions about it in a week. 

I agree it's a relatively simple system, especially compared to FB ads which is what I love about it.

The tricky part is essentially bidding to maximize scale and profit margin (people either fall into high ROI but lower overall sales or higher overall sales but lower/no profit)

Some authors make a huge ROI but don't realize they're actually missing out on far more overall sales because it's not scaled to the level it could be.

With these ads, realize you can't scale infinitely so ROI isn't the only factor to consider.

I'd rather put in $2000 a month in ads with a profit of $2000 (100% ROI) than put in $100 a month with a profit of $1000 (1,000% ROI). At the end of the month $2,000 profit is > $1,000 profit.

One of the most dangerous pitfalls is this: Success that leads to complacency and ignorance of an even greater potential.

I learned this at a seminar where we played a game to get the most points.

Long story short, my team was doing really well scoring a few hundred points per round. Then the trainer shared that it was possible to get thousands of points per round. Instantly we were back to the drawing board to figure out how to improve our score.

The problem was we were doing well with a few hundred points, and we weren't motivated to try something new until we realized we were falling far short of the game's potential.

One must be willing to test, try things, and fail in order to find what works - this is obvious. What's harder to catch is one must let go of what is working well to find what works even better.

Some authors may make $100 a month net with ads and be like, "I figured this out I'm doing great!"

The thing is, if they COULD be making $1,000 a month, so they're in essence losing $900 through ignorance.

If an author makes $100 their first month, $500 their next month, and then finally figures out how to maximize profit and scalability to reach $1,000 their third month...

In essence they lost $1,400 over two months they could have been making.

The brain doesn't always "get this" automatically so it's something that takes conscious thought.

The danger is being just successful enough to think you have something figured out only to get complacent and not realize you could be making 10x more.

This is an ongoing balance between testing and experimenting yourself AND learning from others who can shortcut it for you. A simple tweak in these ads can be the difference between $5 and $10 a day, and that's $150 extra every single month coming in that would have been lost otherwise.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Philip Gibson said:


> I'm running ads on my series books, and I've used many of the same keywords in each book.
> 
> Which makes me wonder if I might be bidding against myself somehow.
> 
> Philip


Commenting on my own post.

I saw someone had clicked to my Apollo 8 book from the keyword "Hidden Figures". What's Hidden Figures? I thought. So I looked for it and saw it is a popular history book I had entered as a keyword for 3 of my books (I entered all the books on the first page of best selling history books). And all 3 of my books appeared as the first 3 sponsored products (out of 5).

The single click to my book cost me just $0.02, so it seems using the same keywords for multiple books in a series doesn't screw up the CPC. In fact, in my case, it made my book series dominate the sponsored products line up for that popular book.

Philip


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

Philip Gibson said:


> I'm running ads on my series books, and I've used many of the same keywords in each book.
> 
> Which makes me wonder if I might be bidding against myself somehow.
> 
> Philip


I am starting to wonder if promoting a free book is a good idea or bad idea with Amazon ads too. I know that "freebie" seekers don't convert as well. I mean, look at the conversion rate with something like Freebooksy. It might be like 10%? How is amazon ads any different? I would love to hear from some people who are promoting a first in series book that is free. Does it lead to a high number of follow through reads to the paid books? I know this also depends on the book etc.


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## Elizabeth Barone (May 6, 2013)

It seems to me like it might be your ad copy that's the problem, but you should also try bidding higher. Zoe York recommended on Self-Publishing Round Table that you go with AMS's suggested bid; she said she noticed she got more impressions that way.

I tested an ad today but stopped it when it hit 205 impressions with no clicks. My CPC was $0.25, so this tells me my ad copy was the problem. (The book is selling one or two copies a day on its own.) Tweak and try again!


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

DerekD said:


> The tricky part is essentially bidding to maximize scale and profit margin (people either fall into high ROI but lower overall sales or higher overall sales but lower/no profit)
> 
> Some authors make a huge ROI but don't realize they're actually missing out on far more overall sales because it's not scaled to the level it could be.
> 
> ...


Nobody would disagree with that. Thing is (regarding your course/mentorship) are you able to show your students how to scale up to that level?

Most of us have a hard time getting Amazon to spend our daily budgets when they are only $3-$5 a day. To spend $2,000 a month we'd need Amazon to distribute nearly $70 a day on behalf of our book/s.

If you are genuinely able to show students, on a case by case basis, how to do that, then I'd say your course may well be worth it.

Philip


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

elizabethbarone said:


> I tested an ad today but stopped it when it hit 205 impressions with no clicks. My CPC was $0.25, so this tells me my ad copy was the problem. (The book is selling one or two copies a day on its own.) Tweak and try again!


I think at just 205 impressions, you stopped the ad too quickly. Most people in the know suggest waiting until there are at least 1,000 impressions before evaluating an ad.

Bear in mind that 'impressions' are not really eyeballs on your ad. If your ad is on the 2nd, 3rd, etc. page of sponsored ads, or down at the bottom of a list of books resulting from a search term, chances are that only a few people will actually see it. 205 impressions and no clicks does not mean that 205 people saw your ad and chose to ignore it.

Philip


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## Nancy_G (Jun 22, 2015)

I might have missed it here, but how do you edit your ad copy? I want to change mine but don't see it. It says there'll be a pencil next to your ad, but, again, don't see it.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Nancy Glynn said:


> I might have missed it here, but how do you edit your ad copy? I want to change mine but don't see it. It says there'll be a pencil next to your ad, but, again, don't see it.


As far as I know, the only things you can edit are keywords. You can add or delete them, and you can change your bid on individual keywords.

I don't see a way to edit ad copy, campaign name or change your daily budget. However, you can "Copy" the ad, edit the title, ad copy and daily budget for what will become a new ad.

That's what I do anyway.

Philip


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Philip Gibson said:


> As far as I know, the only things you can edit are keywords. You can add or delete them, and you can change your bid on individual keywords.
> 
> I don't see a way to edit ad copy, campaign name or change your daily budget. However, you can "Copy" the ad, edit the title, ad copy and daily budget for the new ad.
> 
> Philip


You can change your daily budget. It's under Campaign Settings which is the tab next to where you add or pause keywords.


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## Nancy_G (Jun 22, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> As far as I know, the only things you can edit are keywords. You can add or delete them, and you can change your bid on individual keywords.
> 
> I don't see a way to edit ad copy, campaign name or change your daily budget. However, you can "Copy" the ad, edit the title, ad copy and daily budget for what will become a new ad.
> 
> ...


Thanks, will give it a try!


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Cassie Leigh said:


> You can change your daily budget. It's under Campaign Settings which is the tab next to where you add or pause keywords.


Thanks for that. Very timely since one of my ads just stopped as it ran out of its $4 daily budget. I've now upped it to $5 and it immediately restarted..

Thanks again.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Sometimes I wonder if the ad is stopped. I thought mine had stopped after I increased some bids and yet I didn't appear on some of them I am usually on. I checked my daily limits on all five books and I wasn't even close, although I've increased by limit on my best selling book to $6 just in case. 

I made a note of my impressions first thing this morning and they still haven't moved, but when I search some of my title keywords I am on there, so at least my searching should have increased the impressions, but it hasn't. When I have done that before, the impression has registered right away.

When I have increased bids before,I have moved up the pages within the hour. Sponsored ads really is a strange beast.

I am testing moving from low bids on by best keywords as I  haven't had any recorded sales for a week from the ads (first time ever). I think think this is due to there being so many now joining. It remains to be seen if increasing bids will increase profit. I've also noticed a few free books creeping on pages, so they must be bidding around 50c to be first on the list which could be slowing down sales.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

I've seen the number of impressions shown for an ad go down from one day to the next (see my posts at the beginning of the thread). What's that about? Is the display only for the current day? Do they estimate and revise the totals?

The school of experimentation is a very cheap one. I've only spent 64 cents so far.

Did I understand correctly that you can't bid more than 50 cents per click?


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> I've seen the number of impressions shown for an ad go down from one day to the next (see my posts at the beginning of the thread). What's that about? Is the display only for the current day? Do they estimate and revise the totals?
> 
> The school of experimentation is a very cheap one. I've only spent 64 cents so far.
> 
> Did I understand correctly that you can't bid more than 50 cents per click?


I had one day show a reduction in impressions and I believe that was the same day you noticed it, so it was just a glitch in reporting I think. I usually check day-to-day to see what's moving and not and that was the only time I saw negative numbers.

No, there's no limit on what you can bid on a keyword. I actually bid $1 on one to see what would happen and ended up with a click that cost me 50 cents. It's more that there's a possibility that if you bid too high Amazon just ignores you and you don't get any impressions at all from it which I think also happened to me on another ad set where I upped my bids to 75 cents on a few words where based on click-to-sales ratios I could afford to do so.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Someone said that you can click more than 50c . I'm trying 51c on one to see what happens, but as it's a new keyword, no impressions as yet.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

I've also seen clicks occasional go down as well as up.  Must be something wonky in the system.

My ads sold 3 paperbacks yesterday.  I am joyous.


Philip


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## AliceS (Dec 28, 2014)

I just checked one of my books and the Lethal Seasons page has sponsored products on it! Somebody thinks I'm more important than I am!


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

That's clever. I kept coming across a book called Gone (Gone series 1). Well  there are two actually of the same title and one of them is first on nearly every page it lands on and it is listed as free. 

I couldn't understand the thinking behind it as they were likely bidding 50c on every keyword. I could perhaps understand it as it is the first of three in a series, however when I went to look at the book, it is not a free kindle book, it is over $4 viewed on my comp. Seems it is showing as free because the audio is free.


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## DerekD (Sep 28, 2012)

Philip Gibson said:


> Nobody would disagree with that. Thing is (regarding your course/mentorship) are you able to show your students how to scale up to that level?
> 
> Most of us have a hard time getting Amazon to spend our daily budgets when they are only $3-$5 a day. To spend $2,000 a month we'd need Amazon to distribute nearly $70 a day on behalf of our book/s.
> 
> ...


Yes, this is one of the main selling points is that oftentimes people don't know how to scale up. I've been able to scale to a couple extra thousand dollars worth of *profit* per month when including paperback sales.

I just checked my billing history and I'm a little less than $2,000 spend per month (looks to average $1,750).

I show students ways to scale, but the levels are all relative to the # of books and demand. For me it's about 4-5 books in non-fiction making most of the sales.

There will always be an upper cap. At some point you can spend a lot more money by bidding a lot higher but it becomes diminishing returns and eventually reaches a point where there isn't profit.

So depending on an authors goals, $5 a day might be a good point to be at for 1-2 books.

I tend to stay on the practical side and say, "If this helps you get an extra $10 in book royalties a day (profit after expenses), then it would pay for itself within a month."

I'm not here to sell the course though. I've filled the spots I wanted to fill.

What I want to emphasize to help everyone here is this...

ROI isn't everything with these ads. If you're getting a really good ROI, chances are the advertising is on the conservative side of the overall potential sales. If the ROI is poor, there needs to be some fine tuning of the bidding and keyword selection. That is assuming the book converts. Otherwise title, cover, blurb need to me improved.

The platform is simple, the profit maximizing strategies are where things get a little more complex.


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## Elizabeth Barone (May 6, 2013)

Philip Gibson said:


> I think at just 205 impressions, you stopped the ad too quickly. Most people in the know suggest waiting until there are at least 1,000 impressions before evaluating an ad.
> 
> Bear in mind that 'impressions' are not really eyeballs on your ad. If your ad is on the 2nd, 3rd, etc. page of sponsored ads, or down at the bottom of a list of books resulting from a search term, chances are that only a few people will actually see it. 205 impressions and no clicks does not mean that 205 people saw your ad and chose to ignore it.
> 
> Philip


Good to know. Thank you!


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

elizabethbarone said:


> Good to know. Thank you!


My worst performing book for impressions to clicks is 2680 impressions to one click with low bids, so cancelling at 200 or so impressions is way on the low side. That book has now had 105 clicks (281,400 impressions) and is in profit. As someone said, it likely isn't your book. Not everyone will see your ad. It's a numbers game as well as tweaking bids and selecting keywords. Impressions cost nothing. Only worry if 10 clicks or so doesn't convert to one sale.

Obviously, if I bid high for more visibility, I would expect an improvement of that impression to click rate.


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## AliceS (Dec 28, 2014)

Decon said:


> My worst performing book for impressions to clicks is 2680 impressions to one click with low bids, so cancelling at 200 or so impressions is way on the low side. That book has now had 105 clicks (281,400 impressions) and is in profit. As someone said, it likely isn't your book. Not everyone will see your ad. It's a numbers game as well as tweaking bids and selecting keywords. Impressions cost nothing. Only worry if 10 clicks or so doesn't convert to one sale.
> 
> Obviously, if I bid high for more visibility, I would expect an improvement of that impression to click rate.


As my numbers roll in, I was beginning to wonder about that. I have some high impressions with no clicks, but the ad has only run for 6 days. I didn't want to tinker until I had a little more data. Thanks Decon.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

I've learned that with my highly targeted keywords, I end up spending pennies a day and not learning much. So, I just submitted a new ad with broader keywords and heavy on titles of similar books. Bids: $.26 to $.51.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> I've learned that with my highly targeted keywords, I end up spending pennies a day and not learning much. So, I just submitted a new ad with broader keywords and heavy on titles of similar books. Bids: $.26 to $.51.


Let us know how it goes. Screenshots of results pages, etc. are fun to look at, too so we can learn from each other.

Philip


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

NeedWant said:


> Those are good results but it's all pretty safe. My goal with my ad is to get as many new readers as I can. I accomplish that with higher bids and a higher daily budget (it kept maxing out at $5, $10, $20, etc a day).
> 
> I only have one ongoing ad and it's been active for months now. It has 6.6 million impressions and 7,000 clicks. The ACoS is 245%. But once the pages read and the sales from the other books in the series are counted, there's a nice profit at the end of each month. Basically, the more you spend, the more you can earn.


I'm will NeedWant on this one. I was getting conservative sales and conservative pagereads with conservative bidding. Then I started bumping bids on any keywords that got clicks and impressions.

The only way to scale AMS is to find more relevant keywords, and tweak bidding until you are hitting the magic sweet spot of a [crap]ton of clicks and impressions at a reasonable cost.

What is not factored into the numbers is pagereads. I can almost afford to run a high bidding campaign on pagereads alone. The pagereads make an expensive campaign profitable. Plus, if you're pushing the first book in a series, you have to start factoring in the increased sales and pagereads of the followup books of the series. That is the only way to accurately gauge the ad's performance.

Now, the other factor for consideration: INCREASED ORGANIC VISIBILITY AND SALES

When the book is starting to show up in higher rankings on various categories and subcategories due to aggressive bidding and a 'throw everything against the wall' keyword approach, then organic sales start happening. And who knows, maybe Amazon tosses in a smidge of their algorithm magic as well. Either way, if you factor in pagereads and find out you're making a decent profit, why not focus on scaling up as high as you can go and still maintain a profit?

IMHO, this is a gamblers game. Set aside your fear and roll the dice with a few educated guesses. See how big you can push your sales and pagereads and still maintain a profit.


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

DerekD said:


> I kind of chuckle when someone mentions how simple it is, and then see five pages of posts with questions about it in a week.
> 
> I agree it's a relatively simple system, especially compared to FB ads which is what I love about it.
> 
> ...


I got Derek's course. Why?

Over the years I've spent several thousand dollars on marketing and publishing courses, lost several thousand in Facebook ads, and can't begin to count the hundreds of hours I banged my head against the wall trying to figure out how to consistently sell books.

You would think, with my failures and experience, I could sit down and figure out this AMS stuff no problem. Sure, I probably could, after I lost another thousand or two messing with it.

Or I could spend a few bucks on Derek's course, get it right the very first time out, and start making a profit immediately, while scaling my ads up to increase that profit.

I'll be the first guy to tell you that a lot of courses are rehashed [crap]e. I could probably write 3-4 of those rahashatrons and splatter them out on Kindle or use a scroll-down forever sales page to sell them. But I'd rather focus on mastering practical straightforward methods of selling books and get some more books written and published so I can sell those too.

My hat is off to people who successfully publish and sell books, then take the time to pay it forward to the rest of us. Its worth a few dollars to learn what they know. Guys like Derek spend thousands to learn this stuff. Its worth a few hundred bucks to grab onto a multi-thousand dollar education. Especially if it actually sells books. (most of the courses out there on publishing and marketing don't actually sell books)


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

What's funny is, I actually don't want to give out advice on this. The more people know what they are doing on AMS, the more competition I will have for the keywords that convert in my genres.

So, its in my best interests to let people flounder and just keep doing what I'm doing. LOL.

Derek Doepker, please stop selling your course.


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## thewitt (Dec 5, 2014)

TWLuedke said:


> What's funny is, I actually don't want to give out advice on this. The more people know what they are doing on AMS, the more competition I will have for the keywords that convert in my genres.
> 
> So, its in my best interests to let people flounder and just keep doing what I'm doing. LOL.
> 
> Derek Doepker, please stop selling your course.


I can only hope that this is either a joke, or no one else ever responds to any question you may pose in the future...ever.


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

thewitt said:


> I can only hope that this is either a joke, or no one else ever responds to any question you may pose in the future...ever.


Anyone who knows me would know this is a joke.

I've already told a pile of authors about what I'm doing, how well it works, how I'm doing it. I even spent an hour on a google chat screensharing this stuff with another author.

I have no problem sharing info, if I have the time.

But, there is truth to the joke. The more people figure out AMS advertising, the more competition there will be on all the good keywords. *shrug*


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## geronl (May 7, 2015)

thewitt said:


> I disagree with this completely, and my hits and keywords show that I am appearing in many places where I would not appear in a normal search... Sorry. I'm getting 300-400% return on my ads at the moment, and fine tuning keywords is the key to success. I wish I could get them to take more of my money...


I'm going to need a ton of help with this. Good thing my next book is still rough draft I guess.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> Let us know how it goes. Screenshots of results pages, etc. are fun to look at, too so we can learn from each other.
> 
> Philip


I agree.

First lesson I've learned: Names of other books make good keywords--in terms of getting impressions, at least.

The nut that must be cracked is this: "How to scale up." Sounds like Derek might have the answer, but first, I want to see if I (we) can figure it out.

The only three variables one can change are keywords, CPC Bids, and daily budget limit.

Here's a question: Imagine two ads, one with a daily limit of $1 and another with a daily limit of $100. I'd thought that everything would be the same for those two ads, but the impressions would stop for the first one as soon as the limit was reached. But of course, that would mean you might only get impressions in the wee hours of the morning.

So, it might be that with a higher daily limit, AMS gives you more impressions sooner.

For my ad with a $3 daily limit, I've only been able to spend 8 cents/day. If everything were the same, but I had a $30 daily limit, would I end up spending 80 cents per day?

Also, it would make sense for the AMS algorithms to adjust the impressions based on your current clicks/impression. Like: "This guy isn't coming anywhere near his daily limit. We'd better give him more impressions if we want to make more money."

Just brainstorming here.

Anyway, here are my results after my latest ad has been running for 18 hours:



















And here are the keywords I threw together for this test. _Yesterday's Thief_ involves time travel and a mind-reading PI. Next, I will try to fine-tune the keywords.

a time travel christmas
a time travel paradox
a time traveler
a time traveler walks into a bar
a time traveler's tale
a time traveler's wife
a time traveler's wife book
a time travelers guide
a time travelers guide to medieval england
a time travelers tale
a time travelers wife
a time traveller's guide to medieval england
adventure time travel mug
arthur c clarke time travel
charles e alden time travel
e time traveler's wife
egorythmia
emc2 time travel
full circle tea time travel bottle
louis c k time travel
time travel
time travel
time travel 2016
time travel a history
time travel a history
time travel a history by james gleick
time travel a history gleick
time travel adventures
time travel adventures series
time travel agency
time travel bible
time travel black hole
time travel books
time travel books
time travel books for kids
time travel books for teens
time travel butterfly effect
time travel by james gleick
time travel car
time travel card game
time travel characters
time travel childrens books
time travel clock
time travel coloring book
time travel comedy
time travel conspiracy
time travel costume
time travel costume
time travel device
time travel dinosaur
time travel documentary
time travel drama
time travel dreams
time travel dvd
time travel dvd movies
time travel e mc2 explained
time travel e-books
time travel earthquake
time travel ebooks
time travel effect
time travel einstein
time travel equation
time travel erotic romance
time travel erotica
time travel escape room
time travel escapes
time travel evidence
time travel examples
time travel experiments
time travel explained
time travel facts
time travel family guy
time travel fanfiction
time travel fashionista
time travel fiction
time travel for dummies
time travel for kids
time travel formula
time travel forum
time travel funny
time travel future
time travel game
time travel gifts
time travel gleick
time travel gleik
time travel glick
time travel hamster
time travel harry potter necklace
time travel historical romance
time travel history
time travel immortality
time travel in einstein's universe
time travel in history
time travel invasion
time travel james
time travel james gleick
time travel james glick
time travel jesus
time travel just sucks
time travel kids
time travel kids book
time travel kit
time travel machine
time travel machine
time travel mater
time travel movies
time travel movies dvd
time travel necklace
time travel necklace harry potter
time travel nonfiction
time travel novels
time travel novels in paperback
time travel objects
time travel of the 1800 club
time travel ornament
time travel outfits
time travel paradox
time travel patch
time travel phone
time travel physics
time travel pocket watch
time travel poster
time travel romance
time travel romance audiobooks
time travel romance historical
time travel romance paperback
time travel science
time travel science fiction
time travel shirt
time travel socks
time travel stories
time travel stories
time travel t-shirt
time travel tales
time travel tondekeman
time travel toys
time travel tshirt
time travel victorian romance novels
time travel watch
time travel wife
time travel witch romance
time travel with a hamster
time travel with exceptional americans
time travel xbox
time travel young adult
time traveler's wife
time travelers wife
time traveling bong
time traveller e-inn restaurant electronic city
Timebound
11-22-63
Linear Shift
Rewinder
La Viajera del Tiempo
A Girl in Time
A Thief In Time
Time's Edge
The Fold
The Invisible Library
Time's Divide
Out of Time
Departure
Einstein's Dreams
The Pages of Time
Toward Yesterday
Portal to the Forgotten
The Never Hero
The Time Traveler's Wife
Just one damned thing after another
Sink
The Last Passenger
The Vanishing Girl
Time's Echo
Version Control
Time Rats
A Symphony of Echoes
Point of Origin
Shadow Soldier
Where the hell is tesla
Time and again
time's mirror
The decaying empire
landfall
killer pack
a second chance
Stephen king 11-22-63
2092
2287 ad
no time like the past
sabertooth
time travel megapack
A trail through time
Time's Edge
the day after never
last year
area 51
Time's Echo
it's about time
splinter
a loop in time
mind reading
mind reading book
mind reading tricks
mind reading device
mind reading drone
mind reading deck by david blaine
mind reading e
mind reading emotions library
mind reading for managers
mind reading for dummies
mind reading for two people
mind reading game
mind reading glasses
mind reading helmet
mind reading headphones
mind reading illusion
mind reading kit
mind reading magic tricks
mind reading lior suchard
mind reading machine
mind reading quick and easy
mind reading tube
mind reading t shirt
mind readers
mind readers series lori brighton
mind readers series
mind readers 
mind readers masters of deception
mind readers book 3
The Mind readers
soul guardians
the paper magician
rhapsodic
queen heir
miss peregrine's home for peculiar children
magical probi
angelfall
the glass magician
hollow city
significance
library of souls
the vampire gift
inception
the infinite
invidious
the missing
into the thickening fog
the whistler
the atlantis gene
one fell sweep
the shade of vampire
got luck
demon magic
magic undying
murdered gods
to serve and protect
game break
double-sided magic
wayward
moon tortured
last wish
the diabolical miss hyde
heartbeat
the wise man's fear
shallow graves
paranormal activity
paranormal equipment
paranormal romance
paranormal books
paranormal activity collection
paranormal activity the ghost dimension
paranormal activity 4
paranormal activity blu ray
a paranormal love richards
a paranormal's love
free paranormal books
paranormal books for adults
the heist
Heist
the gardner heist
heist society
the sapphire heist
uncommon criminals
the haunted heist
the lufhansa heist
the alpha heist
coin heist
thieves
holiday heist
gone the next
stateline
turbo twenty-three
the edge of alone
dead lawyers don't lie
iron lake
between black and white
gray wolf
tripwire


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## JaclynDolamore (Nov 5, 2015)

TromboneAl said:


> Also, it would make sense for the AMS algorithms to adjust the impressions based on your current clicks/impression. Like: "This guy isn't coming anywhere near his daily limit. We'd better give him more impressions if we want to make more money."


The most financially successful ad for them is the one that results in an actual sale, so I've wondered if there is weighting based not just on your CPC but also on your success of selling to people who click.

There must be some sort of internal calculations going on (no surprise there) because some of my keywords hardly get any impressions even with a very generous CPC, like they've just decided that people who like that book aren't going to buy mine...


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

The book in that ad (YT) will be free on Christmas day. 

I guess that when it's free, there will be no way to figure out how many people downloaded it based on the ad. I will probably see a lot of clicks on that day.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

I've found the book titles I use as keywords to be way, way cheaper than generic keywords.  Some of them cost as little as $0.01 or $0.02 per click.

I've found the best way to increase impressions is to be constantly adding keywords.  We are allowed up to 1,000 keywords per ad and we only pay for those that are clicked on.

I'm still in the first week of doing this seriously but am beginning to see real results: 15 ebook sales across 6 books, 4 paperbacks sold across 3 books.  All as a result of AMS ads, and all in just the first 3 days.  All showing a healthy profit.  Prior to doing this, and having failed with Facebook ads, I was at the point of giving up.  I believe I now see a real chance of making a living with self-publishing.


Philip


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

The screenshot Al posted seemed to show results ordered hierarchically from high clicks to low clicks to no clicks.  Is there a way to do that?  My results just show alphabetically and I don't see how to re-organize them.  EDIT: Never mind.  I just noticed the little arrow in Al's screenshot.  It toggles the results, but the arrow only appears when I click on clicks, so I wasn't seeing it before.  Cool!

I'd like to post screenshots, but it seems I've now totally forgotten how to use Flickr (or they've recently changed everything on me).  Is there a very simple place I can go to to post pictures so I can then grab the url to post here?


Philip


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## Abderian (Apr 5, 2012)

Philip Gibson said:


> The screenshot Al posted seemed to show results ordered hierarchically from high clicks to low clicks to no clicks. Is there a way to do that? My results just show alphabetically and I don't see how to re-organize them. EDIT: Never mind. I just noticed the little arrow in Al's screenshot. It toggles the results, but the arrow only appears when I click on clicks, so I wasn't seeing it before. Cool!
> 
> I'd like to post screenshots, but it seems I've now totally forgotten how to use Flickr (or they've recently changed everything on me). Is there a very simple place I can go to to post pictures so I can then grab the url to post here?
> 
> Philip


http://imgur.com/


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> I agree.
> 
> First lesson I've learned: Names of other books make good keywords--in terms of getting impressions, at least.
> 
> ...


One suggestion: author names


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

JaclynDolamore said:


> The most financially successful ad for them is the one that results in an actual sale, so I've wondered if there is weighting based not just on your CPC but also on your success of selling to people who click.


I suspect this is right. Also, that approach would provide a better customer experience. Amazon always tries to put in front of a customer the type of thing they're more likely to buy. Why should their advertising be any different?


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

TWLuedke said:


> The more people figure out AMS advertising, the more competition there will be on all the good keywords. *shrug*


We all write in different genres. I write Women's literary fiction. What would be a "good" keyword for one of your books wouldn't be a "good" keyword for one of mine. Figuring out AMS isn't difficult. We have to find bestselling books that are close to ours in subject matter, preferably books as Decon once mentioned that are more expensive than ours. What I see too much of in Sponsored Ads are impressions of books that have no relevance to the book page on which they are appearing, examples like westerns on thriller pages, cozy mysteries on historical fiction pages, etc. It's as if authors picked their keywords just to land on a page with a bestselling book. It's time consuming finding books that will boost the sales of your books. You have to aim at the right target.


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## geronl (May 7, 2015)

A walk-through on AMS would be nice


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Marian said:


> We all write in different genres. I write Women's literary fiction. What would be a "good" keyword for one of your books wouldn't be a "good" keyword for one of mine. Figuring out AMS isn't difficult. We have to find bestselling books that are close to ours in subject matter, preferably books as Decon once mentioned that are more expensive than ours. What I see too much of in Sponsored Ads are impressions of books that have no relevance to the book page on which they are appearing, examples like westerns on thriller pages, cozy mysteries on historical fiction pages, etc. It's as if authors picked their keywords just to land on a page with a bestselling book. It's time consuming finding books that will boost the sales of your books. You have to aim at the right target.


In searching for keywords for my children's books, I avoid rampant bestsellers like the Harry Potter books. Those books have dozens of pages of sponsored ads To get on the first page would, I think, be far too competitive for my $0.26 CPC bid, and I doubt many people browse beyond the first couple of pages of sponsored ads.

(Actually, the first part of that is just an assumption on my part, so I'll now test the assumption and see where a $0.26 bid gets me on a couple of the Harry Potter books.)

Philip


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

Marian said:


> We all write in different genres. I write Women's literary fiction. What would be a "good" keyword for one of your books wouldn't be a "good" keyword for one of mine. Figuring out AMS isn't difficult. We have to find bestselling books that are close to ours in subject matter, preferably books as Decon once mentioned that are more expensive than ours. What I see too much of in Sponsored Ads are impressions of books that have no relevance to the book page on which they are appearing, examples like westerns on thriller pages, cozy mysteries on historical fiction pages, etc. It's as if authors picked their keywords just to land on a page with a bestselling book. It's time consuming finding books that will boost the sales of your books. You have to aim at the right target.


Totally agree. It is an intensive research project of scouting the appropriate genre bestseller lists, author names, series names, alsoboughts, and tracking the hot selling books of my genres.

Yet, if hundreds of authors knew how to do this, knew how much they could boost their sales by simply staying on top of the keyword research, then these keywords would be swamped out with competition.

I guess the only reason it hasn't happened yet is that authors don't understand the process of keyword research for running AMS ads and how profitable it can be.


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

Philip Gibson said:


> In searching for keywords for my children's books, I avoid rampant bestsellers like the Harry Potter books. Those books have dozens of pages of sponsored ads To get on the first page would, I think, be far too competitive for my $0.26 CPC bid, and I doubt many people browse beyond the first couple of pages of sponsored ads.
> 
> (Actually, the first part of that is just an assumption on my part, so I'll now test the assumption and see where a $0.26 bid gets me on a couple of the Harry Potter books.)
> 
> Philip


I have learned to make no assumptions.

Test everything and see what sticks. See what gets you the affordable clicks.

But don't forget to keep an eye on the pagereads and followup sales if you're advertising the first book of a series.

And, I stick with one ad per book, or one ad for the first book of an entire series. Its the only way to track the ad's effect on the full series sales and pagereads. With pagereads its more of an educated guess, a before and after snapshot.

The point is, test everything that seems relevant to your book. Every author, genre, bestselling book title, series title, everything you can think of. And let it ride for at least a week to see how its doing.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

TWLuedke said:


> One suggestion: author names


Done. Thanks.

Noticed this in the FAQ Section:

Do campaigns that have been active longer have a better chance of showing ads?
Yes, click history plays an important role in our bidding algorithm. To win the auction, make sure your ad has a good click-through rate in addition to relevant keywords and a competitive bid.

Just thought of this: Perhaps the best place to get book/author keywords is the Also Boughts for your book.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> Done. Thanks.
> 
> Noticed this in the FAQ Section:
> 
> ...


I would think so - and the Also Boughts of the Also Boughts of those Also Boughts...

Philip


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

TWLuedke said:


> Totally agree. It is an intensive research project of scouting the appropriate genre bestseller lists, author names, series names, alsoboughts, and tracking the hot selling books of my genres.
> 
> Yet, if hundreds of authors knew how to do this, knew how much they could boost their sales by simply staying on top of the keyword research, then these keywords would be swamped out with competition.
> 
> I guess the only reason it hasn't happened yet is that authors don't understand the process of keyword research for running AMS ads and how profitable it can be.


I think authors do know how profitable the ads can be. Some may just not have a handle on it yet. The process isn't difficult to understand. It's simple, really. All it takes is the willingness to do research, which is time consuming, and the willingness to continuously stay on top of it. The following should help:

Find the most popular books in your genre that are closest to yours in subject matter (themes). Use both the authors' names and the titles of the books as keywords. (I tried ISBNs and they don't work.) Also, as someone mentioned, look at the also boughts on these authors' pages.

Use authors' names in your genre who may not have current bestsellers but whose books sell steadily. Their books should have a rank of less than 10,000. You'd be surprised at how well some of these names do.

Think about your genre and subject matter in specific terms. Also, keep track of the pages where Amazon algorithms places your book, which could lead to more keywords.

Finally, after you are at it for a while, you may not need a lot of keywords to have profitable ads. It's an on-going process of searching and honing it down. Hope this helps.


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

Marian said:


> I think authors do know how profitable the ads can be. Some may just not have a handle on it yet. The process isn't difficult to understand. It's simple, really. All it takes is the willingness to do research, which is time consuming, and the willingness to continuously stay on top of it. The following should help:
> 
> Find the most popular books in your genre that are closest to yours in subject matter (themes). Use both the authors' names and the titles of the books as keywords. (I tried ISBNs and they don't work.) Also, as someone mentioned, look at the also boughts on these authors' pages.
> 
> ...


Thanks Marian! Great advice!


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## Lu Kudzoza (Nov 1, 2015)

> Just thought of this: Perhaps the best place to get book/author keywords is the Also Boughts for your book.


I just heard this advice on a podcast today. The author's theory is that Amazon has already deemed the books as selling well to the same audience so it should increase your sell rate per click.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Seem to be getting the hang of it now by tweaking bids on performing keywords. Had 30 clicks in 2 days. Trouble is, it's hard to say if any of them convert to sales because of the reporting delay and of course, you don't know how many who click are in KU.

They really must take account of performance besides bids as the campaign progresses. I tested 51c on 3 popular books and I just cant get on the pages. It isn't my daily limit that is stopping me getting on the pages, because I increased it just in case.

What I've been doing is going through my keywords that have many impressions, but no clicks and copy and pasting the keywords into Amazon search to see where I'm placed. Sometimes an extra 1c can get you from page 2 to page 1 or you can be so far down the pages (58 pages on some) that it's best putting the keyword on pause and move on.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Another puzzle: Remember how I added a keyword "srtestxyz"? I tried searching for that, and nothing matched it.

Today, I looked at the report, and "srtestxyz" has gotten two clicks. Did someone here try that and get a result? How could that have happened?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

TromboneAl said:


> Another puzzle: Remember how I added a keyword "srtestxyz"? I tried searching for that, and nothing matched it.
> 
> Today, I looked at the report, and "srtestxyz" has gotten two clicks. Did someone here try that and get a result? How could that have happened?


Not sure, but Amazon thinks "srtes" should be stress when I did a search


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Decon said:


> What I've been doing is going through my keywords that have many impressions, but no clicks and copy and pasting the keywords into Amazon search to see where I'm placed. Sometimes an extra 1c can get you from page 2 to page 1 or you can be so far down the pages (58 pages on some) that it's best putting the keyword on pause and move on.


I'm doing the same, plus adding new keywords every day. Most of my books have 200+ keywords now.

How about everyone else? How many keywords do you have now? Is it worthwhile to keep on adding them up to near the 1,000 limit?

I can't think why not.

Philip


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Decon said:


> Seem to be getting the hang of it now by tweaking bids on performing keywords. Had 30 clicks in 2 days. Trouble is, it's hard to say if any of them convert to sales because of the reporting delay...


That is a bit frustrating, isn't it?

I guess the sensible and patient way to deal with that is to PAUSE the keyword/s, wait for 3 days until the SALES data catch up with the SPEND data. Then, we can know the true benefit of the individual keyword/s.

But, if you are like me, you may be reluctant to PAUSE something that is currently working and probably generating income just to get the relevant and accurate data.

Philip


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Philip Gibson said:


> I'm doing the same, plus adding new keywords every day. Most of my books have 200+ keywords now.
> 
> How about everyone else? How many keywords do you have now? Is it worthwhile to keep on adding them up to near the 1,000 limit?
> 
> ...


 key/w clicks
Book 1 564 106
Book 2 470 120
Book 3 359 146
Book 4 286 143
Book 5 308 413

Book 5 has three and a half time the income of the others.

I don't think it's a question of quantity, but a combination of precise targeting and efficient bids, although you increase your chances the more keywords that you have, but they are harder to maintain for tweaking bids the more you have.

There is a possibility that by not maintaining them that if you get thousands of impressions on one and no clicks because you have bid too low and have no visibility because you are buried in the pages, Amazon could stop placing you on the page in preference to someone else of the same bid, or lower. Amazon say that click performance is part of the consideration for placement after a trial of giving impressions, especially for competitive books as keywords.

I can't get back on some pages even with increased bids. I'll have to cancel them and start a new campaign just for those keywords and see what happens.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

If a keyword is successful in that it gets my book on the first page of that book's sponsored ads for less than my bid price and makes sales, there can't be any benefit in increasing the bid on that particular keyword, can there?

Or is there some benefit somehow?


Philip


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Philip Gibson said:


> If a keyword is successful in that it gets my book on the first page of that book's sponsored ads for less than my bid price and makes sales, there can't be any benefit in increasing the bid on that particular keyword, can there?
> 
> Or is there some benefit somehow?
> 
> Philip


No, but don't get complacent and expect it to stay on the front page forever. That's what I mean by keyword and bid maintenance. As more join in and chase visibility, you can soon lose your place on early pages. I have many where I was on the 1st or 2nd page a month ago. Since they opened it wide, some of those no longer have 3 pages, but 60 pages and I've ended up at the back because I bid lower than the new entrants.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

My plan is to run my campaign of 8 ads, 8 books for one more day (7 days in total), then PAUSE the campaign and wait 3 days during which time (I believe) the SALES data will catch up with the SPEND data.  During those 3 days, I'll make no more adjustments to any of the ads (I have been making keyword adjustments every day so far).

After those 3 days, I'll post a screenshot here, analyze the data and make what I hope will be beneficial adjustments.  Then, I'll start the campaign again.

Sound like a plan?


Philip


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

LilyBLily said:


> It may be a wonderful plan, but why would you do it during a week when people are buying, buying, buying because they have new Kindles, gift cards, computers, etc.? This coming week is a major shopping week.


So it's a good week to run ads right? Seems like it.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

LilyBLily said:


> It may be a wonderful plan, but why would you do it during a week when people are buying, buying, buying because they have new Kindles, gift cards, computers, etc.? This coming week is a major shopping week.


Good point. I hadn't thought of that. Maybe I'll let the ads run a little longer before pausing them and harvesting the data. More data has to be a good thing anyway, right?

Philip


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> I'm doing the same, plus adding new keywords every day. Most of my books have 200+ keywords now.
> 
> How about everyone else? How many keywords do you have now? Is it worthwhile to keep on adding them up to near the 1,000 limit?
> 
> ...


There is no downside to having a lot of keywords. I have 442 for one ad, 190 for another.

There is a slight disadvantage to adding keywords during the campaign: you won't be able to make good comparisons to figure out which keywords give you the most impressions, because some will have been present for fewer days.

I've only had one sale so far, but I'm patiently waiting for more.










_Yesterday's Thief_ was free yesterday, and the ad for that book quickly maxed out and was paused when the daily budget was reached. Not surprising, of course. However, I don't know how many people downloaded the book for free, since the total sales column only shows dollar amounts of sales.

Sometime I'll try an ad for a free run that is promo'd nowhere else. Perhaps it could be cheaper to give away books like this than through some promo sites. For example, I've calculated that it costs me 5 cents/download when I advertise a free day on FreeBooksy. Perhaps with low bids on clicks, I could do as well with an ad?


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## geronl (May 7, 2015)

I was going to do a BKnights and since I have $5 on my fiverr account I thought I'd only need $1 for the processing fee. But for some reason, Fiverr won't show me an option to use the money in the fiverr account.

What...


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## ICRobledo (Dec 4, 2014)

Is it better to form ad after ad, and let them pile up... assuming you are creating profitable ones, or is it better to create one ad and continue to optimize it? Which will have better results, or will they be the same? I am testing this now, but it will take time. Any other thoughts?


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

Decon said:


> key/w clicks
> Book 1 564 106
> Book 2 470 120
> Book 3 359 146
> ...


Why do you think book 5 is doing better with the ads?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

dragontucker said:


> Why do you think book 5 is doing better with the ads?


Because I've kept up on the bid maintenance more than the other 4 books, so the book is on more early pages. Bid and keyword maintenance is hard work when you have a few books and tons of keywords between them, and it detracts from other efforts... like writing.

I have updated some of the others over the weekend, but really, it is a bind to keep up, especially as more and more are joining and you slip down the pages if you don't keep an eyes on it and your ad becomes less effective.

I can see a time in the not too near future, where bids will be so high to get visibility and sales, authors who stick with it will have increased their bids so much that they will have to increase their book prices or duck out of it altogether.

One problem with keywords is that you could find a book that is a perfect match from yours or someones also boughts, only to discover later that there are 10 other titles the same, but in the wrong genre, and so you need to take those out or you end up with lots of impressions and clicks, but no sales.


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## Marseille France or Bust (Sep 25, 2012)

Funny book! The cover and blurb on paperback is perfect as well.



Niles said:


> Is there no benefit to tightly targeting with keywords? I mean, if I only pay per click, then I lose nothing if I get the ad in front of 1000 people, 2 of whom are right, instead of whittling down my terms so the ad only appear for 5 people, 2 of whom are right. Yes?
> 
> For my anti-Trump book, I thought I'd put in, say, 'Drumpf.' (Among other things!) Anyone who types in Drumpf will have exactly a satirical anti-Trump sensibility. However, almost nobody is going to type that. If I use 'humor books' or something, I'll get far more people, but only a few will be even faintly interested. But still ... that's smarter? I don't want to target too tightly? I should use 'Drumpf' and 'humor,' because a million displays of 'humor' that don't result in clicks don't actually weaken my ROI?
> 
> ...


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> There is a slight disadvantage to adding keywords during the campaign: you won't be able to make good comparisons to figure out which keywords give you the most impressions, because some will have been present for fewer days.


That's why, after this 8-book, 8 ads campaign has run for 10 days, I will pause it, wait for 3 days for the SALES data to catch up with the SPEND data and then either:

1. Re-start the campaign after removing all the non-performing keywords

or

2. Start new campaign for each book only using the keywords that proved effective in this first campaign.

What do people think - 1 or 2? Is there something about the algorithm remembering the current campaign's performance and thus implementing better or cheaper placements, etc.

I dunno.

Philip


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## SCapsuto (Dec 11, 2015)

I've had campaigns running for about a week and am very new to the marketing tool. So I'm not sure I'm fully grasping the conversation here.

Are you saying that if you have keywords that are showing zero displays or clicks, you're better off deleting them?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

SCapsuto said:


> I've had campaigns running for about a week and am very new to the marketing tool. So I'm not sure I'm fully grasping the conversation here.
> 
> Are you saying that if you have keywords that are showing zero displays or clicks, you're better off deleting them?


Other might say that, but I don't. Amazon say something to the effect that consideration for placing ads on pages is a combination of bid, impression to clicks results, as well as the time the campaign has run, the longer the better. Obviously, when you first start a campaign, they give you page placement to start you off. One week or even two weeks isn't enough time to be deleting keywords, or stopping the campaign.

Sure you can go and look see why a keyword isn't getting enough impressions or clicks and there could be any number of reasons which you can address before deleting (pausing)keywords or stopping the campaign.

Misspelling the title or author name as a keyword
Bids are too low so you are too far down on the pages to have visibility 
There are many other similar titles to your keyword that are not in the same genre 
The cover doesn't match with the genre
The short ad blurb isn't enticing
The actual book blurb isn't enticing
etc etc


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Seems like there is a great opportunity for someone to write a book on how to use AMS to sell ebooks. 

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk


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## AlecHutson (Sep 26, 2016)

Just wanted to pop in and thank the regulars here for this incredibly helpful thread. I just published my first book at the beginning of December and I had no idea about AMS services, and it was this thread that clued me in and revitalized my sales after the initial surge of family / friend buying died out. 

I actually think AMS underreports how effective the ads are - according to my ad, since December 18th when I put it up I've spent 60 USD on clicks and made 95 USD in sales. But the sales of my books have really jumped . . . before I started using AMS my sales had slowed to 2-3 a day. I've sold 52 copies at full price in just the last four days. My KU reads have likewise spiked - I was averaging around 2k a day before the 18th, but the last four days have been around 5.5k a day. An AMS ad is the only promotion I've been running, so at this point I'd have to attribute it to that. 

I found that using author names and popular books is much, much more effective than generic terms. Game of Thrones has garnered me 54 clicks and 4 sales at 4.99. Name of the Wind 36 clicks and 2 sales. I've also had luck focusing on popular self-published fantasy authors - the people who end up on their pages are pretty likely to not have any snobbish hang-ups about indie-publishing. 

Also, maybe I don't fully understand the system, but I don't see why authors would bid low for clicks. Doesn't that just push your ad to the back of the queue? You want yours front and center!


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

AlecHutson said:


> Just wanted to pop in and thank the regulars here for this incredibly helpful thread. I just published my first book at the beginning of December and I had no idea about AMS services, and it was this thread that clued me in and revitalized my sales after the initial surge of family / friend buying died out.
> 
> I actually think AMS underreports how effective the ads are - according to my ad, since December 18th when I put it up I've spent 60 USD on clicks and made 95 USD in sales. But the sales of my books have really jumped . . . before I started using AMS my sales had slowed to 2-3 a day. I've sold 52 copies at full price in just the last four days. My KU reads have likewise spiked - I was averaging around 2k a day before the 18th, but the last four days have been around 5.5k a day. An AMS ad is the only promotion I've been running, so at this point I'd have to attribute it to that.
> 
> ...


What you have to understand is that only two months ago, low bids worked to get you on many first pages, with the majority of books only having 2 or 3 pages of sponsored ads. Since they threw it open to all and with posts on here, in such a short time, many more have joined to the extent that there are now popular authors and books with up to 60 pages. As you have just joined, then of course you can't understand why authors should, or did bid low. So really it is understandable why should query low bids.

The key here to your query on low bids is "retail price" Your book is higher than the norm @ $4.99, so that gives you $3.50 in royalty to play with. The majority of indie authors are stuck at $2.99, with only $2 royalty to play with. Authors with books priced at $2.99 like me have to be careful with high bids and I can't use a scatter gun approach. Each high bid has to count, or I would soon run into a loss.

I said in my last post that in the not too near future, authors will have to consider ducking out as low bids become less to non effective, or increase their retail prices to be able to bid higher. In addition to that more attention will have to be paid to having an attractive cover, ad blurbs and the book blurb.

I've had 1,402,403 impressions. From that I've had 959 clicks with mostly low bids and produced 88 sales, but that is spread around 5 books. That's almost 11 clicks to one sale for the period. So at those sort of rates, if I had paid 20c per click, I would have lost 20c on every sale, whereas you would make a profit of $1.30 on every sale.

It's working great for you, because the sales from the ads, though making only $6.60 for 19 sales, they have given you visibility in the charts which is gaining you more organic sales and page reads.

It's all about the math and the popularity of your book, marketing budget, and genre in deciding the strategy for bids.


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## AlecHutson (Sep 26, 2016)

Makes sense, thanks for explaining. I can see now how working with smaller margins changes the calculations significantly. Sorry if I came across as flippant.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

AlecHutson said:


> Makes sense, thanks for explaining. I can see now how working with smaller margins changes the calculations significantly. Sorry if I came across as flippant.


No need. I didn't take it that way at all. I took it as a genuine query that deserved an answer.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

I'm finding that the keywords I selected from Also Boughts (and Also Boughts of Also Boughts) are performing way, way better than keywords otherwise selected.

All of my 8 ads are showing a 100%+ return on investment so far except for the one book that is priced at $0.99.  I will soon be pausing the ads for a couple of days so I can accurately harvest the data (waiting for the sales numbers to catch up), as long as I figure there is no downside to pausing and re-starting ads.

Is there any downside to pausing and restarting ads anyone can think of?


Philip


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Philip Gibson said:


> Is there any downside to pausing and restarting ads anyone can think of?
> 
> Philip


I pause mine individually every time I run a free promo. Never had a problem with it starting to show impressions again.


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## AliceS (Dec 28, 2014)

As I am starting to research my keywords, I'm getting confused. 

Using titles is simple. I can go to that book and look for my ad. Got it. 

Using a keyword that is a genre, for example, I load it in the search and see if my ad comes up on any of the pages. Got it. 

Author names, now I'm not sure how that works. If I search for an author, I usually just get their books and author pages don't seem to have ads on them. 

So if I use an author name, and I have, where might/does it show up? Because I have impressions.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

I'm sort of starting to worry. I took a screen shot on Christmas eve when I increased some of my bids on one book to see what would happen and checked it against today's figures and listed it below



24th Dec /SPENT  $20.12 on  404    clicks    sales $143.04

27th Dec/SPENT  $23.82  ON  426 clicks      sales $163.01

3 DAYS $3.70 ON 22 clicks ($0.17 per click) 

Sales increase (retail) $19.97 = 2 eBooks @ 2.99  ($4.00 royalty) + 1 print book at $13.99  ($3.70 Royalty) For them all to have been eBooks it would be 6.6 ebooks which isn't right. The other thing is that I can't attribute the increase in sales to those 22 clicks because of the reporting delay.

What troubles me, is that I haven't sold a print book for that title in December, but I did sell 2 in November. I hope they are not miss reporting. Can they really be a month out with reporting paper book sales?

Also, at 17p per click, unless my click to buy ratio falls from 11 to 1, I'm in trouble with making a profit.  I have only sold 1 eBook in those three days according to my dashboard. Going to need to take at least weekly screenshots to keep an eye on this.


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## sammccoll (Oct 25, 2016)

This is a great thread - thanks so much everyone... during the next week I'm going to start making some choices. I'll let you know how it goes.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Decon said:


> I'm sort of starting to worry. I took a screen shot on Christmas eve when I increased some of my bids on one book to see what would happen and checked it against today's figures and listed it below
> 
> 24th Dec /SPENT $20.12 on 404 clicks sales $143.04
> 
> ...


So are you saying your cost per click went from $0.05 to $0.31 as a result of increasing the bid?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Philip Gibson said:


> So are you saying your cost per click went from $0.05 to $0.31 as a result of increasing the bid?


No, sorry, I made a mistake and I've amended the post, the average per bid for those 3 days is 17c even though I have many 3,4,5,6, 8 & 10c cent keyword bids on the same book. Looking at the clicks, they have come from mainly a relatively few 51c bids on popular book where I am on the front page, and in some cases, on a few 32c bids. Obviously on those 51c & 32c bids, other authors have bid 50 & 30c. And you get charged on the next lowest bid. It's hard to see it on the pages how much I'm charged, because I didn't set up a new campaign, I simply increased my bids on keywords that had produced sales in the past.

My average to date is showing it has increased from 5c to 6c per click on that book, but of course that is not the cost of this past 3 days which is 31c 17c per click, so my average will increase daily if I l leave it as it is and those high bids keep producing clicks.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Did you increase by a large amount?  Maybe, when it comes to increasing bids, it is best to only increase them very gradually.  That's certainly the case with Facebook ads.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

I increased bids by what I thought it would take to get onto some front pages. Some of them I increased in three stages to get there. I had dropped to the back to the last of an average of 30 pages with my current bids on the books that had produced in the past and clicks has stopped. Some were very large increases, some only took a few cents on less popular books.

It's only a trial, the good thing is I can adjust. All I am saying os you have to keep and eye on results or it can get out of hand.


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## geronl (May 7, 2015)

Decon said:


> I'm sort of starting to worry. I took a screen shot on Christmas eve when I increased some of my bids on one book to see what would happen and checked it against today's figures and listed it below
> 
> 24th Dec /SPENT $20.12 on 404 clicks sales $143.04
> 
> ...


426
-404
------
22 clicks


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

geronl said:


> 426
> -404
> ------
> 22 clicks


Ha ha, now I'm not so worried. My bad. So it's 17c per click. I've amended my post. Maybe I should still be worried, because that makes it worse if I have only 1 sale on my dashboard for the period as that makes the ratio 22 clicks - 1 sale, or $3.70 to make $2.00 royalty

24th Dec /SPENT $20.12 on 404 clicks sales $143.04

27th Dec/SPENT $23.82 ON 426 clicks sales $163.01

3 DAYS $3.70 ON 22 clicks ($0.17 per click)

Sales increase (retail) $19.97 = 2 eBooks @ 2.99 ($4.00 royalty) + 1 print book at $13.99 ($3.70 Royalty) For them all to have been eBooks it would be 6.6 ebooks which isn't right. The other thing is that I can't attribute the increase in sales to those 22 clicks because of the reporting delay.

What troubles me, is that I haven't sold a print book for that title in December, but I did sell 2 in November. I hope they are not miss reporting. Can they really be a month out with reporting paper book sales?

Also, at 17p per click, unless my previous average click to buy ratio falls from 11 to 1 on all books, I'm in trouble with making a decent profit and a loss if it carries on at a ratio of 22 -1. I have only sold 1 eBook in those three days according to my dashboard. Going to need to take at least weekly screenshots to keep an eye on this.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Decon said:


> I pause mine individually every time I run a free promo. Never had a problem with it starting to show impressions again.


Then I guess the only drawback to pausing and restarting campaigns is the fall in books' rankings resulting in less visibility needed to produce organic sales.

(Organic sales being sales without any ads or promotion.)

Philip


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

How long do you pause a book before restarting  the campaign to get more effective placement?


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

I need some help with my decision making. The ads for my nonfiction book (the sight-reading book (SR)) are borderline successful, but would need to be scaled up.

The ads for my fiction books have not been successful.* The question is, could I make changes that would make them successful, or should I abandon ads for them?*

Here's where I stand:










I analyze the results for _Yesterday's Thief_ (YT) like this: I'm getting one click per 1,000 impressions, which is acceptable, but I'm only getting one sale per 185 clicks. That indicates either that my cover & blurb aren't converting well enough or that the clickers aren't well-enough qualified.

Here are the clicks for my _Yesterday's Thief _(YT) ad:










Thanks for the help!


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

TWLuedke said:


> One suggestion: author names


As you can see from my results above, that suggestion was right on. Check out how almost all of the top performing keywords are author names.

So, here's a question: Let's say an Amazon customer doesn't do any searching. He/she browses books, and looks at a book by, say, Brandon Sanderson. I assume that my ad might appear on that page, even though no searching was involved. Is that right?


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> My plan is to run my campaign of 8 ads, 8 books for one more day (7 days in total), then PAUSE the campaign and wait 3 days during which time (I believe) the SALES data will catch up with the SPEND data. During those 3 days, I'll make no more adjustments to any of the ads (I have been making keyword adjustments every day so far).
> 
> After those 3 days, I'll post a screenshot here, analyze the data and make what I hope will be beneficial adjustments. Then, I'll start the campaign again.
> 
> ...


That's an excellent idea. The delay of sales is a significant problem when making decisions.


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## quiet chick writes (Oct 19, 2012)

Perhaps everyone else has already realized this, but I only just realized that these charts are showing us our total sales, not royalty profit after Amazon takes their cut. So I was looking at the ACoS on mine, thinking that 100% was the breakeven point. But no, it would be 70%, wouldn't it? Because of what Amazon takes? 

One of mine was creeping up to 70%, so I paused it to see if there are any lingering sales. If there aren't any, I might pull the plug on that one. 

My second ad is running about 55%, which is still in profit but not a huge profit. 

What do all of you consider to be a good ACoS percentage? Does it make a difference how the book is priced? My book is $4.99, by the way.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> The screenshot Al posted seemed to show results ordered hierarchically from high clicks to low clicks to no clicks. Is there a way to do that?
> Philip


In case this hasn't been answered: Click on the heading to sort the list (once for ascending, a second time for descending).


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## AliceS (Dec 28, 2014)

TromboneAl said:


> As you can see from my results above, that suggestion was right on. Check out how almost all of the top performing keywords are author names.
> 
> So, here's a question: Let's say an Amazon customer doesn't do any searching. He/she browses books, and looks at a book by, say, Brandon Sanderson. I assume that my ad might appear on that page, even though no searching was involved. Is that right?


I'm beginning to think that author names aren't specific enough, especially if they write in other genres. I put in an author that had a post-apocalyptic book, but when I looked, most of his work was space opera. That audience doesn't always cross over. So I added the specific book title with the author name as keyword. We'll see if that helps.

Also, I discovered some issues with book titles that aren't unique. I checked Lois McMaster Bujold's Sharing Knife series. The first and third books had 14pgs of ads. Book 2 only had 2 pages of ads. I thought that was odd. Book 3 is Passage - also the name of Justin Cronin's post-apocalyptic series and the first book of that series. However, Sharing Knife isn't post-apocalyptic, it's fantasy. So do some of those folks on her book actually belong on his? I think so. And I imagine that book 1 - Beguilement - probably has the same issue with other books of that name.

Since we can gang up words, I think "Passage Justin Cronin" vs "Passage Lois McMaster Bujold" is the way to go.

I'm also wondering about best sellers. Yes, it gets you great exposure, but how high do you have to bid? And half the books on those pages don't really fit, so are people even paying attention to it? When I go to a "quiet" fantasy like The Sharing Knife series and see ads for the big battle epics or mercenary grimdark stuff, I'm going to ignore the whole bunch because it is a major misconnect with the readers of THAT series. So if you're on page 2, 3, 4...will anyone go that far if page 1 and 2 don't appeal?


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Laura Rae Amos said:


> Perhaps everyone else has already realized this, but I only just realized that these charts are showing us our total sales, not royalty profit after Amazon takes their cut. So I was looking at the ACoS on mine, thinking that 100% was the breakeven point. But no, it would be 70%, wouldn't it? Because of what Amazon takes?
> 
> One of mine was creeping up to 70%, so I paused it to see if there are any lingering sales. If there aren't any, I might pull the plug on that one.
> 
> ...


>But no, it would be 70%, wouldn't it? Because of what Amazon takes? 
Yes, exactly correct. But remember that KU reads are not included in this figure.

If I had anything under 80% or so, I'd keep the ad.

Raise the book price, and you'd get more per sale, but presumably you'd get fewer sales. I also worry that if the price is too high, I might generate more negative reviews.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

I can't find the post, but someone talked about seeing a significant increase in sales even though his ads weren't generating many sales themselves.

In general, I've decided that it's difficult to make inferences about causation when looking at correlations like this. First, my sales are so low that big changes can happen by chance. But more importantly, there are always other variables that aren't controlled. For example, his sales may have increased because it's Christmas time. [this was the ex-scientist in me talking.]

Also, my guess is that the ads don't help much due to general exposure. That is, it's not too likely that someone will see my ad and end up purchasing my book later but not as a result of clicking on the ad. It could happen, but I doubt it's significant.

IOW, I'm unlikely to say "My ad isn't profitable, but sales have increased, so I'll continue running it."


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

Great thread! I'm slowly getting through it. Sorry if this has been answered before, but do you get credit for a KU sale with an AMS ad click? I feel like Leonard's mysteries have jumped in KU since I started doing a little AMS ad, but how would a "sale" be quantified?


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

GrandFenwick said:


> Great thread! I'm slowly getting through it. Sorry if this has been answered before, but do you get credit for a KU sale with an AMS ad click? I feel like Leonard's mysteries have jumped in KU since I started doing a little AMS ad, but how would a "sale" be quantified?


No, the AMS data doesn't take KU borrows or page reads into account. Audiobook sales are also ignored.


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## Lu Kudzoza (Nov 1, 2015)

TromboneAl said:


> I need some help with my decision making. The ads for my nonfiction book (the sight-reading book (SR)) are borderline successful, but would need to be scaled up.
> 
> The ads for my fiction books have not been successful.* The question is, could I make changes that would make them successful, or should I abandon ads for them?*
> 
> ...


You're targeting a lot of fantasy authors, but the book cover and blurb look targeted to sci-fi fans. What I'd do is target time travel books and authors (which you might be doing, but I don't know them). Anyway, targeting authors that match your cover and blurb should increase the sales to click ratio.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Marian said:


> How long do you pause a book before restarting the campaign to get more effective placement?


I'll pause mine until I see that the SALES data have caught up with the other metrics. Probably 2 or 3 days.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Laura Rae Amos said:


> Perhaps everyone else has already realized this, but I only just realized that these charts are showing us our total sales, not royalty profit after Amazon takes their cut. So I was looking at the ACoS on mine, thinking that 100% was the breakeven point. But no, it would be 70%, wouldn't it? Because of what Amazon takes?
> 
> One of mine was creeping up to 70%, so I paused it to see if there are any lingering sales. If there aren't any, I might pull the plug on that one.
> 
> ...


It's a bit tricky to calculate accurately, especially if there are also paperback sales being made. Taking my combined royalties into account, I estimate that my ads break even with an ACoS score of 70% and a score of 35-40% gives a ROI of 100%.

I aim for that 100% return on investment.

Philip


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Philip Gibson said:


> I'll pause mine until I see that the SALES data have caught up with the other metrics. Probably 2 or 3 days.


I read somewhere that pausing and restarting gets your book more visibility, in other words you can get back on the first page. Could it take longer than 3 days?


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

AliceS said:


> I'm beginning to think that author names aren't specific enough, especially if they write in other genres. I put in an author that had a post-apocalyptic book, but when I looked, most of his work was space opera. That audience doesn't always cross over. So I added the specific book title with the author name as keyword. We'll see if that helps.
> 
> Also, I discovered some issues with book titles that aren't unique. I checked Lois McMaster Bujold's Sharing Knife series. The first and third books had 14pgs of ads. Book 2 only had 2 pages of ads. I thought that was odd. Book 3 is Passage - also the name of Justin Cronin's post-apocalyptic series and the first book of that series. However, Sharing Knife isn't post-apocalyptic, it's fantasy. So do some of those folks on her book actually belong on his? I think so. And I imagine that book 1 - Beguilement - probably has the same issue with other books of that name.
> 
> ...


The book title issue can be a problem. If you put the book title in the search box and see that there are multiple books with that title or very similar titles, you want to put the author's name with the title. I believe this is one of the reasons there are so many non-related sponsored books. There is a lot of trial and error.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> It's a bit tricky to calculate accurately, especially if there are also paperback sales being made.


So paperback sales are not included?


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> So paperback sales are not included?


Paperback sales are included in the SALES column and the ACoS score.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Until I started increasing bids the 24th Dec, I was running at an average ACOS of 11% across 5 books and that included one that was a touch over 58% ACOS with many clicks and only 1 sale.

I changed the cover and blurb on that one and the ACOS dropped to 26% as sales came in. Still high, but worth sticking with it and tweaking bids and maybe planning a free promo to boost its rank.

Mine vary from 7.5% ACOS to 15% on the other 4, but the %s and average bids are climbing since I increased my bids. I've set a cut off at 20%. If I can't make 50% out of the effort, then I'll pause the ad and do something else to promote my books. Bear in mind my books are all $2.99 retail. I could change my mind if I increase the retail prices and still make sales. I panic when any of the books get to 20% of retail, but usually it's a delay in sales reporting and then the % falls back again. Hopefully that will continue.

The results so far could be to do with my genre, but I don't know. Or maybe it's that I augment the ads with free promos now and then when sales and rank drop and I pause the ads, then I come back with a higher rank which maybe looks a better risk when a reader clicks? 

At 11% average, it was down to all low bids between 3/6c yet still giving me good visibility  at the time, and an 11-1 click to buy ratio. I don't think those figures are possible now as I keep saying, mainly because of competition for visibility and the numbers joining. There is no way in the world I'd go to 70% ACOS or above,  unless it was part of a strategy for say a series, or say to promote a new release where I'd set a throwaway budget and I expected a loss with the book having no reviews.

I'd also say don't lose sight of some low bids mixed in. I can pick pick out a few keywords where I've had 1 click and 1 sale at a cost of 1/3c, which vastly improves the ACOS.

With some books I don't think it will ever work if they are part of a small niche genre, or some none fiction. The exception would be say children's books and possibly cook books which would favor paper back sales.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

I'm finding it can take as few as 5 and as many as 24 clicks to sell a book. So any keywords that are getting more than 24 clicks, but not resulting in sales, I now remove and therefore no longer pay for those unproductive clicks.

Philip


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Decon said:


> There is no way in the world I'd go to 70% ACOS or above, unless it was part of a strategy for say a series, or say to promote a new release where I'd set a throwaway budget and I expected a loss with the book having no reviews.


Can you explain your reasoning there? For me, if I were breaking even I would keep the ad going (and try to scale it up). I'd view it as improving my rank/exposure for free.

Or am I like the gambler who says, "I sure hope I break even. I could really use the money"?


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Return on investment (ROI)

Could someone complete the following simple sums for me?  Seems I am too dumb, or senile myself.

Spend $40, get back $20 = _____ % ROI

Spend $40, get back $40 = _____ % ROI.

Spend $40, get back $60 = _____ % ROI

Spend $40, get back $80 = _____ % ROI

Spend $40, get back $120 = _____ % ROI

Thanks so much.

Philip


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> Return on investment (ROI)
> 
> Could someone complete the following simple sums for me? Seems I am too dumb, or senile myself.
> 
> ...


It's not you. Many use the term incorrectly.

Using:









Spend $40, get back $20 = (20-40)/40 = -50% ROI

Spend $40, get back $40 = 0% ROI.

Spend $40, get back $60 = 50% ROI

Spend $40, get back $80 = 100% ROI

Spend $40, get back $120 = 200% ROI


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> It's not you. Many use the term incorrectly.
> 
> Using:
> 
> ...


Thanks Al.

I can make it work for those examples except:

Spend $40, get back $80 = ?

Gain from investment = $40
Cost of investment = $40

$40 - $40 = $0

0 divided by anything = 0

What am I doing wrong?

Philip


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> Thanks Al.
> 
> I can make it work for those examples except:
> 
> ...


The gain from the investment is $80, not $40. IOW, you doubled your investment, so you had a 100% return.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

TromboneAl said:


> Can you explain your reasoning there? For me, if I were breaking even I would keep the ad going (and try to scale it up). I'd view it as improving my rank/exposure for free.
> 
> Or am I like the gambler who says, "I sure hope I break even. I could really use the money"?


Everyone has different personal circumstances. I need to make a gross profit now, not at some future date that might never happen for me, because I'll have to pay for a lot of covers and books edited during 2017 that I hope to publish, so I'll need the cash flow. I also want to travel from Brazil to see my family next year because I haven't seen them for quite a few years. I can't do any of that if I don't make a profit now, so I won't gamble. I've only just started to make decent bank this last 4 months after 5 years of subsidizing publications. I've said ... no more thank you to making losses.

Edit: I forgot to mention. I'm also at a disadvantage with the withholding tax. I live in a country that has no tax treaty, so the 30% tax on .com royalties from sales is not set against anything for tax purposes here in Brazil and is in effect a fixed expense of doing business on .com. So really, if I earn enough above allowances after expenses, I would be double taxed.

If you think about it, I don't have $2 to play with, but $1.40 royalty on every .com sale @ 2.99. Without calculating the exact math that's around 47% and not 70% of retail because of the tax.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> The gain from the investment is $80, not $40. IOW, you doubled your investment, so you had a 100% return.


Got it. Thanks.

I'm currently trying to work out (with current and projected sales) what I need to spend on AMS to make a livable income (or at least a very healthy supplement to my non-existent pension).

At the moment, it's looking like a spend of around $500 a month would do it.

Philip


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## AlecHutson (Sep 26, 2016)

TromboneAl said:


> I can't find the post, but someone talked about seeing a significant increase in sales even though his ads weren't generating many sales themselves.
> 
> In general, I've decided that it's difficult to make inferences about causation when looking at correlations like this. First, my sales are so low that big changes can happen by chance. But more importantly, there are always other variables that aren't controlled. For example, his sales may have increased because it's Christmas time. [this was the ex-scientist in me talking.]
> 
> ...


Hi Al! I think you might be referring to me. I'm very much - what's the Kboard word - 'prawny', having first published at the beginning of this month, so I don't have a long history of sales to compare with anything. But I did notice a significant (for me) spike in sales and reads once my ad went live, far more than what Amazon reported. As someone else mentioned, perhaps these are organic sales if my ad did make my book more visible in the rankings or elsewhere. In any case, since this is the only promotion I'm doing I'm going to keep running with it. Just for reference, I've run two ads, the first from 12/17-12/20 and the second since the 21st. I cancelled the first because I didn't realize there was a lag on reporting sales, and I thought my ad was not performing - actually, it was operating at 52% ACoS, as I found out later. The second that I've had going since then is at 75%. Anyway, in the eleven days prior to my ad I averaged 2.8 sales a day; in the eleven days since I've sold 9.8 a day. Page reads went from 2,005 a day to 4,476.

So it very well may be another factor that I in my newness do not fully understand. But I'm not about to cancel my currently running ad to find out


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Here's a little thing I learned today: You can't pause a campaign when the daily budget has been spent.

ETA:  this is not true. You can pause it but not from the campaign summary screen.


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## Paul Kohler (Aug 14, 2013)

Great thread. I've just started back up with AMS ads, and so far, I'm pretty happy. I'm planning on expanding it to more of my books!


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> I'm finding it can take as few as 5 and as many as 24 clicks to sell a book. So any keywords that are getting more than 24 clicks, but not resulting in sales, I now remove and therefore no longer pay for those unproductive clicks.
> 
> Philip


Interesting. I've been holding out for 40 clicks (don't know where I read that one) which can take forever to get. Does anyone else have a maximum number of clicks before turning off a keyword?


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

GrandFenwick said:


> Interesting. I've been holding out for 40 clicks (don't know where I read that one) which can take forever to get. Does anyone else have a maximum number of clicks before turning off a keyword?


I average a sale every 15 clicks, but I wouldn't ditch a keyword until about 30 clicks. The higher the bid, the quicker I get rid of it though. If the CTR is high, and the bid fairly low, I'm more inclined to trial things a bit longer.


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## AlecHutson (Sep 26, 2016)

What would be wonderful would be if Amazon included in the ad data how many people 'borrowed' your book in KU after clicking on the ad. That's certainly data they have. 

As a side note, is there any way to tell how many people have borrowed your book in KU?


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

I think I've got enough data from my ads now to make some judgement calls and take action.  Here are some 'rules' I now apply to myself.  They may or may not apply to others.

If a keyword has 0 impressions after 3 days, REMOVE IT.

If a keyword has impressions numbers of more than 2,000 X the number of clicks, REMOVE IT (unless the CPC is really low like 1 or 2 cents)

If a keyword has 24+ clicks but 0 sales, REMOVE IT.

If a keyword has more than 1,000 impressions but no clicks, REMOVE IT.

Don't use Amazon's generic, automatically created keywords, or any generic keywords like (in my case) History or Children's books.  Those are expensive.  Only use keywords generated from digging into the Also Boughts of my book (and the Also Boughts of those Also Boughts).


Philip


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

Here's my takeaway so far from personal experience:

AMS ad reporting is not really accurate to measure the full effect of the ad.

Most of my reporting is showing that I'm headed for the red (getting into 70% ACoS or higher). But my daily income from sales and pagereads is far higher than my daily spend on ads. Something is missing in the reporting.

Here's my leap of logic: an ad that appears too costly (via AMS reports) is actually earning really good money overall when I factor the increased pagereads and organic sales from rankings and alsoboughts exposure.

AMS sponsored product ads work best for books enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, because the pagereads alone can pay for the ad, whether or not you sell more books. LOL.

How does one track the pageread increases? You need this tool to see your book sales and pagereads in a manner that makes sense to the eye: https://www.getbookreport.com/ Without Book Report, it would be very difficult to visualize the huge leap of income my ads are creating.

So, all arguments on bidding aside (I'm currently of the opinion that the sweet spot for my genre/book/author keywords is around .12 - .15), you have to take AMS reports with a grain of salt, and look at the big picture of overall increased sales-pagereads income. AND, you can only do that if you run one ad per book. Even then, running more than one ad per a series of books will skew things, because some of the ad traffic will be buying other series books. So, I suggest one ad per series for tracking purposes.

Once you get a feel for this stuff, have a more intuitive sense of bidding and keyword choices based on previous experience, then you can run more than one ad per book, or more than one ad per series.

In summary, AMS says my ads are headed into the red. Book Report says my income is far higher than what I'm spending on ads (to the tune of 200-300% ROI).

But what if all this is simply the Christmas effect? I'll have to ride it out into the coming months to see how it rolls.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

LilyBLily said:


> I hope I'm understanding this correctly: As the ACoS percentage rises, the profitability of the ad declines.
> 
> For instance: A $3.99 book sells one copy from an ad spend of $0.49. The true return is $2.79 (70% royalty) - $0.49 = $2.30. The ACoS percentage listed is 12.28%. But it's really higher: 17.56%, because $3.99 is the list price, not the royalty amount.
> 
> Which is why an ACoS of 70% is equal to no profit (roughly). We only get a 70% royalty. So on a $3.99 book, if the ad spend is $2.79, it's a wash.


Yes, you have it. Advertising Cost of Sales is a dumb, dumb term, because it is not a cost, it is a percentage. True, it's hard to come up with a good term. It would be best if they displayed ROI instead of ACoS.



> The only problem is that we have no way of knowing if these ads are generating page reads.


True. You could estimate it by calculating how many page reads you have per sale, on average. For example, one of my books has 332 page reads for every sale. If the revenue from a sale is $.005 and the book costs $3.99, then I'd estimate that the true revenue would be ($3.99 * .70) + (332 * .005) = $4.45.

4.45/3.99 = 1.12, so your TRUE ACoS is the reported ACoS divided by 1.12. IOW, that adjusts for the royalty and the added KU Reads.

As an example, if Amazon says your ACoS is 100%, you can estimate that it is really 89.3%.

WARNING: I just did those calculations quickly--there may be errors.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> I think I've got enough data from my ads now to make some judgement calls and take action. Here are some 'rules' I now apply to myself. They may or may not apply to others.
> 
> 1. If a keyword has 0 impressions after 3 days, REMOVE IT.
> 
> ...


Remember that you don't pay for impressions, you only pay for clicks. There's no downside to keeping keywords that haven't generated any impressions.

Based on that, does rule 1 make sense? As an example, let's say you had a keyword of "Twitter feed in 1945 Berlin." You might not get any impressions, but if someone did search for that, he'd be shoe-in to buy your book. It's costing you nothing to keep that keyword, so why not keep it around?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

TromboneAl said:


> Here's where I stand:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


It isn't your cover for Yesterdays Thief that's the problem from my POV. I think it is quality. Readers think the same, because they are clicking on the cover.

You have over 200 great reviews.

It's selling organically to people who are interested in the subject matter because you have a good rank.

I'm crap a blurbs, and for a similar paranormal/supernatural/sci fi detective story, I play down or don't even mention the paranormal aspect, only alude to it. In that way, I get a bite of both those who like psychic/supernatural sort of a story and police procedural, which in your case would be PIs I don't dive into the supernatural aspect in the story at the beginning, so I sort of lead the police procedural readers on to discover that aspect of the supernatural. I imagine that readers of noir, or hard boiled PI stories would be put off by the supernatural part of the blurb, yet they might enjoy the story in the way that happens to my story. although some have said that they/ didn't like the weird part.

Assuming your blurb is okay because people are buying it, I can only assume that it is your keywords and you are wasting money on high bids

I know I'll be now using Yesterday's Thief as a keyword, because it is spot on for the type of readers I am looking for with Missing: The Body of Evidence which is free today, so it is paused.

Here are the figures for that Missing: The Body of Evidence which has 564 keywords

Impress clicks cpc total sales acos

279,233	115	$0.02	$2.78	$35.11	7.92% approx ratio of clicks to buy 11-1

I take no notice of impressions to clicks as impressions cost nothing and of course I am bidding low so I expect high impressions to clicks.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> Remember that you don't pay for impressions, you only pay for clicks. There's no downside to keeping keywords that haven't generated any impressions.
> 
> Based on that, does rule 1 make sense? As an example, let's say you had a keyword of "Twitter feed in 1945 Berlin." You might not get any impressions, but if someone did search for that, he'd be shoe-in to buy your book. It's costing you nothing to keep that keyword, so why not keep it around?


One reason I remove keywords that aren't doing anything is to make the dashboard more clean and manageable. I hope to get to the point where I only see and deal with the handful of keywords that are generating sales and achieve a really good ACoS.

Although keywords with no clicks or no impressions don't cost me anything, if they remain active (switched on/running) in my/Amazon's system, that means Amazon's algorithms have to deal with/work with them on an hourly (?) basis. That must cost Amazon energy and money, so I suspect that the algorithms may punish my campaigns (in terms of placements, cost per click, etc.) for wasting their energy and money by having them deal with those non-performing keywords.

Something like that.

Philip


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

*How to Convert ACoS to ROI*

ROI is a much more useful and intuitive metric than ACoS. So ...

(Someone check my thinking/math, please)

Ignoring the fact that we only get 70% of sales:

ROI = (100 - ACoS) / ACoS

So, for example, if I spend $10 and my total sales are $20:

ACoS = 10/20 = 50%
ROI = (100 - 50) / 50 = 1 = 100%

And a real example from one of my ads:

ACoS = 119.35%

ROI = (100 - 119.35) / 119.35 = -.16 = -16%

Assuming a royalty rate of 70% on all sales:

True ROI = 100 - (ACos/.7) / (ACos/.7)

or

True ROI = 100 - (ACos*1.43) / (ACos*1.43)


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> *How to Convert ACoS to ROI*
> 
> ROI is a much more useful and intuitive metric than ACoS. So ...
> 
> ...


That seems to work. Well done.

Don't forget to include 'x 100' in the equation to make it a percentage.

The difficulty for me is that my ads are selling a good number of paperbacks and my royalty on those is very different to the ebooks. I don't even know offhand what percentage of list price my paperback royalties are, but they will be way lower than for the ebooks.

Philip


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## thewitt (Dec 5, 2014)

As long as your ACoS percentage is below your royalty rate you are making money on your ads. If your ACoS is above your royalty rate, you are losing money...

On one of my ads, my ACoS is 11.49%. I've spent $27.50 and had $234.94 in sales. This book started at $0.99 with 30% royalties and was eventually bumped up to $6.99 with 70% royalties, so the numbers are a little skewed.  If we simply assume all sales were at $6.99, then my gross profit is $164.46 and my ad costs are $27.50 so my ROI is 598%.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Pedantic language point re. ROI

If I have an ad that costs me $40 and I get an income of $80, that's a 100% ROI and I can say: "I doubled my money!"

So can you complete the following:

If I have an ad that costs me $40 and I get an income of $120, that's a 200% ROI and I can say: "I ___________________!"


Philip


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> I need some help with my decision making. The ads for my nonfiction book (the sight-reading book (SR)) are borderline successful, but would need to be scaled up.
> 
> The ads for my fiction books have not been successful.* The question is, could I make changes that would make them successful, or should I abandon ads for them?*


No do not abandon ads for your fiction.

1) Cut down the bidding on the keywords that aren't effective. Go with lower bids or pause them altogether. 
2) Tweak bidding if you must on the keywords that are effective. You may not need to tweak some (if its not broken, don't fix it).
3) Do more keyword research by chasing alsoboughts and free lists and bestseller lists in your target genres. 
4) Consider stretching out your targeting into neighboring subcategories and genres, all sorts of dark fantasy, urban fantasy, scifi, action adventure, and other Young adult genres. Your book could appeal to a lot of those other genre targets as well. Find the authors of those genres on the bestseller lists and chase down their alsoboughts.

I think you're probably bidding too high at the moment, which is why the ads are too costly for your sales results, but at least you're seeing which keywords get eyeballs and clicks. You're spending money to see what sticks. Now scale down the bids _as needed_, and scale up your ads with new keywords for testing.

Questions: What are the pagereads doing? What are the followup books of the series doing? Have you considered putting out a $6-$8 boxset? (my boxset does better than all my other ads)

The AMS sales reporting doesn't show the huge income boost of pagereads that can offset a costly ad and make the whole venture profitable. The AMS reports don't reflect readers who come back a few days later and grab more books from your series. But you should be able to see the "before and after" effect, the splash-over of increased sales and pagereads of other books. Your ads are possibly more effective than what AMS reporting shows, when you take a look at the bigger picture.

I'm sure you already know most of this. Hopefully something I've said is helpful, or maybe just a confirmation of what you already know.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TWLuedke said:


> No do not abandon ads for your fiction.
> 
> 1) Cut down the bidding on the keywords that aren't effective. Go with lower bids or pause them altogether.
> 2) Tweak bidding if you must on the keywords that are effective. You may not need to tweak some (if its not broken, don't fix it).
> ...


Don't forget to consider paperback sales. I've had a really surprising number of paperback sales - 17 in the past 9 days. That crossover to paperback sales never happened with any of the other paid promotions I did (and I have done all of them except Bookbub).

And these AMS sales, both, ebooks and paperbacks, are for books at full price, not discounted as required on the other advertising platforms.

I'm loving AMS at the moment.

Philip


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Yeah. page reads are often forgot, because is so hard to determine where they come from.

I seem to be averaging 60,000 per month for the last three months from virtually nothing, but they are not all down to sponsored ads as I have had some excellent tails on other promos and I wasn't full on into sponsored ads until a month ago. But again, I still use promos to top up my rank and page reads.

One thing I dare not do is to stop other promos to find out.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Are AMS sponsored products ads shown on the U.K. book pages?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Philip Gibson said:


> Are AMS sponsored products ads shown on the U.K. book pages?


The UK is a funny site in this regards. Unless you live in the UKs 4 territories and you join .co.uk, you can't view eBooks on the site as a .com signed in customer, only the paper books. If however customers in the UK or anywhere else in the world are members of .com, then they can view the eBooks and the sponsored ads. I haven't seen any sponsored ads on print books in the UK. You can only view the eBooks in the UK from the outside of the UK if you use a browser that doesn't auto recognize that you are a customer of .com.

The only thing I learned lately is that books that are permafree on .com, they still show up on the free charts but with a price tag outside of US .com because Amazon don't make them free in all territories.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Thanks for the advice. I'm starting new ads for YT. More targeted, lower bids.

I'm also trying to ads that are the same except the ad copy.

I assume that although sales may be delayed, clicks are recorded instantly.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> I assume that although sales may be delayed, clicks are recorded instantly.


I see impressions and clicks being reported, not instantly but within a few hours. Spend, sales and ACoS numbers much, much later.

Philip


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## Abderian (Apr 5, 2012)

Decon said:


> The UK is a funny site in this regards. Unless you live in the UKs 4 territories and you join .co.uk, you can't view eBooks on the site as a .com signed in customer, only the paper books. If however customers in the UK or anywhere else in the world are members of .com, then they can view the eBooks and the sponsored ads. I haven't seen any sponsored ads on print books in the UK. You can only view the eBooks in the UK from the outside of the UK if you use a browser that doesn't auto recognize that you are a customer of .com.
> 
> The only thing I learned lately is that books that are permafree on .com, they still show up on the free charts but with a price tag outside of US .com because Amazon don't make them free in all territories.


Amazon won't make a book free in all territories unless you give them a link that shows the book is free on other sites in the territories. You have to give them iBooks links for example for each country in question.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Abderian said:


> Amazon won't make a book free in all territories unless you give them a link that shows the book is free on other sites in the territories. You have to give them iBooks links for example for each country in question.


Yes, this is a bit off topic, but I kept seeing a sponsored ad as a free book. Not only that but it was 1st on the sponsored pages on many books, so they must have been bidding 51c per click. I could understand the logic to spend a budget for marketing as it was part of a series, but it must be costing a fortune... or maybe not as you will see at the end of this post.

I live in Brazil and I'm a .com customer and wanted to download it free, but it kept showing as a price of $3.99. I went to the free charts and it showed a retail price. Not only that but out of the first few pages of the free ranks, 16 out of 20 were priced at full retail. The other odd thing was that when I viewed it the first time it showed a paid rank, but the second time it showed the free rank... very confusing.

I wrote to Amazon this week and said it was false advertising. They said they knew it wasn't perfect placement for charts viewed from outside the US as they were permafree eBooks and only free if you live in the US.

I really don't know how Amazon are getting away with it legally as they show it as free outside the US in one place(sponsored ads) and price it in another. It took three emails to customer services for them to respond.

My question would be... how many outside the US who are .com customers who see these books as free, click on them, then buy them anyway, which would make the sponsored ad more worthwhile.


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## Abderian (Apr 5, 2012)

Decon said:


> Yes, this is a bit off topic, but I kept seeing a sponsored ad as a free book. Not only that but it was 1st on the sponsored pages on many books, so they must have been bidding 51c per click. I could understand the logic to spend a budget for marketing as it was part of a series, but it must be costing a fortune... or maybe not as you will see at the end of this post.
> 
> I live in Brazil and I'm a .com customer and wanted to download it free, but it kept showing as a price of $3.99. I went to the free charts and it showed a retail price. Not only that but out of the first few pages of the free ranks, 16 out of 20 were priced at full retail. The other odd thing was that when I viewed it the first time it showed a paid rank, but the second time it showed the free rank... very confusing.
> 
> ...


If it's a first in series or a book in KU it can make a Sponsored Ad worthwhile. I know people who are making bank on page reads through advertising that on the face of it is running at a loss. A marketing expert on a podcast I listened to said he would accept up to 100% ACoS if a book was a first in series.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> I think I've got enough data from my ads now to make some judgement calls and take action. Here are some 'rules' I now apply to myself. They may or may not apply to others.
> 
> If a keyword has 0 impressions after 3 days, REMOVE IT.
> 
> ...


How do you remove KWs? I can only pause them, not delete them.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Here's my connundrum about removing KWS that has high impressions but no clicks, or high click rates but no sales (according to AMS reports):

1. If there is no click, it's not costing me anything, so why not leave it out there for sake of visibility? Surely it doesn't hurt.

2. High click but no sale seems like click bates, but as other have pointed out, and my own experience as well, my actual sales exceeds what the AMS report shows, and I have NOT run any other promos for my books that would lead to the sustained, continuous sales rate. So people are either buying but not from the clicks, or I don't know what. I don't want to lose the sales because people may not be buying from direct clickss.

3. And there's the issue of KENP reads and Downloads too. They don't show up on the AMS report, but the ads are likely to be helping.


So I just can't pause any KWs even if the AMS report says no sale.

As for those with no impressions at all -- those to me are the most frustrating. My book is clearly in the same genre with one I used for KW, but Zon won't show it there. Meanwhile, they repeatedly show unrelated books instead. What gives?

And there's as set of books by 2 authors that seems to me to show up everywhere ALL THE TIME. I don't know what bribe these 2 authors gave to Amazon but I swear they get VIP treatment. Theirs are always first to show up on any new book's page that starts to get Sponsored Ads. Their books show up regardless of genre relevance. They bid low at about 5c max. They never get rotated out and they only get bumped down the list when others start to bid high. I don't understand why their books always get priority and premium first class treatment.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Just answered a question on another thread, but to keep it all under one roof, I'll post it here, but with additional info.

It's probably already answered, but with AMS you use the exact author name as it appears on the product page and not necessarily the book cover which could leave out the periods after initials. You can use capitals as their software converts it to lower case. If the initials show periods after each initial, then you must do the same or risk the author name producing no impressions. So if it's J.K. Rowling type that then the bid and when you save it will be j.k. rowling on your list of keywords. Or you could just type the keyword in lower case. Typing two author names the same but one without periods will likely end up with one of them producing no impressions. At least that's my experience.

For book titles, series titles, sub titles, what you do it to ignore everything in the title  after : So if it's The Sword and Sorcerer: Book 1 The magic series. You would only type The Sword and the Sorcerer, or, the sword and the sorcerer. Obviously, you don't type the : after the title.

Watch out for some series titles that have the book order inclusive with the title, say Hunch 1: The arrival, Hunch 2: The Departure, Hunch 3: The Return. So the keywords would be "hunch 1" and so on.

There is an exception to this that I found. Stephen King has a title and on the cover it has 11.22.63 but on the product page it has 11/22/63. AMS don't accept the / so I used the periods it shows on the cover and it worked to produce impressions.

If you have a different experience, then post it here as a reply.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

*I was of the impression that generic keywords that Amazon supply from search data for your book were a waste of time and I have said so on here as have others. I just saw someone saying the same on a different thread. I have now changed my mind now that I have some data.*

Saying that, although generic, they are still targeted to some extent, but not as exact a fit as a say a title.

On one book, I have "wolverine" as a generic keyword with a very low bid. It now has 2,766 impressions, 1 click @ $0.01c and a sale at $2.99. The ACOS doesn't even register.

I also have "werewolves" again with a low bid. That one has 7,902 impressions, 5 clicks @ $0.02 total $0.09 and 1 sale at $2.99. The ACOS is 3.01%

I have other results that are similar for such as Murder, crime, kidnapping, detectives, but always with very low bids. Some don't have any sales, but the cost of any clicks, if any, are insignificant with the minimum low bid. Sales they have produced also helped bring down the average % ACOS on higher bids with targeted keywords.


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

Decon said:


> Because I've kept up on the bid maintenance more than the other 4 books, so the book is on more early pages. Bid and keyword maintenance is hard work when you have a few books and tons of keywords between them, and it detracts from other efforts... like writing.
> 
> I have updated some of the others over the weekend, but really, it is a bind to keep up, especially as more and more are joining and you slip down the pages if you don't keep an eyes on it and your ad becomes less effective.
> 
> ...


Thanks for the reply. I agree, it is a lot of work. Odd thing is, I notice my sales increase when I advertise the last book in my series. It's hard to know for sure, but whenever I stop running ads to the last book sales tank. I am running ads to book 1 and 2 and not seeing as many sales. So....I am beginning to think book 3 ads increase sales of book 2 and 3. I cannot say for sure though as I have only run the test two times. I will have to start advertising book 3 again to know for sure. Of course, there are all sorts of little variables that are impossible to track.


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

AlecHutson said:


> Just wanted to pop in and thank the regulars here for this incredibly helpful thread. I just published my first book at the beginning of December and I had no idea about AMS services, and it was this thread that clued me in and revitalized my sales after the initial surge of family / friend buying died out.
> 
> I actually think AMS underreports how effective the ads are - according to my ad, since December 18th when I put it up I've spent 60 USD on clicks and made 95 USD in sales. But the sales of my books have really jumped . . . before I started using AMS my sales had slowed to 2-3 a day. I've sold 52 copies at full price in just the last four days. My KU reads have likewise spiked - I was averaging around 2k a day before the 18th, but the last four days have been around 5.5k a day. An AMS ad is the only promotion I've been running, so at this point I'd have to attribute it to that.
> 
> ...


Congrats! I saw your fantasy book closer to it's release date and it wasn't doing near as well. Amazon ads do appear to be working for you. That is so great! I am curious, how high are you bidding and what is your average Cost per click? I tend to just target indie authors and books because I feel like they are more likely to enjoy my books.


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

Is anyone having much success here advertising a permafree book? I am thinking that advertising a permafree (first in series) is less effective than advertising the last in the series. It seems odd, but that's my experience so far. Or perhaps there is just a delay in readers actually reading the free book and moving on to the next in the series? It's really hard to track the results of advertising a permafree. Just curious if anyone here is taking this route? Thanks.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

dragontucker said:


> Is anyone having much success here advertising a permafree book? I am thinking that advertising a permafree (first in series) is less effective than advertising the last in the series. It seems odd, but that's my experience so far. Or perhaps there is just a delay in readers actually reading the free book and moving on to the next in the series? It's really hard to track the results of advertising a permafree. Just curious if anyone here is taking this route? Thanks.


In the webinar, Derek said that advertising permafrees is a good idea, especially if you also have a print book.

YT had a free day within an ad period, and quickly reached the daily budget--so yes, permafrees get a lot of clicks.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

AlexaKang said:
 

> Here's my connundrum about removing KWS that has high impressions but no clicks, or high click rates but no sales (according to AMS reports):
> 
> 1. If there is no click, it's not costing me anything, so why not leave it out there for sake of visibility? Surely it doesn't hurt.
> 
> ...


I'm with you on this (1&2). However, some say that if your ratio of impressions to clicks is above 2K or so, that Amazon will penalize you and not display your ad as often.

>my actual sales exceeds what the AMS report shows, and I have NOT run any other promos
Are you getting enough sales that you're confident in that conclusion? For me, I only get 0-3 sales per day, so the results may be due to chance.

If what you are seeing is real, it means free advertising.

Do you think people see the ads, then later search for the book on their own. Or maybe they come across it while browsing, and the familiarity makes them more likely to buy.

There was an old saw in advertising: the customer must be exposed to your ad nine times before he/she reacts to it. OSLT.


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## Andrew Christie (Jul 13, 2014)

TromboneAl said:


> In the webinar, Derek said that advertising permafrees is a good idea, especially if you also have a print book.
> 
> YT had a free day within an ad period, and quickly reached the daily budget--so yes, permafrees get a lot of clicks.


I have just switched my campaign from my paid 2nd in series to the permafree first and this is my experience as well. Lots of impressions and lots of clicks within 24hrs. I'm now hitting the daily budget which hasn't happened before.
I'm assuming that downloads of the permafree won't show up as the dashboard only shows the value of sales. It will be interesting to see if there is any flow on to the second book.
I'd also like to thank those of you who have been posting here regularly - it has been a very helpful - an interesting learning curve for everyone I suspect


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Andrew Christie said:


> I'm assuming that downloads of the permafree won't show up as the dashboard only shows the value of sales. It will be interesting to see if there is any flow on to the second book.


Right. Maybe you'll notice an uptick in the downloads of the permafree and can post the results here.


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## AlecHutson (Sep 26, 2016)

dragontucker said:


> Congrats! I saw your fantasy book closer to it's release date and it wasn't doing near as well. Amazon ads do appear to be working for you. That is so great! I am curious, how high are you bidding and what is your average Cost per click? I tend to just target indie authors and books because I feel like they are more likely to enjoy my books.


Hey Dragon! My aCPC for my current ad is .26. I've spent 84.00 with a return of 142.00, so a ACoS at 59%. I know my bid is high, but my book is 4.99, so as someone helpfully pointed out earlier I have more room to work with than writers who charge 2.99. And, again, I do think the benefits of the ad are not being captured in that little sales snapshot. I've almost tripled my KU page reads (and it only takes around 2k reads to cover the daily cost of the ad) and my sales are still hovering around 15-20 a day. Yesterday was my best day ever, with 23 sales and 8,635 page reads. My first month of self-publishing and I'm a 4-figure author! AMS had a lot to do with that, I think.

Oh, and I would definitely put in popular fantasy authors and their books. With George RR Martin I've spent 2.11 and made 20.00 in sales. Name of the Wind I've spent 10.52 and made 25.93. Brandon Sanderson I've spent 13.00 and made 19.00. Game of Thrones has given me the most clicks, but only at a 66% ACoS. The fantasy term that really didn't work for me was dragon - it's the only keyword that went over 100% - I spent 10.30, and made 9.98. I stopped it, but I might just start up again because I do believe just getting my book out there - a new book from a debut - is worth it, even if the ad doesn't make me a big profit.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

I said it would happen, but its now gathering a pace. Just been to a book that is not so high in the charts, with a none bestselling author and it has a whopping *82 pages* of sponsored ads. That's 7 books per page or 574 books in total.

Not saying there are not some books with 3 pages left, but it's getting heavy and costly to get visibility. Many books have 30+ pages. or 210 in total vying for visibility. The high bids I put in on Christmas eve, have now dropped me down the pages, so I've reduced them again.

I also think that as people add permafree free first books in series, it will have a big effect on other books clicks drying up.

I walking away from it and leaving everything as is for now to concentrate on writing and to see where it is going. I'll look at it again in maybe a month. Good luck everyone. Last thing I'm going to do is to stuff money in Amazon's pockets for little return by chasing bids.


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

BVLawson said:


> Regarding advertising your permafree first-in-series, unfortunately mine features a bloody handprint on the cover, which is against the AMS cover rules. It's too bad Amazon won't let you use an alternate cover for the ad instead of defaulting to the one on the product page.


Because of both Facebook and Amazon rules, I have considered and actually changed book covers, simply because I wanted to run ads and not have issues.

If you can earn $100's in sales from running ads, but you have to change the book cover in order to do it, I vote for changing the cover. I'm not that emotionally attached to cover art or fonts. I've tweaked them numerous times.

A funny side note: I had product ads that were rejected because of book covers being too sexy. Then later, those same covers were accepted for sponsored product ads. _Go figure_. I never changed the cover art. Sometimes I think it comes down to whoever is running the dashboard at the moment my ads go through the review process. I am on standby with another cover, just in case. LOL.

These ads are too lucrative. I'll swap covers in a heartbeat. Who knows, might increase sales anyway.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

TromboneAl said:


> I'm with you on this (1&2). However, some say that if your ratio of impressions to clicks is above 2K or so, that Amazon will penalize you and not display your ad as often.


If the only penalty is less display, I still don't see how it could hurt. It's still visibility in a book of the same genre, and as you said, more exposure means more likely a browsing reader might click on it later, even if somewhere else.

What mystifies me actually is that Amazon actually stopped showing my ad on several books where I did REALLY well. Clearly the readers crossed over. One example: 28K+ impressions, 26 clicks, $11.96 in sales. All going good but Amazon just stopped showing my ad there for weeks. I can't get back on that page not matter what I tried. I feel like the penalty came from actually selling effectively. Can't explain why. Then just as inexplicably, it let me get back on again.

As always, the Zon moves in mysterious ways.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Decon said:


> I walking away from it and leaving everything as is for now to concentrate on writing and to see where it is going. I'll look at it again in maybe a month. Good luck everyone. Last thing I'm going to do is to stuff money in Amazon's pockets for little return by chasing bids.


Yes, this is a big time sink and procrastination magnet.

I'm vowing not to play with my ads or post here unless I've written at least 1,000 words for the day.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Decon said:


> I said it would happen, but its now gathering a pace. Just been to a book that is not so high in the charts, with a none bestselling author and it has a whopping *82 pages* of sponsored ads. That's 7 books per page or 574 books in total.
> 
> Not saying there are not some books with 3 pages left, but it's getting heavy and costly to get visibility. Many books have 30+ pages. or 210 in total vying for visibility. The high bids I put in on Christmas eve, have now dropped me down the pages, so I've reduced them again.


On the other hand, there is a History book that is currently a bestseller and looks to be selling around 800 ebooks a day. That book has only 1 page of sponsored books. Just 7 sponsored books in all - AND THEY'RE ALL MY BOOKS!

Odd things is though, those are on the hardcover book page. The Kindle book page has no sponsored ads at all.

Philip


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

I wish AMS would provide a column for the click-thru rate (CTR) regardless of sales. Whether the book is purchased or not, the amount of clicks per impressions is a helpful stat. Instead I have to eyeball it or copy all the data to excel and create a CTR column myself.


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## because (Jul 9, 2014)

GrandFenwick said:


> I wish AMS would provide a column for the click-thru rate (CTR) regardless of sales. Whether the book is purchased or not, the amount of clicks per impressions is a helpful stat. Instead I have to eyeball it or copy all the data to excel and create a CTR column myself.


There's such a CTR column 

You can download your campaign stats by clicking the download icon (along the search bar, to the left of the Results per Page drop down on the right).


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

Thanks!

But what I meant is that I wish the AMS dashboard would have a CTR column--the way Google Ads does it.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

because said:


> There's such a CTR column
> 
> You can download your campaign stats by clicking the download icon (along the search bar, to the left of the Results per Page drop down on the right).


Interesting. I clicked and downloaded that. Can't make head nor tail of it.

Philip


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

If you click the download icon on your dashboard, the data is not useful.

But if you have multiple campaigns, you can go into each campaign and click the download icon and get the added CTR stat:

Status	Keywords	Match	Bid	Impr.  Clicks	CTR	ACPC	  Spend	Sales  ACoS.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

GrandFenwick said:


> If you click the download icon on your dashboard, the data is not useful.
> 
> But if you have multiple campaigns, you can go into each campaign and click the download icon and get the added CTR stat:
> 
> Status	Keywords	Match	Bid	Impr. Clicks	CTR	ACPC Spend	Sales ACoS.


I see. Thanks. But my CTR of 0.16% on one of my keywords means what exactly?

Philip


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

That means people are clicking your ad 16 times out of 100 impressions--I think. Which even without any sales is pretty good at first. It's not until you've gotten 1600 clicks out of 10000 impressions (still the same CTR) and ZERO SALES that it becomes a bad statistic.

Actually, I'm sure people here are better at the math and analysis here than I am. Please jump in and educate us.


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

Andrew Christie said:


> I have just switched my campaign from my paid 2nd in series to the permafree first and this is my experience as well. Lots of impressions and lots of clicks within 24hrs. I'm now hitting the daily budget which hasn't happened before.
> I'm assuming that downloads of the permafree won't show up as the dashboard only shows the value of sales. It will be interesting to see if there is any flow on to the second book.
> I'd also like to thank those of you who have been posting here regularly - it has been a very helpful - an interesting learning curve for everyone I suspect


I am seeing an uptick in my permafree downloads. I am pretty certain it's from my ads. The problem is, I am not seeing much read through yet, It's only been a few days since I started promoting the permafree though. I have no idea how long it takes for people to read the first book and move on to the 2nd book. I just worry I am paying for "freebie seekers."


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

AlecHutson said:


> Hey Dragon! My aCPC for my current ad is .26. I've spent 84.00 with a return of 142.00, so a ACoS at 59%. I know my bid is high, but my book is 4.99, so as someone helpfully pointed out earlier I have more room to work with than writers who charge 2.99. And, again, I do think the benefits of the ad are not being captured in that little sales snapshot. I've almost tripled my KU page reads (and it only takes around 2k reads to cover the daily cost of the ad) and my sales are still hovering around 15-20 a day. Yesterday was my best day ever, with 23 sales and 8,635 page reads. My first month of self-publishing and I'm a 4-figure author! AMS had a lot to do with that, I think.
> 
> Oh, and I would definitely put in popular fantasy authors and their books. With George RR Martin I've spent 2.11 and made 20.00 in sales. Name of the Wind I've spent 10.52 and made 25.93. Brandon Sanderson I've spent 13.00 and made 19.00. Game of Thrones has given me the most clicks, but only at a 66% ACoS. The fantasy term that really didn't work for me was dragon - it's the only keyword that went over 100% - I spent 10.30, and made 9.98. I stopped it, but I might just start up again because I do believe just getting my book out there - a new book from a debut - is worth it, even if the ad doesn't make me a big profit.


Congrats! That must be a great feeling. You are seeing some good success. I would be thrilled to get near 10k page reads in one day! Thanks for taking the time to give me such a detailed reply. I might need more money to play with if I want to see higher levels of success. I might try bidding higher like you seem to be doing. Do you usually bid higher than say 30 cents? At one point I was setting my bids to 50 cents. I was for sure seeing more success, but my bill was adding up and I was worried I wouldn't be able to pay it on time.


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## because (Jul 9, 2014)

Philip Gibson said:


> I see. Thanks. But my CTR of 0.16% on one of my keywords means what exactly?
> 
> Philip


We are learning this too as we go along...

0.16% means you get about 16 clicks for every 10,000 impressions (or 625 impressions for every click) which is better than the baseline rate (a number that was suggested by some book selling gurus) of 0.05% (or 2,000 impressions for every click). CTR is the number of clicks that your ad/keyword receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown: Clicks ÷ Impressions = CTR. One would want a higher CTR percentage and if the CTR is lower than 0.05%, the cover and/or the ad copy may need tweaking.


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## AlecHutson (Sep 26, 2016)

dragontucker said:


> Congrats! That must be a great feeling. You are seeing some good success. I would be thrilled to get near 10k page reads in one day! Thanks for taking the time to give me such a detailed reply. I might need more money to play with if I want to see higher levels of success. I might try bidding higher like you seem to be doing. Do you usually bid higher than say 30 cents? At one point I was setting my bids to 50 cents. I was for sure seeing more success, but my bill was adding up and I was worried I wouldn't be able to pay it on time.


I've set the bid at .50, though for most of my clicks I'm paying around .26. Ironically, it's the really popular authors and books - Sanderson, Martin, GoT, etc - that are my cheapest clicks - I guess it's because so many people search their names and visit their pages. The indie authors and less-well known published authors - even the ones with great success - are costing me a lot more per click (I guess because there are fewer people visiting their pages, so it becomes a bidding war, since so many people are dumping in every keyword they can imagine. Brian Staveley has cost me .39 per click; game of thrones only .24. GoT has now made me reported sales of 31.00, with 17.00 spent on the ad. Brian Staveley has only cost me money.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Is this real?

I decided to test two different ad blurbs for YT:

1. (Time Travel Only) The world stops when a time-traveling jewel thief materializes in the midst of the playoffs. Too bad she's not willing to share her secrets. 
2. (He/She) She's a time-traveling thief holding the key to the energy crisis. He's a mind-reading PI. If he can't catch her--and unlock her secret: World chaos.

Everything else for the campaigns is identical. I ran them simultaneously. Here are the results:










I admit, the second one is pretty lame, but I don't believe there could be that much difference. I'm guessing it's an artifact of running both simultaneously. What do you think?

BTW, if these results are real, or if I can do the test in a more reliable way (non-simultaneousy), what a great way to test blurbs!!


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

The second ad blurb is far better. I think the results you're seeing (impression numbers) don't really mean anything at this stage. 

Another way to look at it is that the second ad has a much higher CTR. Keep them running and see what happens...


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

You can't judge the effectiveness of your blurb based upon the number of impressions each ad gets.  For that look to clicks-to-impressions like the poster above mentioned.


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## JKata (Dec 9, 2014)

TromboneAl said:


> Is this real?
> 
> I decided to test two different ad blurbs for YT:
> 
> ...


I like the second blurb better as well. I wonder why the other has more impressions, but in terms of converting impressions to clicks, the second one is way better. As the others said, you'll probably need to run the ads longer to get more data.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

I just finished my first serious AMS campaign. It was 7 ads/7 books and ran for 10 days before I paused it. Not sure whether to see it as a success or not. Six of the ads showed a profit. One showed a loss. The ad that showed a loss actually sold more books than the other ads. The reason it did so badly was because of the large number (hundreds) of keywords that had just one or two clicks and no sales. Even with CPCs of just a few cents, those hundreds of non-performing, automatically generated keywords cost so much that they ended up costing way more than the five keywords that actually produced sales.










I've now stopped those ads, copied them, and am running new campaigns, not using the keywords automatically generated by Amazon but pretty much only using the keywords that were successful in this first campaign. Hopefully, those new ads will produce much better results.

Philip


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

TromboneAl said:


> Is this real?
> 
> I decided to test two different ad blurbs for YT:
> 
> ...


You need more conversions - clicks in this case - to have confidence in the data.

This tool will help you determine how much data you need based on how much confidence you desire in the results. In my opinion, this tool is too conservative for AMS. A smaller sample size should suffice.

Personally, I use 50 clicks to determine if a lone ad is working and 100 clicks per variation when I'm A/B testing. Note: if I'm A/B testing, the control has already been through the 50-clicks phase and been deemed to be effective.


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

AlecHutson said:


> I've set the bid at .50, though for most of my clicks I'm paying around .26. Ironically, it's the really popular authors and books - Sanderson, Martin, GoT, etc - that are my cheapest clicks - I guess it's because so many people search their names and visit their pages. The indie authors and less-well known published authors - even the ones with great success - are costing me a lot more per click (I guess because there are fewer people visiting their pages, so it becomes a bidding war, since so many people are dumping in every keyword they can imagine. Brian Staveley has cost me .39 per click; game of thrones only .24. GoT has now made me reported sales of 31.00, with 17.00 spent on the ad. Brian Staveley has only cost me money.


Thanks. That is interesting about the bigger author names. I increased my bids and saw a few sales yesterday. Hopefully things will continue


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

If you run two ads with the same keywords aren't you competing against yourself and driving up your CPC?


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

GrandFenwick said:


> If you run two ads with the same keywords aren't you competing against yourself and driving up your CPC?


I would assume you're right. BUT, here's how I look at it:

I run same keywords on several ads for different books. They are not all the same, but a handful are, when I think the keyword is relevant to both books.

I'd rather that a reader sees the sponsored ads and has a choice of me or _me_, and I'll pay the extra penny or two per click if seeing me and _me_ hammers home the idea that I might be a good author to check out. That sort of repetition is a form of validation. Its kinda like Amazon is telling the reader, "If you like this (book on page), you might like these books from Travis Luedke too."

I don't fuss too much about the issue of running up my cost per click competing against myself, if it gets me clicks and sales and pagereads.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Anyone else had their impressions stopped reporting today?


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

Mine have stopped as well.


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## Cherise (May 13, 2012)

Maybe it's the Y2K bug. ;P


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## David J Normoyle (Jun 22, 2012)

So say you have AuthorX, writing BookY in SeriesZ, and you think all three: author, book and series are a match to what you are selling.

Which is the better keyword? AuthorX, BookY or SeriesZ?

If you enter all three with the same bid price, which will Amazon give the clicks to?

I randomly entered loads of different keywords, but didn't pay much attention to what I was doing. I'm now looking at the data, trying to make sense of it all but not exactly succeeding.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

David J Normoyle said:


> So say you have AuthorX, writing BookY in SeriesZ, and you think all three: author, book and series are a match to what you are selling.
> 
> Which is the better keyword? AuthorX, BookY or SeriesZ?
> 
> ...


If it's a series with a match, then I start very low and increase my bids in stages on each book title through the series on the personal assumption that they land on the other pages after the first book to buy the series and only when they get to the last do you have a chance of a click turning to a sale. The others are there just on the off chance and hopefully for some subliminal advertising for when they get to the last book. Who knows what works best for each individual and their books? It's all trial and error.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Cassie Leigh said:


> You can't judge the effectiveness of your blurb based upon the number of impressions each ad gets. For that look to clicks-to-impressions like the poster above mentioned.


Yes, of course. I wasn't thinking straight.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Jack Krenneck said:


> Mine have stopped as well.


Finally they are on the move again. Been stuck all day.


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

Mine are now trundling along also.


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## K.B. Rose (Sep 7, 2014)

I've been playing around with these ads for the last couple of days (it's kind of fun and addicting). So far I've noticed that I've gotten far more clicks on similar author name keywords, as opposed to subject/genre type keywords.  There is a lot of helpful advice in this thread I'll use as well.


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## JKata (Dec 9, 2014)

K.B. Rose said:


> I've been playing around with these ads for the last couple of days (it's kind of fun and addicting). So far I've noticed that I've gotten far more clicks on similar author name keywords, as opposed to subject/genre type keywords. There is a lot of helpful advice in this thread I'll use as well.


I have the same experience. Author names get more clicks than any other kind of keyword.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Does the number of keywords affect how the ads are distributed?

I have ads for two children's beginner readers which should have the same audience:

Ad 1 - 179 keywords, only half of which have impressions.  14,472 impressions so far.

Ad 2 - 8 keywords, all of which have impressions.  13,226 impressions so far.

Both ads started at the same time and have about the same number of total impressions.

On the face of it, it would seem that having fewer keywords results in more ads being distributed.  Having a large number of keywords results in ads being distributed more thinly.

Do you think that is the case?


Philip


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

Decon said:


> Anyone else had their impressions stopped reporting today?


I know that it can take up to 3 days for metrics to appear, but how often do they get updated? I've been in my first campaign for a couple of days and have (so far) only noticed reporting updates occurring overnight.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> Does the number of keywords affect how the ads are distributed?
> 
> I have ads for two children's beginner readers which should have the same audience:
> 
> ...


Keep in mind that AMS is broad match.

If you're using a lot of general, but related keywords (singular/plural, synonyms, etc.), your ad is probably being triggered by a small subset of your keyword inventory.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Anarchist said:


> Keep in mind that AMS is broad match.
> 
> If you're using a lot of general, but related keywords (singular/plural, synonyms, etc.), your ad is probably being triggered by a small subset of your keyword inventory.


I don't use any of the possible variations of a single keyword. In the campaign that has over 100 keywords, the majority are simply single titles of children's early readers (like my books). My ad is only being shown on half of those books, whereas the 8 ads in my other campaign are all being placed. Yet the total number of impressions for both ads is nearly identical. So I'm wondering if having fewer, yet highly targeted, ads is a better strategy in terms of gaining impressions and therefore clicks/sales.

Philip


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

Interesting observation. I have a few campaigns running. I'm going to check out this theory and report back.


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

No correlation in my case. Of my three ads I started at the same time, the one with the most keywords has the most impressions and the one with the fewest has the least impressions.


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

Philip Gibson said:


> I don't use any of the possible variations of a single keyword. In the campaign that has over 100 keywords, the majority are simply single titles of children's early readers (like my books). My ad is only being shown on half of those books, whereas the 8 ads in my other campaign are all being placed. Yet the total number of impressions for both ads is nearly identical. So I'm wondering if having fewer, yet highly targeted, ads is a better strategy in terms of gaining impressions and therefore clicks/sales.
> 
> Philip


I have ads targeting an author with two initials and a last name. I tried II name, I I name, and I. I. name, and I get impressions and clicks on all three. LOL.

I like to play with variations, especially if they appear to have a bit of traffic (using keyword research tools and methods). Why not catch as many clicks and impressions as possible on that same target? Especially if its a hot selling, _highly relevant_, target.

Definitely worth a few ads of test material. You can always regroup and start the same ad over and cut out the keywords that aren't getting any action.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

BVLawson said:


> For those of you who have had luck selling paperbacks via AMS ads, I'm just curious - was that spillover from ebook ads or were you specifically advertising the new KDP print books? I'd love to sell more print, but I want to stick with Createspace until Amazon forces us all to switch.


I think it's fair to say that we all target our eBooks with sponsored ads. We don't have to market our paper books as Amazon do it for us, so it is a spillover of how it works. It doesn't matter if they are Lulu, Create Space, KDP, Lightning or any other source of paper books, they will all be marketed via sponsored ads in the way that it works. The main one is that when a customer lands on your page they have the option as always, but if the customer is viewing a paper book page, sometimes your sponsored ad will be on there if you have a paper book.

It was a surprise to me when I started selling my Create Space books, but previously I had only ever used sites that promote only eBooks as free or discounted which is a specific market segment and narrow price point to zero. If you have some of the trad-published authors and their books as keywords, then customers in that price segment have a higher price point and they are they are more likely to be print book buyers. A least that's what I think happens.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Like Decon said.  I'm Createspace with all of my paperbacks and the ads generated sales of those books.  For the ones where it was obvious where the sale came from for my fantasy novel they were predominantly on trade-published author names.  You can't target the ads to just paperback or ebook (or audio).


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

My ads often show up on the paperback version page of the books I targeted for keywords, but not on the ebook version. This is sometimes very frustrating when all the ads on the ebook page of that target aren't even remotely in the same genres, and they're all ads from the same 2-3 authors over and over and over again. I really wonder what devil's deal thse 3 authors made with Amazon to keep having their ads shown.

On another note, I have to say I agree with Decon that this is a huge time suck. I know many authors trying these ads are having fun playing with KWs but for me it's the most boring chore ever to keep checking to see if my ad is still competitive on every KW's page and having to constantly tweak them. Unfortunately it's the only way these ads would work.


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## Piano Jenny (Nov 30, 2016)

TromboneAl said:


> The keyword results can be an eye-opening learning experience. Here are the results for my _Contact Us_ ad:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Wow, thanks for this Al! I just spent about a half hour adding over a hundred new keywords for other related book titles.


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## dragontucker (Jul 18, 2014)

I really wish amazon would show what you have spent each day. They should also show the dates of each click too. It's hard to keep track of what you are spending per day when you have multiple campaigns running. Right now I just write down my stats and check them every 24 hours to see what I am spending etc. Anyone have a better method of keeping a tight track of clicks, cost etc?


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

I download the spreadsheet and then copy and paste into the prior day's version and add a few columns with formulas to subtract impressions, clicks, spend, and sales between the two.  It's the quickest way I know to see impressions, clicks, and spend across periods.


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

Has anyone ever tried to estimate what the delay in reporting might be? I know it's all guesswork, but is there a ballpark? Is it a day behind? Three days behind? One hour behind?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

GrandFenwick said:


> Has anyone ever tried to estimate what the delay in reporting might be? I know it's all guesswork, but is there a ballpark? Is it a day behind? Three days behind? One hour behind?


I wish I could work it out. I'm starting to have doubts about some of the sales updates reported when I look at the sales on my dashboard against when sales appear on sponsored ads. For some of them to be correct, the delay must be at least up to a week on some of them, maybe more.

I'm going to start taking daily screen shots. It's supposed to update at least after 3 days.

I took a screen shot on one book on the 31st Dec and the book had $166 in retail sales via sponsored ads. Today it is showing $206.79 retail via sponsored ads, or 13 additional sales. Since the 31st of December I have had 8 sales on that book, but I haven't checked any sold on the dates prior to the 31st. It could be right, I just don't know. I've also had sales added to my other books this month that have had no sales as yet in January.

As for the other updates on impressions and clicks, apart from one day when it froze, it seems to update hourly for me, but it is more active during the evenings when readers must be more active.


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## Piano Jenny (Nov 30, 2016)

I started a new thread this morning charting my results in two AMS ads, one fiction and one NF, but that thread didn't take off, so I'll share my experience here.

*My fiction book has 299 keywords, 1,905 impressions, and 2 clicks* so far. I started out biddings 0.25 for every keyword, and just now bumped some of them up to $0.40 to see what happens. That's a _really_ small amount of impressions for that many keywords, at least based on the screenshots Trombone Al shared earlier in this thread. They keyword with the most impressions is "chick lit," at 179 impressions.

*My non-fiction book has 467 keywords, 2,884 impressions, and 4 clicks* so far. All my bids there are for $0.25, and I also just bumped a few up to $0.40. Interestingly, all 4 clicks have been for 4 completely different keywords.

Neither book has gotten any sales yet.

So ... it's surprisingly disappointing, especially since I went hog-wild coming up with keywords. Although I don't know what "typical" or "good" is for these kinds of ads, so who knows. I'm going to definitely give them both at least 3 more days.

The good news is, I've only spent less than a dollar so far.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Piano Jenny said:


> I started a new thread this morning charting my results in two AMS ads, one fiction and one NF, but that thread didn't take off, so I'll share my experience here.
> 
> *My fiction book has 299 keywords, 1,905 impressions, and 2 clicks* so far. I started out biddings 0.25 for every keyword, and just now bumped some of them up to $0.40 to see what happens. That's a _really_ small amount of impressions for that many keywords, at least based on the screenshots Trombone Al shared earlier in this thread. They keyword with the most impressions is "chick lit," at 179 impressions.
> 
> ...


That's a small amount of impressions, especially on your fiction book. The good thing is that for your fiction book the ratio of impressions to clicks is normal and the ratio on your nonfiction is better than normal. How long has it been running? Are you using book titles of the same genre for your keywords for your fiction book? What keyword provided the 2 clicks on your fiction book?


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Piano Jenny said:


> I started a new thread this morning charting my results in two AMS ads, one fiction and one NF, but that thread didn't take off, so I'll share my experience here.
> 
> *My fiction book has 299 keywords, 1,905 impressions, and 2 clicks* so far. I started out biddings 0.25 for every keyword, and just now bumped some of them up to $0.40 to see what happens. That's a _really_ small amount of impressions for that many keywords, at least based on the screenshots Trombone Al shared earlier in this thread. They keyword with the most impressions is "chick lit," at 179 impressions.
> 
> ...


Keep the data lag in mind.

One of my ads had an ACOS of 300+% yesterday. But it was young, so I waited. Today? The ACOS is 32%. Impressions and clicks have increased, but not significantly.

Wait for the data before you make any big decisions.


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## Piano Jenny (Nov 30, 2016)

Decon said:


> That's a small amount of impressions, especially on your fiction book. How long has it been running? Are you using book titles of the same genre for your keywords for your fiction book?


The fiction ad has been running since late last night, so it's definitely new, but yes, you'd think it would have more impressions that that by now. And yes, the _*vast*_ majority of my keywords are authors' name and book titles. That's why I'm wondering ... should I bid higher, maybe? Why so few impressions for well over 200 keywords?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Piano Jenny said:


> The fiction ad has been running since late last night, so it's definitely new, but yes, you'd think it would have more impressions that that by now. And yes, the _*vast*_ majority of my keywords are authors' name and book titles. That's why I'm wondering ... should I bid higher, maybe? Why so few impressions for well over 200 keywords?


No don't bid higher. All that will do is to soak up your daily limit and freeze the ad until the following day once it starts to work at those sort of bids you mention. It's too early. You need to forget about it for at least a week for more data. I have one book that only gets 2,000 per day and it has 760 keywords, then other days I get 10,000. If it's costing so little, why cancel it until you have lots more data. My other 4 books have 500+ keywords. I only have a few high bids on one book, and that costs at least $3 per day, but it's covered with sales. It took 2 weeks for sales to kick in... there again nothing is guaranteed.


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## Piano Jenny (Nov 30, 2016)

Decon said:


> No don't bid higher. All that will do is to soak up your daily limit and freeze the ad until the following day once it starts to work at those sort of bids you mention. It's too early. You need to forget about it for at least a week for more data. I have one book that only gets 2,000 per day and it has 760 keywords, then other days I get 10,000. If it's costing so little, why cancel it until you have lots more data. My other 4 books have 500+ keywords. I only have a few high bids on one book, and that costs at least $3 per day, but it's covered with sales. It took 2 weeks for sales to kick in... there again nothing is guaranteed.


Thanks, will do!


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

LilyBLily said:


> I would allow it to become a huge time suck if I could find the ads. Often, I see zero sponsored ads on Amazon pages. I do not know why.


It could be the browser or ad-blocking settings. I can't see any sponsored ads using Firefox, but I see them using Chrome.

I also noticed that some books seem to be blocking sponsored ads altogether. It's rare, but I've run across a couple of sponsor-less books that I set up as keywords.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Accord64 said:


> It could be the browser or ad-blocking settings. I can't see any sponsored ads using Firefox, but I see them using Chrome.
> 
> I also noticed that some books seem to be blocking sponsored ads altogether. It's rare, but I've run across a couple of sponsor-less books that I set up as keywords.


Sometimes I have thought an author had an arrangement for no sponsored ads, then I realized it depended on where you clicked the covers from with your search on Amazon. Don't ask me where it happens because I can't remember, but it does. All I know is sometimes there are none and the next time there are 30 pages or more, then none again. Also sometimes if I click on some covers and view the sponsored ads, then click it again, the ads have changed.

The biggest mystery I have is why on one book I have half a million impressions and 500+ clicks, and the other four I have with more keywords have only a third of that number. I'd be doing okay if they had equal impressions because they have the same click ratio to impressions and clicks to sales.


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## Joynell Schultz (Oct 29, 2016)

Do you think the number of impressions is also based on how much profit Amazon has to make based on a sale? For a 99 cent promo, impressions go down opposed to a $3.99 book?

My head hurts trying to figure this whole thing out.


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

Decon said:


> Also sometimes if I click on some covers and view the sponsored ads, then click it again, the ads have changed.


I just assumed that ads drop away as their daily limits are reached. Yesterday morning I saw my book on several sponsored banners for books/authors I had in my keywords, but later in the day I couldn't find them. My daily limit must have been reached. Hard to confirm because of the lag in reporting. That's my biggest frustration with AMS so far. You'd think Amazon could manage an update within 12 hours, not up to 3 days.


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## WRPursche (Feb 18, 2011)

A few people mentioned that they used the 'automatic' keyword targeting (keywords determined by amazon) and then used these keywords to get ideas for manual targeting.

I tried this, but I can't find the keywords that amazon is using in my 'automatic targeting' campaign. The keywords tab that I have on the manual campaigns does not exist on the automatic campaign. Where did you all find the keywords amazon uses?


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## thewitt (Dec 5, 2014)

WRPursche said:


> A few people mentioned that they used the 'automatic' keyword targeting (keywords determined by amazon) and then used these keywords to get ideas for manual targeting.
> 
> I tried this, but I can't find the keywords that amazon is using in my 'automatic targeting' campaign. The keywords tab that I have on the manual campaigns does not exist on the automatic campaign. Where did you all find the keywords amazon uses?


I don't believe you can see the keywords in automatic placement.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

WRPursche said:


> A few people mentioned that they used the 'automatic' keyword targeting (keywords determined by amazon) and then used these keywords to get ideas for manual targeting.
> 
> I tried this, but I can't find the keywords that amazon is using in my 'automatic targeting' campaign. The keywords tab that I have on the manual campaigns does not exist on the automatic campaign. Where did you all find the keywords amazon uses?


I think that the Amazon list of keyword suggestions only show when you start a new campaign. You can accept them all or delete some of them. After that you can add your own. Once the campaign is up and running, the Amazon keywords you have accepted are in and among your keywords, but the original list is not accessible.

Edit:By automatic, what that means is Amazon make suggestions for keywords based on the search data in generic terms to find your book and other similar books. It isn't automatic in the sense that you have no choice which keywords to accept or reject.


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## WRPursche (Feb 18, 2011)

Huh. I didn't get that opportunity to see them. I started a new campaign, chose the book, wrote the text, and that was it. After hitting the submit button it went off to be approved, and then a day later it just started running. It never showed me the keyword suggestions.


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

Are these ads likely to become less effective because the sponsored ad books aren't targeted worth a darn? As a reader I'm already less likely to look at them because they never seem to relate to the book I'm considering buying. If I look at Also Boughts, I can follow a trail of them and stay not just in the genre, but in the subgenre I'm interested in. Just today I was looking at a Regency romance, and there wasn't a single Regency in the first half dozen sponsored ads. In fact the first one was suspense that mentioned romance in the ad string, one other was obviously erotica, one was a vampire story, etc.

People here are trying to target carefully, but it looks like either most advertisers or Amazon itself are just slinging broad categories around and ending up with sponsored ads attached to totally inappropriate books. I noticed the same with one of mine recently; it had some sponsored ads and not one was for a Historical Western Romance, maybe there were some that were Historical Romance, but what I remember is looking at them and thinking ugh, those don't fit.

When you work on your keywords the way those in this thread are, do your ads end up on appropriate pages?


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

For those of you who have hundreds of keywords, how do you keep track of them? Does Amazon report by keyword? How often do you have to change your bids?

In other words, is this a really big time suck?


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

You can go into each ad and download an Excel file with your keywords and stats for all the words.  You kind of have to keep versions of the spreadsheets to see what's happening with that ad now since Amazon just shows total numbers for the entire time period the ad has been running.

It can be a big time suck.  I just spent an hour or so going through two ads with 200 or so keywords each and pausing all of them related to authors in KU since I just let me books roll out of KU.  Others spend even more time seeing if their ads are on the first page of results or not as mentioned up thread.  I find they do need some maintenance or else they stop working.

As for ads that don't fit with the books they're on...One of my better performing keywords for one of my novels has been "fiction".  I have a very genre-specific cover so I count on that to keep the number of inappropriate clicks down but I'm sure it ends up on all sorts of pages.  Although, interestingly, today when I was going through all those author names I pulled them all up on Amazon and on a few was like "why the hell did I choose this name?" and almost all of those had a very low level of impressions on them.  So I'd say Amazon is pretty smart about showing the right books even if it doesn't seem like it to a casual observer.


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## Piano Jenny (Nov 30, 2016)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> For those of you who have hundreds of keywords, how do you keep track of them? Does Amazon report by keyword? How often do you have to change your bids?
> 
> In other words, is this a really big time suck?


I'm running my first two ads right now, one for fiction and one for NF. _*My fiction has 508 keywords and NF has 470 words*_. There is nothing really for me to keep track of. They are all listed in your dashboard and you can sort them in different ways; for example, put the ones with the most clicks at the top, etc.

It did take some time, but not all at once, and it was research that was interesting and perhaps insightful. I found other books that looked similar to mine, the top books in different categories that mine is in, etc. Almost all my keywords for the fiction book are author names and titles.

As for how effective the ads are or what readers notice, I have no idea. My stats so far are:

*Fiction*
31,657 impressions
35 clicks

*Non-Fiction*
2,260 impressions
6 clicks

Interestingly, the NF ad has been running longer, but is still getting *way* less impressions that the fiction.

I have not gotten any sales on my dashboard yet, but have a few page reads and one purchase on the fiction. It was dead in the water for many weeks prior, so that's worth something to me. I've spent less than $5.00 so far on the fiction ad, and that's such a small amount of money that it's worth it, as far as I'm concerned, for a two buck royalty and a small rankings bump.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Cassie Leigh said:


> You can go into each ad and download an Excel file with your keywords and stats for all the words. You kind of have to keep versions of the spreadsheets to see what's happening with that ad now since Amazon just shows total numbers for the entire time period the ad has been running.
> 
> It can be a big time suck. I just spent an hour or so going through two ads with 200 or so keywords each and pausing all of them related to authors in KU since I just let me books roll out of KU. Others spend even more time seeing if their ads are on the first page of results or not as mentioned up thread. I find they do need some maintenance or else they stop working.
> 
> As for ads that don't fit with the books they're on...One of my better performing keywords for one of my novels has been "fiction". I have a very genre-specific cover so I count on that to keep the number of inappropriate clicks down but I'm sure it ends up on all sorts of pages. Although, interestingly, today when I was going through all those author names I pulled them all up on Amazon and on a few was like "why the hell did I choose this name?" and almost all of those had a very low level of impressions on them. So I'd say Amazon is pretty smart about showing the right books even if it doesn't seem like it to a casual observer.


Thanks. That helps a lot. Just about ready to go for it. I've been compiling keywords and I've got just about 200. I think that's going to be enough to start with.

Jenny, thanks. Your response was helpful, too.


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## WRPursche (Feb 18, 2011)

Keywords are really easy to manage. You can just create them in a Word file and then cut and paste the entire list into the "Add keywords" box on the campaign page. If you add a keyword you already added, it just gives you an error (you cut the keyword out and that's it). 

The manual targeting (you pick the keyword) option has a tab for your keywords, and you can sort it by Keyword, Impressions, Clicks, Cost per click, Spend, Sales, and Average Cost of Sales. As per my post above, I don't think there is any way to see the automatic target keywords, but someone did say they were able to see them at some point.

Edit add: From what I've seen, my books show up exactly where I want/expect them to (although of course, they could be showing up on some random/dissimilar books, and I haven't seen those ads).


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

WRPursche said:


> Keywords are really easy to manage. You can just create them in a Word file and then cut and paste the entire list into the "Add keywords" box on the campaign page. If you add a keyword you already added, it just gives you an error (you cut the keyword out and that's it).
> 
> The manual targeting (you pick the keyword) option has a tab for your keywords, and you can sort it by Keyword, Impressions, Clicks, Cost per click, Spend, Sales, and Average Cost of Sales. As per my post above, I don't think there is any way to see the automatic target keywords, but someone did say they were able to see them at some point.
> 
> Edit add: From what I've seen, my books show up exactly where I want/expect them to (although of course, they could be showing up on some random/dissimilar books, and I haven't seen those ads).


That makes me feel better.

I noticed the book I'm starting with is listed with the authors and books that I'm using for keywords. So I guess I'm on the right track.


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

thewitt said:


> I can only hope that this is either a joke, or no one else ever responds to any question you may pose in the future...ever.


I have used AMS ads with measurable benefit, selling a lot of books, and garnering a lot of pagereads. I am a huge advocate of AMS ads, and this opportunity, and I have shared that here. I passed on my experiences, mistakes, and triumphs, to the benefit of kboards authors.

_Edited. TWLuedke, you responded to this post of thewitt's back on p. 6, clarifying that you were joking; thewitt has only posted twice in this thread since then, and neither of those posts referred to you. I'd say the misunderstanding is fixed, and the matter is done. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca_


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

LilyBLily said:


> I don't think there's much point in overdoing the curating of keywords. Just read the results on the AMS site and adjust them there. You'll know if a bid is too high if the keyword is costing you too much money vis a vis sales of that title. You'll know a keyword isn't working if you get lots of impressions and no clicks. And so on.
> 
> I play around with the bids and add new keywords a couple times a week in hopes of keeping them seeming fresh to Amazon so they won't get paused. Otherwise, it's entertainment.


That is pretty much the summary of my experience.

Keep an eye on new potential keywords, authors, series, anything relevant that comes along, and add it to the program.

Adjust bids up or down based on performance and my budget.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

ellenoc said:


> Are these ads likely to become less effective because the sponsored ad books aren't targeted worth a darn? As a reader I'm already less likely to look at them because they never seem to relate to the book I'm considering buying. If I look at Also Boughts, I can follow a trail of them and stay not just in the genre, but in the subgenre I'm interested in. Just today I was looking at a Regency romance, and there wasn't a single Regency in the first half dozen sponsored ads. In fact the first one was suspense that mentioned romance in the ad string, one other was obviously erotica, one was a vampire story, etc.
> 
> People here are trying to target carefully, but it looks like either most advertisers or Amazon itself are just slinging broad categories around and ending up with sponsored ads attached to totally inappropriate books. I noticed the same with one of mine recently; it had some sponsored ads and not one was for a Historical Western Romance, maybe there were some that were Historical Romance, but what I remember is looking at them and thinking ugh, those don't fit.
> 
> When you work on your keywords the way those in this thread are, do your ads end up on appropriate pages?


Yes, my ads end up on appropriate pages and I get reasonably good results for the low cost. 

But I am very, very specific in my keywords.


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## Piano Jenny (Nov 30, 2016)

JRTomlin said:


> Yes, my ads end up on appropriate pages and I get reasonably good results for the low cost.
> 
> But I am very, very specific in my keywords.


Care to share some examples?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Piano Jenny said:


> Care to share some examples?


If I were to give a sample of examples of generic keywords rather than specific book titles of the same genre and style that work to target specifically the content of one of my books that doesn't stray outside what I am targeting. then those would be such as ... shifters, werewolf, werewovles, wolverine, wolverines, all of which produce results.

If however, as I did, and used... crime, then cancelled it, I would be targeting books that would be outside the comfort zone of my target reader. The last thing a reader of cozy mystery crime readers would want, would be my crime books which have violence, expletives, etc and so the use of crime would not be specific. Lots of impressions and clicks maybe, as I found out, but not not much in the way of sales.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

WRPursche said:


> Huh. I didn't get that opportunity to see them. I started a new campaign, chose the book, wrote the text, and that was it. After hitting the submit button it went off to be approved, and then a day later it just started running. It never showed me the keyword suggestions.


Here's what it says from the links in the side box .

*What keywords should I add to my campaign?*

Choose multiple keywords that are relevant to your book. We provide a list of recommended keywords for the advertised book in your campaign. You can choose to use one or all of the recommended keywords. You can also add your own keywords in addition to using the recommended keywords. The more keywords you select the better chance you have of receiving ad impressions and clicks. Remember, you don't pay for impressions, only clicks.

Maybe you clicked on something by mistake and it went straight to the list for adding your own keywords. I assume you went to the page to add your own keywords and that it is not running without them. I can't remember now, but I think you add the suggested keyword after acceptance, or discard it and choose your own, not sure. I could be wrong as it some time since I set mine up. Once you go to add your own keywords, the recommended list goes away and can't be recovered.


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## WRPursche (Feb 18, 2011)

Thanks Decon. Actually, I never did go to or see the manual keywords entry for the automatic targeting campaign. It was approved and started to run.

I just tried setting up a new campaign to check to see if I hit the wrong key.  
1. select a book from bookshelf
2. name campaign/set budget/set duration
3. select targeting (automatic); customize text/preview

From there the only option is cancel/save as draft/submit for review.

I can't see any place to see keywords. If I hit 'submit for review', it gets approved and starts running; I never see the chosen keywords.


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

I made a huge change to one of my campaigns and it took four days to show a shift in the statistics on the dashboard, so I'm guessing the delay in reporting is at least three days. But that's just a guess.


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

GrandFenwick said:


> I made a huge change to one of my campaigns and it took four days to show a shift in the statistics on the dashboard, so I'm guessing the delay in reporting is at least three days. But that's just a guess.


The whole reporting lag thing has been hard to figure out. I've added new keywords to a campaign and saw impressions/clicks register within hours, while others take a day or so, but sales seem to consistently take more than two days to update. I suspect AMS is pulling data from multiple Amazon sources that update at vastly different times.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Just set up my first campaign. I took Amazon's keywords and added about 180 of mine. When the campaign saved it only showed 59 keywords. Yes, I did click the add button on both ... I think.

What did I do wrong? Can I re-add my own keywords once the campaign has been approved?


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

You can add keywords at any time while the ad is running if you chose the manual keyword option.  Just click on the ad and find the button that says something like add keywords and then type in all the ones you want to add and submit.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> Just set up my first campaign. I took Amazon's keywords and added about 180 of mine. When the campaign saved it only showed 59 keywords. Yes, I did click the add button on both ... I think.
> 
> What did I do wrong? Can I re-add my own keywords once the campaign has been approved?


How to add new keywords, alter bids, and pause individual keywords that you don't want, after you have set up your campaign

Click on the campaign and wait for the keyword list to load. You'll see a search box near the top on the left hand side and above that it says "add keywords". It's a little confusing because all the box is that you see at first is the search box and so if you enter a keyword in there, all it does is to search to see if you have the keyword already on your list.

What you do is to click on words "Add Keywords" That expands the search box into a bigger box where you add your new keyword. Once added, to the right on the screen you should see the default bid under the letters CPC (COST PER CLICK) The default bid is usually high, but you can alter that to whatever you want. At the side of that is an orange add button. Click on that and your keyword is added at your bid price and the box clears ready for your next one. You can have a different bid every time, but during that session, the CPC will be what you first set it as so you don't have to keep typing the same bid if you intend them all to be the same bid. When you start a new session, then the CPC will have reverted to a high default bid.

Be careful, because a number of times I've gone into add a keyword, not paid any attention to the default bid, and simply pressed add, only to discover it had set at anywhere from 25c to 50c and quickly used up my daily limit with just the one or two keywords. When that happens, the impressions are frozen until the next day.

Once you have added all your new keywords, it's easy to either pause an individual keyword, or to increase the bid. Pause is the only way to eliminate a keyword, there is no delete, but you can delete the bid to alter it. For that you enter your campaign and wait for the keyword list to load. find your keyword, delete the old bid and add the new one, then press save or cancel if you have made an error typing the bid. Those two options show when you click in the individual CPC bid box for the keyword.

To pause a keyword that you don't want to use anymore, to the left of each keyword is a box with a green dot and "enabled" click on that and it will show a drop down, click on "pause" to select.

One other thing is that if you have already entered the keyword when you press add it will flag it so that you can't duplicate the keyword.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Thanks, everyone. I think I see where I made my mistake. I clicked on the add button after I put in my keywords. I should have clicked to add first, added the keywords, then clicked the other add button.

Shouldn't be a problem to fix it. Amazon's keywords look like a good start.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

A warning to take reports with a grain of salt. Here are results at the beginning of two identical campaigns (except for blurb):










Later on, they evened out:










So, either impression reports are delayed, or something else is going on.

I'm not getting any traction on my fiction book ads, but I'll give them more attention later. I think I can get a reasonable ROI on my sight-reading nonfiction, but I doubt I can scale it up.


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## authorbpshea (Nov 26, 2016)

Jimmy said:


> Hi there,
> 
> My AMS ads got approved on 12/13/2016. I have received 14,312 impressions, 3 clicks and 0 sales so far with my Amazon Marketing Services ads. Each of the clicks came from 3 different keywords. Also, I realized that only about 37 of my 100 keywords are receiving impressions.
> 
> My current keyword bid is $.04 and daily budget is $1. What do you think I should do now to improve performance?


I doubled my clicks by changing my copy (the tag line to get readers to click). Remember that there are two ways for readers to see your book. Go to your "preview ad" page where you see how the ad appears. Depending on the device, you see something different. The text people see on "Kindle device" is different than the 980x55, at least as far as I can tell. Try different text for each one. When I changed it, my clicks doubled. That being said, I've sold a total of three books. Frankly, when I open my Kindle, I'm there to go to a book I've already identified. I'm surprised anyone clicks on the ad, no less buys it. If your goal is book sales, these ads don't work for me. If it's just getting your book out there, maybe, though you have to spend $100 to find out.


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## WRPursche (Feb 18, 2011)

For those of you who were able to somehow see what keywords amazon chose in the 'automatic targeting' option, are you running a 'sponsored products' campaign or a 'product display ad'  campaign? I'm wondering if the reason why I've never been shown the amazon generated keywords is because I'm running the former and not the latter.

My 'test' campaign went live last night and I did not get a chance to see the amazon created keywords at any point in the process. Also, I got a response to a query to amazon about this, and their response states:

"However, please know, since the Automatic Targeting option uses an algorithm to automatically target your ad to customers, keywords cannot be viewed or added manually to an ad with the Automatic Targeting option. I'm sorry for the inconvenience."


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

TWLuedke said:


> I have ads targeting an author with two initials and a last name. I tried II name, I I name, and I. I. name, and I get impressions and clicks on all three. LOL.


I suggest "I.I. name" as well.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

The fact that ebook and paperbacks sales are conflated in the Sales figure means that I can't use ACoS figure to determine whether the ad is profitable. For my sight-reading book, I'm seeing a big increase in paperback sales, but the royalty on those is 45%. For example, if my ACoS is 60%, but all of my sales are paperback, then the ad is not profitable.

You can't even calculate it reliably by looking at the actual sales of the books, since those include sales that are unrelated to your ad. I guess I'll just look at the ratio of ebook to paperback sales and use that to calculate my break-even ACoS.


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> The fact that ebook and paperbacks sales are conflated in the Sales figure means that I can't use ACoS figure to determine whether the ad is profitable. For my sight-reading book, I'm seeing a big increase in paperback sales, but the royalty on those is 45%. For example, if my ACoS is 60%, but all of my sales are paperback, then the ad is not profitable.
> 
> You can't even calculate it reliably by looking at the actual sales of the books, since those include sales that are unrelated to your ad. I guess I'll just look at the ratio of ebook to paperback sales and use that to calculate my break-even ACoS.


The only way I can accurately account for the true effect of my ads is to look at pagereads and sales across each series that has a book promoted by an ad.

I involuntarily stopped my ads for 3 days, because I didn't have any $$ on my debit card to pay Amazon when they billed me. Got it paid and ads rolling again 3 days later. The difference was easily $50 a day in overall sales across all my books.

AMS reporting is not accurate. It does not reflect the full measure of exposure of the ads. It doesn't reflect the organic sales boosts, and the alsobought exposure and the pagereads.

Maybe I'm good at targeting, or good at writing ad sales copy or something, so these ads work for me where they have failed other authors. Plus, I continually research new keywords in attempt to scale up. And I'm not afraid to blow a few dollars here and there trying to figure out which keywords get me the sales and exposure.

I instantly noticed the huge drop off in sales and pagereads when my ads stopped. AMS reporting shows I am losing money. My Book Report KDP view shows I am making money. Again, I repeat myself, AMS cannot accurately track the full effect of their ads.


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

And, to clarify, I regularly max out the 1000 keywords on an ad. It takes me a week or so of keyword research to do it, but I fill those puppies up.

It will be a few more weeks before I really nail down all the effective keywords ... but then everytime Bookbub kicks out a new promo, or Freebooksie, or some other book promo that grabs my attention, I find a new keyword or set of keywords. LOL.

There's always some author-book-series that's rising to the top, creating a new keyword opportunity. Yes, its a pain in the ass to be this hyper-aware of the Amazon marketplace. But it pays off when a hot new keyword snags new readers for me.


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## Joseph Malik (Jul 12, 2016)

TWLuedke said:


> And, to clarify, I regularly max out the 1000 keywords on an ad. It takes me a week or so of keyword research to do it, but I fill those puppies up.
> 
> It will be a few more weeks before I really nail down all the effective keywords ... but then everytime Bookbub kicks out a new promo, or Freebooksie, or some other book promo that grabs my attention, I find a new keyword or set of keywords. LOL.
> 
> There's always some author-book-series that's rising to the top, creating a new keyword opportunity. Yes, its a pain in the ass to be this hyper-aware of the Amazon marketplace. But it pays off when a hot new keyword snags new readers for me.


I also max out the thousand keywords, and put a few weeks into determining them and sorting them, feeding them each into Amazon to see what comes up and then using a two-factor system to rank them for relevance and popularity before deciding on my CPC bids. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

I used about 900 words to start, but I'm constantly adding more, pausing others, and when I get close to the thousand-word limit I'll pause the ad, remove some non-performers from my spreadsheet, and start over again with 900 or so. I've also been playing with my ad copy but I believe I finally have it dialed in. This most recent ad has blown all my others away.

Some of you could have written an entire book in the amount of time it took me just to set up my keywords for this one, but . . . .










I need to figure out how to scale this up before I launch Book II this summer.


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

Joseph Malik said:


> I also max out the thousand keywords, and put a few weeks into determining them and sorting them, feeding them each into Amazon to see what comes up and then using a two-factor system to rank them for relevance and popularity before deciding on my CPC bids. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
> 
> I used about 900 words to start, but I'm constantly adding more, pausing others, and when I get close to the thousand-word limit I'll pause the ad, remove some non-performers from my spreadsheet, and start over again with 900 or so. I've also been playing with my ad copy but I believe I finally have it dialed in. This most recent ad has blown all my others away.
> 
> ...


Impressive!

See, I am totally in agreement. If the tremendous time and effort of AMS ad keyword research equates to sales and pagereads, its worth it. Mastering this skill sells books. And now I'm motivated to get my butt into gear to write more books! LOL.


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## JKata (Dec 9, 2014)

Joseph Malik said:


> I also max out the thousand keywords, and put a few weeks into determining them and sorting them, feeding them each into Amazon to see what comes up and then using a two-factor system to rank them for relevance and popularity before deciding on my CPC bids. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
> 
> I used about 900 words to start, but I'm constantly adding more, pausing others, and when I get close to the thousand-word limit I'll pause the ad, remove some non-performers from my spreadsheet, and start over again with 900 or so. I've also been playing with my ad copy but I believe I finally have it dialed in. This most recent ad has blown all my others away.
> 
> ...


Wow! That's awesome, especially for a book that's priced at .99.


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## Joseph Malik (Jul 12, 2016)

JJoy said:


> Wow! That's awesome, especially for a book that's priced at .99.


It's only at $0.99 through the weekend for a GenrePulse sale.


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## Joseph Malik (Jul 12, 2016)

TWLuedke said:


> Impressive!
> 
> See, I am totally in agreement. If the tremendous time and effort of AMS ad keyword research equates to sales and pagereads, its worth it. Mastering this skill sells books. And now I'm motivated to get my butt into gear to write more books! LOL.


I write slow. I have my own niche, and my target readership is both rabid and unforgiving. So I figured as long as I'm turning out one meticulously-crafted book per year, I might as well dial this part in while I'm writing. In a couple of years, when the series is going strong and I'm working on Book IV or V, I hope to have cracked the code on a lot of the marketing and also have a lot more money to throw at it. This is just playing penny stocks right now. The important thing is that the percentages of impressions to clicks, and clicks to sales, stay consistent or improve, which has been my focus for the past month. Right now I'm getting about one click per 240 impressions, and roughly 1 sale per 3 clicks. The key is to figure how to keep that consistent; if it's consistent, then I don't see any reason that it shouldn't replicate at larger scales. I guess we'll see.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Joseph Malik said:


> ... and roughly 1 sale per 3 clicks.


That's a remarkable conversion rate. If you're able to maintain it over 500 clicks, I just might die of jealousy.


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## Joseph Malik (Jul 12, 2016)

Anarchist said:


> That's a remarkable conversion rate. If you're able to maintain it over 500 clicks, I just might die of jealousy.


I might die of shock. I'm curious to see how long the pattern holds, but I'd be stunned if there's not some diseconomy of scale that kicks in at a certain point; I expect there will be diminishing returns once I start getting way beyond my target readership. I believe my target readership is fairly small, but I could be wrong.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

WRPursche said:


> My 'test' campaign went live last night and I did not get a chance to see the amazon created keywords at any point in the process. Also, I got a response to a query to amazon about this, and *their response states:*
> 
> *"However, please know, since the Automatic Targeting option uses an algorithm to automatically target your ad to customers, keywords cannot be viewed or added manually to an ad with the Automatic Targeting option. I'm sorry for the inconvenience."*


It's nothing to do with which type of ad you have chosen and it is as Amazon says in their reply to you. All of us on here are using sponsored ads the same as you. What I don't think many, if any apart from you on here have done, is to have chosen the automatic option, but I may now try it as you can run a manual and an automatic sponsored ad campaign at the same time, so giving you an answer would be a guess. I can then maybe mess around with it to see how it works for myself and see what you can and can't do that differentiates it from a manual campaign, but I think what I have below pretty much covers it.

Apparently, there are two options... automatic..... manual, within sponsored ad campaigns, though I hadn't noticed. The automatic campaign campaign is reported to choose your keywords for you based on your own book and the genre data that Amazon farm. I don't think that you can change any of it as it is what it says, automatic and the bid you make applies to all keywords they use as far as I can make out unless you can tell me different.

With Manual, which most have chosen, you are given a list from Amazon, as I said before, of suggested keywords for your campaign, which you can accept or reject, then move onto adding your own keywords, at which time you can no longer see the separate list of suggestions, only the ones you accepted which will be on your list and they are in alphabetic order among your chosen keywords. Also with manual you have complete control over individual bids for keywords and you can modify your list at any time. The downside is that it is what it says ... manual and therefore time consuming.

With automatic you completely cede control to Amazon bots. As far as I can make out from searching the net, and from their reply, you can't add your own keywords if you have set it as automatic. They make the choice for you which they can vary where they decide to put placement based on your book's search history, meta data, and the genre traits of your story, which I suppose will change regularly as new data is collated. I guess from this they decided you don't need to know what keywords they use as they can chop and change them as they receive results data and they set their software programming accordingly. So basically, unlike manual, they do all the heavy work for you and you don't and can't do anything only keep one eye on results and terminate it if it doesn't work.

I think you would be better staring a new ad, but this time try the manual option from the setup page if it's control that you want.


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Many of my keywords have no impressions, which is puzzling since they were chosen specifically because they relate directly to my books. At the same time, I see westerns, cozy mysteries and erotica in AMS sponsored ads for historical literary short stories; in other words, books that are totally unrelated are appearing in sponsored ads where they most likely won't get a click. It seems that the software isn't targeting properly.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Marian said:


> Many of my keywords have no impressions, which is puzzling since they were chosen specifically because they relate directly to my books. At the same time, I see westerns, cozy mysteries and erotica in AMS sponsored ads for historical literary short stories; in other words, books that are totally unrelated are appearing in sponsored ads where they most likely won't get a click. It seems that the software isn't targeting properly.


I have over 1.7 million of impressions on 5 books. All are targeted keywords to specific authors or book titles with a few exceptions. I have yet to see any of my books landing on any other than what I have targeted, and out of more than 500 keywords on each book, I have very few not to get any impressions. If that happens, or I get next to nothing in impressions after a time, I go look at the page of the book. It could be that it is very low on the charts and so not viewed. Or it could be the opposite and a best seller with sixty pages of ads and another 1000 in line waiting to get on the page before you at a higher bid, I pause those and seek another book as a keyword.

There are possibly 5 things going here.

1, Your bids are too low.

2, You are not specific enough with your keywords and you are maybe using generic keywords or phrases that you think should work, but don't and they are not as targeted as specific book titles in your genre would be.

3, The book titles you have chosen as keywords, if any, are not getting sales page reads so obviously they won't garner impressions, or you have typed in the title with an error in how it is spelled. I've done that a few times.

4, Some authors use the scatter gun approach and that's why you see unrelated titles. Or, they use generic keywords that can identify with other genres in error.

5, You haven't been running your ad long enough to gather data to start building on your campaign results.

There is only one other possible explanation I could think of and that is your book could be in a niche genre that not many people read and there aren't many other books with you story traits for the keywords you have used.


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## WRPursche (Feb 18, 2011)

Decon said:


> With Manual, which most have chosen, you are given a list from Amazon, as I said before, of suggested keywords for your campaign, which you can accept or reject, then move onto adding your own keywords, at which time you can no longer see the separate list of suggestions, only the ones you accepted which will be on your list and they are in alphabetic order among your chosen keywords. Also with manual you have complete control over individual bids for keywords and you can modify your list at any time. The downside is that it is what it says ... manual and therefore time consuming.
> 
> I think you would be better staring a new ad, but this time try the manual option from the setup page if it's control that you want.


@Decon, thanks for this, you gave me the info I needed to figure it out. Actually, I had been running manual ads for about a month, choosing all my own keywords. But I was interested in what keywords amazon would suggest, hence my trial of an automatic targeting.

The problem--as I've confirmed as I just tried setting up another test campaign--is that two of my books don't generate any 'suggested' keywords by amazon in the manual targeting option. There's just no list there. It does say "suggested keywords" (which I must have missed when I set up the original manual ads for those books) but the list is blank. Below it, there is a place for "added keywords" but it is empty (until I manually add them).

For another book, it does give a list of suggested keywords, but (as perhaps others have found) the keywords are incredibly broad (for my book about dogs, it suggests a keyword of "life".).

I was misunderstanding the comments people made about leveraging amazon's suggested words because I was assuming they were discovered by setting up an automatic campaign, not a manual one.

Just as a note, I've let the auto keyword campaign run for a few days. So far (early, just 17K impressions) I'm getting (oddly) about the same click/impression rate (about 1 click per 1300 impressions) as my manual keywords, which are driven off of also boughts and specific book titles. The automatic CPC is higher though, at .12 instead of the manual .08.

Also, in general I have notice though that my clicks/impression worsen over time -- in the example above, I was getting a click/impression of under 1000, and now it is up to 1 per 1300.


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Decon said:


> I have over 1.2 millions impression on 5 books. All are targeted keywords to specific authors or book titles with a few exceptions. I have yet to see any of my books landing on any other than what I have targeted, and out of more than 500 keywords on each book, I have very few not to get any impressions. If that happens, or I get next to nothing in impressions after a time, I go look at the page of the book. It could be that it is very low on the charts and so not viewed. Or it could be the opposite and a best seller with sixty pages of ads and another 1000 in line waiting to get on the page before you at a higher bid, I pause those and seek another book as a keyword.
> 
> There are possibly 5 things going here.
> 
> ...


It could be that there aren't a lot of books with similar stories. In fact, one of the novels is the only fiction I am aware of that takes place in a unique setting. There are nonfiction books that relate directly to the subject and the setting, but the software isn't picking up on it. In another instance, a book that is a collection of short stories is getting impressions from some novels that I've used as keywords. I have found authors' names and book titles to be the most effective keywords. I wish more of them would be used for impressions. I've tried to avoid generic keywords.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

In my AMS campaigns, I have many keywords with numbers like this:

Impressions: 9
Clicks: 2
CPC: $0.02

That's great.  But what I (we) want is for the impressions number to go way up into the tens/hundreds of thousands (like some of my other keywords), not stay in single digits like that and other keywords with similar numbers do.

Is there anything we can do to make that happen?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

@ Philip

I'm not sure there is a way only increasing your bid on the keyword and crossing your fingers. It could be that keyword is directed to a book and that it's only been browsed by readers 9 times.

I had noticed that on 4 of my books, impressions were coming in at around 1,000+ per day each in total with clicks per book increasing around zero, to 1, or sometimes 2 per day on each. The APC on those varied from 2 to 3c, and to be honest, not producing a whole lot of sales. It looked good that the average for all 5 books was only 11% and so I was making a profit. I'm estimating that within a week from today my ACPC will jump to $0.8c across all five books

I did have one book that had an ACPC of 5c and that was getting around 5000+ impressions per day and it produced most of my sales.

I've since increased bids across all 5 books and that has had a dramatic effect on impressions and clicks, but as of yet there hasn't been time for the reporting to catch up. Saying that I am starting to be concerned as the ACPC has climbed rapidly to give an  average ACOS of 20% which is up from 11% and I'm not getting much on my sales dashboard (kDP, not the sponsored ads one) in the way of daily sales to cover the average daily spend.

That could change if I hold my nerve, but the limit I have set in my mind is 20% ACOS because of my weird tax situation and as I said, I am now bouncing along at that figure.

Here are the figures I took on Jan 6th the, the day I set the last of the  increased bids which I started increasing Jan 1st.

All five books @ Jan 6th 1,735,277 impressions    1,185 clicks 
All five book  @Jan 9th  1,863,978  ''      ''        1,283  ''
                                =======                      =======
Increase in 3 days        128,701      ''      ''          98 " 

So I'm now getting around 43,000 impressions per day and around 33 clicks per day.

Before I increased the bids as I said I was getting around 10,000 impressions per day, but it hasn't increased sales since I increased bids, so as yet it hasn't scaled up. In fact my sales are down. Not one sale on my KDP dashboard yesterday, which is rare, and my page reads have halved. It could be to do with January, I don't know, only maybe another week will tell. At the moment I feel as though I am just throwing money at it to see if it will stick.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

@wrpursche

Maybe they were right with the suggested *"life"* keyword for your dog book. One of your reviews does say "....self-help book intended for readers of all backgrounds, regardless of pet ownership, that draws upon what humans can learn from their canine companions."

Sounds interesting.

The other thing is that since I clicked on you cover, I now have a banner ad at the bottom of this page in my Google Chrome browser for a brand "*Life* Vivara, It then says, (*Life* Wishes, ate 50% off) I live in Brazil and it's Brazilian company. So something is at work with the connection to *life *and your book.

I thought is was God working his mysterious ways at first, then I noticed your title... The Canine Commandments:* Life*'s lessons from dogs.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

The delayed campaign metrics make decision-making tricky. We've been talking about waiting 3-5 days for the sales to appear, but if sales are _always _delayed, the only way to make good decisions is to pause a campaign and wait for the sales to catch up.

In a few days, I'll pause my latest campaign and watch to see which metrics change and when they change. Have any of you done that?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

TromboneAl said:


> The delayed campaign metrics make decision-making tricky. We've been talking about waiting 3-5 days for the sales to appear, but if sales are _always _delayed, the only way to make good decisions is to pause a campaign and wait for the sales to catch up.
> 
> In a few days, I'll pause my latest campaign and watch to see which metrics change and when they change. Have any of you done that?


Not sure if you were referring to my post which I have now edited to clarify. If you were, what I meant was that I am not getting sales on my KDP dashboard, as opposed to the sponsored ads dashboard, at all this past two days, so any delay will mean there is nothing to add to my sponsored sales. Hopefully that will change as the clicks have considerably increased.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Decon said:


> @ Philip
> 
> I'm not sure there is a way only increasing your bid on the keyword and crossing your fingers. It could be that keyword is directed to a book and that it's only been browsed by readers 9 times.
> 
> ...


Ha, I should have checked Create Space before posting this. Two paper books sod and updated on spons ads sales. Just need some eBook sales now.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Someone has started a thread on scaling up and I haven't replied to it because I'm hoping we can keep all the the info on here. In the report a few posts back where I said my impressions per day had jumped from 10,000 per day to 42,000 per day and from 10 clicks on five books to 33 per day. The figures where taken from a 3 day period. I now have a 24 hr period so I've added them here to see it was holding up.

All five books @ Jan 6th 1,735,277 impressions    1,185 clicks 
All five book  @Jan 9th  1,863,978  ''      ''        1,283  ''
                                =======                      =======
Increase in 3 days        128,701      ''      ''          98 " 



All five books @ Jan 10th 1,908,788                  1296 clicks

increase in impressions over 24 hrs 44,810  (Note, I paused one ad overnight as it is free today so it could have been higher.)  

The clicks are way down on the average for 3 days @ 33 per day, down to 13 for the period, but like I said I have a book paused for a promo.

Anyway, just to say it is possible to scale up to get more impressions by a combination of adding more keywords and increasing bids. What I can't say yet is if sales will scale up as mine have tanked this last week. Still, it's January, so that could have something to do with my lackluster sales, I hope.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Okay, in the interests of keeping all the info here:

Scaling up would seem to be all about scaling up the number of impressions.  But how to do that?

For my campaigns, if I can roughly predict:

how many clicks on a performing keyword I need for 1 sales (current average = roughly 

how many impressions I need on a performing keyword I need to get 1 click (current average = roughly 1,000)

So I can think that for my best performing keywords, I need 8,000 impressions to get 1 sale.

Problem is - I have no way to boost the number of impressions I get on those top performing keywords.  I could bid higher on them, but what's the point when my existing bid of $0.26 wins the auctions and always gets me a CPC of $0.10 or less?

Philip


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

Philip Gibson said:


> Scaling up would seem to be all about scaling up the number of impressions. But how to do that?


I'm only in my first campaign, but I'm wondering if scaling up impressions just to make that number higher isn't necessarily the goal. I think impressions tell you that there's a lot of traffic for that particular keyword, but is it the type of traffic that will generate meaningful clicks? For instance, I'm targeting a popular author/book who isn't an exact match to my target genre, but close. It's generated an impressive number of impressions, and is one of my leading generator of clicks (for a reasonable ACPC), but no sales so far. By comparison, a more targeted keyword has generated far less impressions, and less clicks, but more sales.

So am I wasting my money chasing impressions/clicks in this case? Maybe. I'll wait until the campaign ends and the final numbers roll in. However, at present it's not looking good. If anything, I'm now trying to scale up on the keywords that have generated sales to see if I can scale up on sales.

One other thought - I wonder how many impressions are merely other AMS authors checking out their positions on the sponsored products carousels?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Accord64 said:


> One other thought - I wonder how many impressions are merely other AMS authors checking out their positions on the sponsored products carousels?


Ha, never thought of that. Considerable I would imagine if others research books for keywords like me, which I didn't do at first as it would have been too much of a chore. I don't simply add books as keywords anymore just because they are the same genre. I want to know their chart position, how many other sponsored ads there are etc. I also check out high impressions on my reports with few to no clicks or no sales by going to the page to see if their are clues as to why before I either pause them or increase my bids.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Philip Gibson said:


> Okay, in the interests of keeping all the info here:
> 
> Problem is - I have no way to boost the number of impressions I get on those top performing keywords. I could bid higher on them, but what's the point when my existing bid of $0.26 wins the auctions and always gets me a CPC of $0.10 or less?
> 
> Philip


I think you have answered your own question and it's probably that you can't increase your impressions if you are winning the bids and getting onto the first page. What I would do in the first instance is to go to the book page, look at their chart position, and possibly star rating and price. From that you can glean if it is a popular book that readers would be eager to land on in numbers, or not.

It could be that it is expensive, a low star rating and has a poor chart position. If that's the case then it is likely the few who are landing there are more likely to consider delving further into what else is displayed on their page. Or it could be that your book is simply lower priced and yet has the same attributes, so whoever lands there, buys or clicks on yours. Whatever, I'd just accept that is the way it is, and scale up by adding more keywords to find other similar books that produce results, unless you are saying you already have a 1,000 keywords.


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## calpub (Nov 10, 2013)

Does anyone know if books advertised through AMS only appear on pages of other books and not products? I'm concerned about using broad terms for fear my books will show up on random product pages too.

Thanks!


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

I don't know about the Sponsored Product ads but Product Display ads can be deliberately targeted at non-book products.  For example, I targeted my budgeting title at expensive televisions and purses and jewelry at one point.  (Amazon shut the ad down for lack of clicks but it did generate a few sales before then.)  I assume if your ad is being displayed in search results (which is part of how Sponsored Product ads work) your books could show up with non-book products.


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## calpub (Nov 10, 2013)

Okay. Thank you for the info!


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## TheLemontree (Sep 12, 2015)

calpub said:


> Does anyone know if books advertised through AMS only appear on pages of other books and not products? I'm concerned about using broad terms for fear my books will show up on random product pages too.
> 
> Thanks!


I deliberately target some non book products with my keywords, if I think they'll be a good fit with my non fiction books.

Sent from my GT-S7390 using Tapatalk


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Decon said:


> Not sure if you were referring to my post which I have now edited to clarify.


No, it was just based on my observations: I was waiting for the sales data to update, then realized it may never be current. That is, if it's always delays, the ACoS will always be wrong.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

TheLemontree said:


> I deliberately target some non book products with my keywords, if I think they'll be a good fit with my non fiction books.
> 
> Sent from my GT-S7390 using Tapatalk


Thanks for the idea. I think I'll target some metronomes and piano lights for my sight-reading book.

I'm certainly not having as much success with my fiction titles--that's going to require some more research.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> Thanks for the idea. I think I'll target some metronomes and piano lights for my sight-reading book.


That could be a killer idea! Maybe tuning forks (or whatever they use these days) too.

And any other piano accessories you can think of.

Philip


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## Joseph Malik (Jul 12, 2016)

And cowbells.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Joseph Malik said:


> And cowbells.


How about electronic keyboards and toys parents buy for their kids to learn piano on?

I'd guess those might be expensive keywords, but I don't know. Might be worth a try. Hopefully, Al will let us know if he does.

Wish I could think of some non-book products relevant to my books. I'd love to try it myself.

(EDIT: I just thought of some: model building kits for Apollo spacecrafts, etc. Off to find some now.)

Philip


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## Darius Brasher (Feb 6, 2015)

Is anyone else experiencing problems with their AMS dashboard? When I logged on to it today, all of my Sponsored Product ads are gone from the dashboard, both the ones I'm currently running and the ones I've run in the past. The Product Ads are there, but not the Sponsored ones. I checked with the Amazon website, and my Sponsored ads seem to still be running, but on my AMS dashboard, it's as if they never existed. I'm about to send an email to Amazon to find out what the problem is, but I thought I'd see if anyone else is experiencing this.


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## calpub (Nov 10, 2013)

Yes! I'm having the same problem. Nearly had a heart attack. Glad it's not just me.


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## Greg Dragon (Jun 10, 2014)

Just popped mine open and dashboard only shows product display ads as well... I hope that this is a glitch.


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## MissingAlaska (Apr 28, 2014)

Darius Brasher said:


> Is anyone else experiencing problems with their AMS dashboard? When I logged on to it today, all of my Sponsored Product ads are gone from the dashboard, both the ones I'm currently running and the ones I've run in the past. The Product Ads are there, but not the Sponsored ones. I checked with the Amazon website, and my Sponsored ads seem to still be running, but on my AMS dashboard, it's as if they never existed. I'm about to send an email to Amazon to find out what the problem is, but I thought I'd see if anyone else is experiencing this.


Yes. I'm only seeing old product-search ads -- not my latest keyword ad. It disappeared sometime mid-morning. This is annoying as I'm seeing a spike in sales and would love to know if the ad is fueling them or not.


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## jackconnerbooks (Nov 18, 2014)

>>>>Is anyone else experiencing problems with their AMS dashboard? When I logged on to it today, all of my Sponsored Product ads are gone from the dashboard, both the ones I'm currently running and the ones I've run in the past. The Product Ads are there, but not the Sponsored ones. I checked with the Amazon website, and my Sponsored ads seem to still be running, but on my AMS dashboard, it's as if they never existed. I'm about to send an email to Amazon to find out what the problem is, but I thought I'd see if anyone else is experiencing this.


Having the same problem. Also nearly had a heart attack. I wonder what's up.


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## Sonya Bateman (Feb 3, 2013)

I'm so glad I can come to the WC when something incites me to panic, and find out that I'm not the only one going WHAT JUST HAPPENED. It's a strange relief, knowing I'm not the only one with the issue... 

Yep, both of my Sponsored Product ads have vanished from the dashboard too. Yay.


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## Mark Dawson (Mar 24, 2012)

Grr. Me too. Just the keyword ads (which I was rocking very nicely). Can't create any new ones, either. What gives, Amazon? I've emailed support and will report.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Hmmm... my AMS Dashboard has been working fine all day.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Harald said:


> Hmmm... my AMS Dashboard has been working fine all day.


Mine, too.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

What would help me, and what I will post when I've learned more, is information about how to tweak keywords.

For example, something like 

If I've had more than 30 clicks on a keyword, and no purchases, I pause that keyword.
If I've had more than 30 clicks on a keyword, but the ACoS is greater than 150%, I decrease the bid.
If the ACoS for a keyword is less than 40%, I increase the bid.

Anyone developed rules like that?


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

My sponsored products campaign metrics have been frozen since early this morning.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

TromboneAl said:


> What would help me, and what I will post when I've learned more, is information about how to tweak keywords.
> For example, something like
> If I've had more than 30 clicks on a keyword, and no purchases, I pause that keyword.
> If I've had more than 30 clicks on a keyword, but the ACoS is greater than 150%, I decrease the bid.
> ...


Yep. Me, too. It's too early for me to offer any rules but plan to do so after more than a month in. In the meantime, look forward to hearing what others say on this.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Since Saturday, 1/8: 180 keywords, 17,013 impressions, 18 clicks, ACPC .06, Spent $1.12, 1 sale at $2.99, Profit .94c

WHOOPEE!!!!

What's my secret? Darned if I know. It's not much, but it's something.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

I'm getting a few sales on my KDP dashboard of one of my AMS books. Anyone know how long it takes to show up on the AMS dashboard?


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> I'm getting a few sales on my KDP dashboard of one of my AMS books. Anyone know how long it takes to show up on the AMS dashboard?


AMS Dashboard states: "...may take up to 3 days to appear." I'm seeing 1 day so far, but I'm early in the process myself. Will keep watching this.


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

Has anyone noticed a significant slowdown over the past 2-3 days? My impressions and clicks have slowed to a crawl as compared to the prior 9 days. Sales have also flat-lined. I've only made minor tweaks to my keywords during that time, so no major changes to my campaign were made. 

Frustrating, because I had built some good momentum, and now it's come to an abrupt halt. I'm hoping it's a reporting issue, but my plunging sales rank suggests otherwise.


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## Eric Z (Apr 28, 2015)

Accord64 said:


> Has anyone noticed a significant slowdown over the past 2-3 days? My impressions and clicks have slowed to a crawl as compared to the prior 9 days. Sales have also flat-lined. I've only made minor tweaks to my keywords during that time, so no major changes to my campaign were made.
> 
> Frustrating, because I had built some good momentum, and now it's come to an abrupt halt. I'm hoping it's a reporting issue, but my plunging sales rank suggests otherwise.


Sure is frustrating - but there is this thing called "audience exhaustion". You have to realize that after a while your audience is used up, the ads have hit as many as they are going to as per your definition (budge+keywords/categories etc.)

You gotta test this yourself, there is a HUGE difference in size of audiences, e.g. my book in "Psychoanalysis" doesn't have half the audience of the "Small Business" category.

I'm batting at hundreds of $ or 3 digits while my buddies in small business are consistently batting at thousands - 4 digits.

PLACEMENT is a big factor.

I recommend you turn off your ads for a week or more and the turn them back on when your audience has replenished.[but how do you guage this?]

This is total guru science and thumb rules to say the least. We all know there is a huge Christmas bump (at least my kids books on CreateSpace sell about 5x more in November and December- NOT my Kindle books.) so if your ads are doing good, then you know:
--Your cover is working
--Your Title is working (hook)
--Your -zon sales page is working (hook2)

That leaves you with 2 knobs to turn: Keywords(or category and product placement) and TIMING.
You gotta test yourself and add new keywords to increase your coverage and see if it is a matter of coverage or audience exhaustion.

Gonna do a webinar about his end of month. ;-)


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

Eric Z said:


> Sure is frustrating - but there is this thing called "audience exhaustion". You have to realize that after a while your audience is used up, the ads have hit as many as they are going to as per your definition (budge+keywords/categories etc.)


That makes sense, but would this impact the number of impressions? My thought is that it would only affect clicks and sales, as impressions are the total number of people landing on that keyword. Unless I've misunderstood what impressions really are?


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## IreneP (Jun 19, 2012)

Accord64 said:


> That makes sense, but would this impact the number of impressions? My thought is that it would only affect clicks and sales, as impressions are the total number of people landing on that keyword. Unless I've misunderstood what impressions really are?


Amazon shows more successful ads more. So if you are getting impressions but no clicks, I think they will gradually rotate you in less.

I'm not really sure their methodology, but I think the above is true. If your ads are in a category with a relatively small reader base, I think the "exhaustion" thing might be right. At a certain point a lot of those people have seen your ad and either clicked or not. Also, my guess is they get "blind" to it. They've seen it enough that their eye slides over it and catches on the sparkly new ad in the list. I would think that is why stopping/starting seems effective sometimes?

But really, just a guess.


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## Eric Z (Apr 28, 2015)

Accord64 said:


> That makes sense, but would this impact the number of impressions? My thought is that it would only affect clicks and sales, as impressions are the total number of people landing on that keyword. Unless I've misunderstood what impressions really are?


If you already have some successful ads, you can benchmark them, e.g. I have an excel (which will be available at end of webinar) that projects more stuff,for example: "how many clicks per sale" 
My ads average 30 clicks for the first sale.

I think on average we are all taking the metrics too seriously - some of them are not "stand alone" - and don't make any sense out of context.

For example, if I have targeted my book sloppily, I will get TONS of impressions, but that doesn't mean anything does it? -- I targeted a "big" niche that maybe has nothing to do with my book.

The start of a "fresh" campaign is where the juice is. If you are getting impressions and no clicks = something wrong; Category, Cover, Description (no hook etc.)

If you are getting impressions AND clicks but no sales, means your AD is working but your -zon sales page is not -OR- you are targeting wrong readers/products/category/keywords.

However we were talking about running ads above - so I'm gonna tip audience exhaustion...


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

I have a lot of doubts about the exhaustion of audience theory. Say your book is being shown on the page for Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I'm a buyer/reader. I go buy Bleak House, I'll see your book and decide to buy it or not. But after I buy Bleak House, I'm not going to go back to the page for Bleak House again because I already got that book. So the next person who sees your ad on the page for Bleak House would be someone who hasn't bought Bleak House. Sure, a reader might check out Bleak House a few times before buying it, but the point is, Bleak House gets continuous stream of new readers looking to buy it, and those people would not have seen your ad before. So unless all the readers who want to buy Bleak House have all bought it, I don't see how the audience can be exhausted.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Eric Z said:


> ... For example, if I have targeted my book sloppily, I will get TONS of impressions, but that doesn't mean anything does it? -- I targeted a "big" niche that maybe has nothing to do with my book.


Yep, Eric's right. There seems be a mini-fad here on Kbrds of authors using the keyword "unlimited." Sure, tons of impressions, but so what? What matters is Clicks, conversion to Sales, and a decent ACoS (although there are other benefits to AMS ads beyond ACoS).


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

IreneP said:


> Amazon shows more successful ads more. So if you are getting impressions but no clicks, I think they will gradually rotate you in less.


That could be an explanation, also.

For several days my impressions/clicks came at a steady rate (with some sales, which were building momentum). Then sales abruptly flat-lined. Soon after that, I noticed that my overall impressions & click totals slowed down significantly. At first I thought it was because my daily $ limit was reached and the campaign suspended itself until the next day. But the next couple of days showed the same slowness, so it couldn't have been caused by hitting my daily limit.

If I understand this correctly, if impressions slow, it's because my ad isn't running as much (because the impression counter only ticks up when your ad is active for that keyword). That certainly could suggest that Amazon has deemed my ad less successful, and has decided to run it less within all of my keywords (around 200). That sucks, because that would mean that the Zon basically shot my campaign dead just as it was taking off in sales.

My only other thoughts are that it was a slower week for book browsing, or maybe a busier week within AMS. More campaigns running might be driving up the minimum bid prices per click, which is causing my ad to run less.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Accord64 said:


> That could be an explanation, also.
> 
> For several days my impressions/clicks came at a steady rate (with some sales, which were building momentum). Then sales abruptly flat-lined. Soon after that, I noticed that my overall impressions & click totals slowed down significantly. At first I thought it was because my daily $ limit was reached and the campaign suspended itself until the next day. But the next couple of days showed the same slowness, so it couldn't have been caused by hitting my daily limit.
> 
> ...


They rotate you out even if the ad is successful. It's just what they do. I haven't figued out what the method is and I may never figure it out. They sometimes take away sponsored ads on a page all together for a day or two, and then the ads come back. Sometimes they'll put your book in the paperback version only, but not the kindle version, even though none of the ads on the kindle version has any relevance and all the ads on the paperback version are targeting the same readers. In fact, lately I'm finding they often put similar genre book ads on the paperback page, and they would only show the same repeated sheik romances on the kindle page of every book.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Keep in mind, AMS is going to be a little wonky for awhile.

It was just opened up to everyone. Plus, there's been a lot of "press" covering it. More and more authors are proclaiming AMS to be the best alternative to Facebook advertising.

So folks are rushing in and throwing money at it. Worse, they're overbidding, partly because it's difficult to track AMS metrics and partly due to an "anything for more visibility" attitude.

There's only so much prime real estate to go around. By "prime," I mean the 1st panel (or page) of sponsored listings for high-value keywords and relevant books. There's a lot of stupid money grabbing that real estate.

Things will shake out this year as Amazon's PPC algos improve, AMS offers additional tracking features, and more authors blow up their "bankrolls." 

In my opinion, now's the time to optimize your ad copy for conversions (in this case, clicks). Start building a high-CTR track record for your account so you can outrank higher bidders down the road. And create a killer call-to-action to join your mailing lists. Your lists will make it easier to earn out your adspend.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Anarchist said:


> Keep in mind, AMS is going to be a little wonky for awhile. It was just opened up to everyone. [...]


Anarchist: what do you mean "just opened up to everyone"? I can't find anything about that. Thanks.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Link5 said:


> Before November-ish, a book had to be in Select to be able to run an AMS ad on it. That is no longer a requirement, any KDP book can run an ad.


Ah... OK, got it. Thanks!


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

As promised, here's my experiment to show what reports are delayed. Result:*

Reports of impressions, clicks, and sales can all be delayed.*

I paused an ad for my sight-reading book at 11:27 on 1/12/17. Here are how the stats changed over time:










I'll let you know if they continue to change, but it looks like all the reports had come in after two days. It could vary, of course. I'll let you know if there are any further changes.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

TromboneAl said:


> ... I'll let you know if they continue to change, but it looks like all the reports had come in after two days. It could vary, of course. I'll let you know if there are any further changes.


Interesting! I'm also now seeing a full delay of 2 days. However, I have a twist that I don't see above in your chart: new Sales but NO new Clicks, which is theoretically impossible. Which tells me that there are also lags among the columns within the same campaign line. Would be interested if you notice that happening, too.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Ah, looks like another sale of $7.99 (paperback) came in:










and it's interesting to note that CreateSpace tells me the last sale was made was on 1/12. Perhaps that sale hasn't registered with CreateSpace yet.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

TromboneAl said:


> Ah, looks like another sale of $7.99 (paperback) came in: [...]


So again proving that there is not only a Campaign Lag but also an Inter-Column Campaign Lag, right? In this case, a 2-day delay reporting a Sale with no new Clicks.

Thanks for posting this, Al.


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## thewritescott (Nov 18, 2016)

Getting set to run my first ad. When do you actually pay? After the ads run? Up front? It looks like $100 is the minimum amount that can be spent.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

thewritescott said:


> Getting set to run my first ad. When do you actually pay? After the ads run? Up front? It looks like $100 is the minimum amount that can be spent.


They charge your credit card. The first time they charged my card it was for $1.06. You can look at the billing history tab.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

thewritescott said:


> It looks like $100 is the minimum amount that can be spent.


I think that's no longer true.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

TromboneAl said:


> I think that's no longer true.


I hope it's no longer true. If it is, is it $100 across all campaigns or $100 each? If it's each, I'm in big trouble.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> I hope it's no longer true. If it is, is it $100 across all campaigns or $100 each? If it's each, I'm in big trouble.


Depends on which ad type you choose. For Sponsored Products (the easiest/cheapest to get into and a good place to start IMHO), all you need, after setting up your account, is to start your campaign @ $1 per day minimum, which you can Pause or Terminate at any time. My first credit card charge was for $1.05. My current bill is "accumulating."


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

The $100 minimum is only for Product Display ads (not Sponsored Product ads).  You don't have to spend anywhere near the $100 though - you can terminate (but not pause) the campaign at any time.

Philip


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## P.A. Woodburn (May 22, 2010)

Please check out My Amazon Marketing Experiment for more information. See above. Now below.


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

While researching also-boughts to add to my ads keywords list, my ad came up on a book/author/series that I do not have as a keyword. So I got an impressions on something I'm not paying for officially. Not complaining, just pointing out that the algos might be doing more than we think they are.

BTW, I have also gotten a couple of sales on keywords without a single click. So I'm thinking this might be the reason (as opposed to a delay in reporting).


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

GrandFenwick said:


> ... BTW, I have also gotten a couple of sales on keywords without a single click. So I'm thinking this might be the reason (as opposed to a delay in reporting).


Hmmm... By Amazon's own definition, you can't have a Sale without a Click (in AMS). Strange.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Harald said:


> Hmmm... By Amazon's own definition, you can't have a Sale without a Click (in AMS). Strange.


Maybe the report of the click was delayed more than the report of the sale. From my experiment, I found that reports of clicks, impressions, and sales can all be delayed.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

TromboneAl said:


> Maybe the report of the click was delayed more than the report of the sale. From my experiment, I found that reports of clicks, impressions, and sales can all be delayed.


Yeah, I know that the Sales column can be delayed but I've never seen the Clicks column delayed on a Sale (for me). But I guess so. Maybe GrandFenwick can update us on her columns to see if the Clicks caught up.


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

I have two keywords that show no clicks and one purchase each. So far, they have not changed. I tried to post a screenshot but I failed.

But once again, I'd like to point out that in researching also-boughts, I keep finding my ad under keywords/books/authors that I have NOT targeted. So it looks like Amazon is maybe floating impressions in related keywords even if you haven't picked them?


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

GrandFenwick said:


> I have two keywords that show no clicks and one purchase each. So far, they have not changed. I tried to post a screenshot but I failed.


We believe you  But give it another day.



> But once again, I'd like to point out that in researching also-boughts, I keep finding my ad under keywords/books/authors that I have NOT targeted. So it looks like Amazon is maybe floating impressions in related keywords even if you haven't picked them?


Amazon cares primarily about Relevance. If your book is relevant to another for any reason, the algorithm could put your ad there. My guess, anyway.


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

Haha ok. I will post my screenshots when I get back to my desktop. I can't do anything from my phone.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Pretty sure right now that all keywords for these types of ads default to a broad match rather than an exact match which is how you could be appearing on pages that aren't identical to what you have as keywords.

No explanation though for it reporting sales without clicks unless there's some sort of delay in reporting clicks but my observation has been that it's more often the case that the delay is in reporting the sales.


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

Here are the screenshots.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

GrandFenwick said:


> Here are the screenshots.


Have never seen anything like that (in my 10 days of doing AMS ads . Anybody else?


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Harald said:


> Have never seen anything like that (in my 10 days of doing AMS ads . Anybody else?


Yes, that is strange. I've been losing clicks and impressions. I'm going to start keeping track tomorrow.


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

Harald said:


> Have never seen anything like that (in my 10 days of doing AMS ads . Anybody else?


The final week of my latest campaign basically flat-lined, so I'd love to learn how you managed that.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

It's the miracle of the immaculate acquisition. Now, if you can just scale that up.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

TromboneAl said:


> It's the miracle of the immaculate acquisition. Now, if you can just scale that up.


That's wonderful!

Philip


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## Christopher Bunn (Oct 26, 2010)

TromboneAl said:


> It's the miracle of the immaculate acquisition. Now, if you can just scale that up.


Ha! AMS has been a head-scratcher these past few weeks. I wouldn't be surprised if it runs on a mixture of pixie dust and a couple hamsters running in their wheels.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Something I noticed today...

I've had two main AMS ads running on my fantasy novel for a while.  I paused both of them on the 12th because I was running a 99 cent promo on it over the weekend and didn't want to target the full-price trade authors that those ads target.  Instead I set up an automatically-targeted ad and ran that from the 13th to the 15th.  The ad showed five clicks but no sales.  Today I turned back on those two main AMS ads and went looking for new authors in my also-boughts to ad to my list of keywords.  One of the authors I really like who I hadn't been able to get sales on was now showing in my also boughts.  I went back to that ad and saw that the keyword for that author was now showing two sales.  At the sale price.  Even though that particular ad wasn't running when the book was on sale.

Which is all a long-winded way to say that if you're running multiple ads on a book the sales of that book may get credited to different ads than the one that ultimately led to the sale.  I suspect two people had previously clicked on the book when it was at full-price, decided not to buy, and then saw it was on sale and bought and because it was within the x number of days that AMS counts towards an ad, those buys went on the first ad they saw not the second one.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

The problem with the ACoS figure is that it doesn't take into account

KU borrows
Audiobooks
The difference in royalty rates for paperbacks vs. ebooks
Organic sales that may result from an improvement in rank
Other organic sales
So, for my sight-reading book, I looked at a year of sales and determined that average royalty income per day. Any sales above that I will attribute to the ad, and use that information to decide if it's making money.


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## Eric Z (Apr 28, 2015)

FYI:
-Zon will indeed turn off under performing ads:

quote:
Hello Eric,

Yes, it is true. If customers did not engage with your ad campaign when there are many impressions (impressions are the number of times your ad was displayed.); but, no clicks for it, your ad may get stopped.

We're unable to provide you with specific numbers or algorithm on how it works. I'm sorry for any inconvenience that has caused.

However, we do actively compare the effectiveness of an ad with other similar ads. We want to ensure that ads are both of interest to our customers and effective to advertisers like you.

In such cases, we highly encourage you to create a new campaign with an eye towards more specific interests and products your potential customers would likely have. Refining your targeting options, ensuring your book's cover, title, and price appeal to customers and adding ratings and reviews to your detail page may help increase the effectiveness and relevance of your ad.

For more details on ad performance, see our Help page:

https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A29SDHM2KNHV0N
unquote

So I guess we gotta watch those impressions, once they go down or freeze, looks like game over for that ad.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

So I recently did an experiment of running a campaign for Book 3 in my series, set it at limit $1, and let Amazon choose where to run it instead of my own KWs.

I do have two other campaigns for my Book 1 in series which I work much harder on to promote. But I wanted to see what happens if I run a later book in the series (plus I needed to find another way to repopulate my Also-Bots with the right genre books after a free promo run that destroyed my also-bots). So obviously, ROI on Book 3 was not my goal. I wanted to attract readers to click on Book 3 so they would go on to buy Book 1. People can't read Book 3 without reading Book 1 & 2 first.

I started running the Book 3 campaign on 12/28. I paused it last night. It got a total of 43310 impressions and 40 clicks. My total spending was $4.41. I didn't expect any buys but actually did get 1 buy.

I get the feeling that Book 3 gathers enough clicks as an ad for my series. As I said, I don't expect buys from this ad at all, the buys should go toward Book 1. But I'm worried that if I continue to run it, and there's no buy, Amazon algo would think the book is not selling and stop running the ad.

I don't know what to do from this point on.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

It's all experimenting at this stage for me . I have my original ad , which got over 180k impressions, 98 clicks and initially four sales and two full reads. Right after that it came to a screeching halt as far as sales and reads go . I added about 20 new authors to my keywords last night. We'll see how that goes.

I have also set up a new ad for that book with different copy and only Amazon suggested keywords. The reason I did that is because all four of my sales in the original ad came from the Amazon keywords.

Fingers crossed, candles lit.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Here's my take so far with people saying it's not working for them the same as it was..

Once you have been in this a while and if you are getting a good number of imressions, and clicks, and you are not getting frozen out, but the sales and reads slow down as mine have, then it is likely because when the customer clicks on your cover that you are missing one ingeredient and that is a decent rank. So I don't believe that sponsored ads by themselves are the utopia of marketing and that once set up that's all you have to do for regular sales and reads. My experience is that sales increase via sponsored ads in line with any decent tail after say a free promo where your rank is improved and decrease as you rank decreases.

I also think that as many dived in in December that the highs and lows of the buying season also have to be taken into account.

Make of what's below as you will.

Jan 22nd










Dec 19th


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Nice results, Declan.


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

My books have been rotated out of the beginning of the carousels, and they are getting fewer impressions. I believe this happens to everyone. I'm considering pausing the ads, but I don't know for how long--a week, two weeks?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> Nice results, Declan.


Thanks

I've kept all my original ads running with no trials. All I have done is to add keywords, delete none performing, and to increase bids on successful keywords when I slipped down pages. I have also paused indvidual book ads during any promo.

One thing I did do,and that was to change the cover and blurb on Deadly Journey (2nd ad down) which at the time was getting the clicks as you can see, but the ACOS was 51.89% even with low bids. That's now in line with my other books results., In fact it is doing slighly better at 18.93%

Amazon does say that the longer you keep ads running, the more data they have for page placement.... or not if a keyword is not performing. I don't see this happen on individual keywords that perform within a campaign ad. By deleting your own none performing keywords, I think you help to improve their data so that you get more of a chance of placement with any new ones you add.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

I just raised bids on non-performers. I'll give them a few days to "impress" me. If not, I'll cut them.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> I just raised bids on non-performers. I'll give them a few days to "impress" me. If not, I'll cut them.


Yeah, that's what I did, but I also brought up the Amazon kindle sales page on my browser, then copied book title across from my keywords to see if I was on the pages before increasing. If I was the last of say 39 pages, or far away, then I paused/deleted the keyword considering the competition for a first page too high to be worth increasing my bid

If however I was in stiking distance of the first page, I would increase my bid.

If I had no impressions, then I took it that amazon had algos in place that didn't match the meta data from the target book, even though I thought it was a match, so I deleted those.

As an example, I listed all Von Dankin books which are not exactly fiction stories but cover the idea of "gods" So in effect one of my books has his ideas as a fiction thriller story relating to ancient gods, so I imagined his readers would accept the premise. Amazon's algos just don't see it that way, so I had no impressions and deleted them all. No amount of increasing my bids would have got me onto his page, as they only had a few sponsored ads anyway, so mine would have been on them with a low bid if Amazon considered it a match.


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## JayandFunGoo (Jan 20, 2017)

Read this article -

http://www.justpublishingadvice.com/how-to-master-kindle-keywords-for-free/


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

Decon said:


> One thing I did do,and that was to change the cover and blurb on Deadly Journey ...


I see that as a potential use of AMS ads: Testing covers.

Run an ad for two weeks with one cover, take a break, then run the same ad after changing the cover.

The clicks/impressions figures should give you a good indication of which cover is more effective.


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## Cherise (May 13, 2012)

JayandFunGoo said:


> Read this article -
> 
> http://www.justpublishingadvice.com/how-to-master-kindle-keywords-for-free/


That's not what we're talking about in this thread.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Looking at the number of sponsored ad pages, it really is getting so competitive as to be ridiculous. One of my own own books which is nothing to shout about regards sales and reads, has 84 pages of ads with 7 per page. I can't see anyone getting many impressions from it as a keyword, never mind clicks and sales. 

When I went to look at some popular books I have as keywords, they also have upto 84 pages and despite recently increasing my bids and getting to within a spit of the 1 page, I am now 50 pages down with bids of 26c.

So when I said that sales were probably slow because of January, I'm having to think again, because this beast is moving so fast, I must be gradually working my way to the back of the list. From November with many books having say 3 pages and top books with 20. To December with many books up to 15 pages and top books with 35, to now 84 in January. No wonder it is not as effective.

In my opinion now over utilized, with bids required of 50c+ to get to the first page on popular books. That makes it likely unprofitabe for any book at less that $4.99 and even then I'm gessing at a poor ACOS.


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

Decon said:


> In my opinion now over utilized, with bids required of 50c+ to get to the first page on popular books. That makes it likely unprofitabe for any book at less that $4.99 and even then I'm gessing at a poor ACOS.


This was a concern I had earlier: Too many campaigns running at once. Then there's the algorithm that Eric Z confirmed Amazon is applying to all campaigns (stopping ads in low-performing keywords, without warning or explanation of how it works). Just making it too hard (and expensive) to use AMS effectively.


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## WRPursche (Feb 18, 2011)

I totally agree with Decon and Accord64. Something changed big time over the last week or so. (Perhaps partially coinciding with the rollout to non Select). For many of my (book title) keywords, I was getting on page 1 or 2 of 10 pages in the carousel with bids of 15 cents.

Now there seem to be 75+ pages in the carousel of almost all the books on amazon, even low selling ones.  

On a few keywords, I raised my bid to 27 cents (to get past the automatic recommended bid of .25) and I still didn't see my ad listed after going through the first 40 or so pages.  I can't imagine what it is costing to get on page 1 or 2. 

Anyone else getting better visibility with reasonable bids?


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Something to think about...

All ad platforms become increasingly, and eventually prohibitively, expensive in the context of generating direct sales at low price points.

For example, in the early days of FB advertising, it was relatively easy to produce a positive ROI by sending folks directly to Amazon for single-book purchases at $2.99. As more authors launched FB ad campaigns, bids increased and ROIs declined. Today, it's difficult to generate a positive ROI via direct sales unless you're using a price point normally reserved for box sets (e.g. $6.99).

AMS is getting to that point. It's not there yet, but it will be soon.

The question is, how can you participate in AMS in the future without hemorrhaging cashflow? In my opinion, there are two ways...

1. optimize your account CTR.

2. prioritize the growth of your mailing list.

Regarding #2, in the future of AMS, it'll no longer be enough to have seven people click on your ad and one person buy your book. You'll need to get folks on a list where you can promote - and get them to buy - *all* of your books. The more profit each subscriber generates, the more you can spend on AMS ads.

AMS, of course, is designed to get people to click and make purchases. Unlike FB ads, you can't send folks to your site to join a list. But you *can* make your in-book mailing-list call to action so irresistible that people can't help but join. And once they do, you can reach out to them over and over, promoting your backlist and generating a growing volume of sales.

Nearly every type of business, from grocery stores and restaurants to auto repair shops and dental practices, want your email address. That's so they can increase the average lifetime value of their respective audiences, allaying their advertising costs. Indie authors will have to use the same model to stay competitive.

AMS is only going to get more expensive. Bids are going to rise as marketing-savvy authors build funnels that maximize profit per customer. The more profit they're able to generate per customer, the higher they'll be willing to bid, even if higher bids produce a negative ROI on the first purchase.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

One thing I haven't done so much of since starting AMS and that is promote my books via the free days, where I know I get a return, and an increase in page reads.  The reason for this is that AMS provided daily sales and page reads, but now not so much.

It's looking like I'll go back to doing that just now, but leave the AMS running with no more increases in bids, and to pause all the keywords where I am 50 pages down with high bids, then if my ACOS gets to 30% or more, I'll pause it all until I see how it plays out. Amazon can freeze keywords as much as they like , because I don't intend to play their profit game at the expense of mine.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few months, because I expect more dramatic changes for people to consider it a marketing tool worth participating in.... or not.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Well, I have a different story to tell. I also have my main series novella (Book 1 @ $0.99) appearing way back on Sponsored pages, but the AMS campaign is more than paying for itself with the pickup in KU Reads. Way more. Plus any additional outside-AMS "organic" sales due to the Sales Rank bump from the Reads. Plus the funneling to a higher-priced book. And I've been *dropping* my bids to keep my daily Spend under control. My overall ACoS on this one campaign is now over 80%, but that doesn't bother me at all. At least not for now. Of course, I will be watching all this closely. And I'll be promoting my email list .


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Harald said:


> Well, I have a different story to tell. I also have my main series novella (Book 1 @ $0.99) appearing way back on Sponsored pages, but the AMS campaign is more than paying for itself with the pickup in KU Reads. Way more. Plus any additional outside-AMS "organic" sales due to the Sales Rank bump from the Reads. Plus the funneling to a higher-priced book. And I've been *dropping* my bids to keep my daily Spend under control. My overall ACoS on this one campaign is now over 80%, but that doesn't bother me at all. At least not for now. Of course, I will be watching all this closely. And I'll be promoting my email list .


In my last 2 posts I am predicting the near future. You are only telling it like it is now. I have a different story to tell just like you if you look on the page before this with screenshots for my results to the 22th Jan and my ACOS is around 20% on average on all five book campaigns, which are all @ $2.99 each book. So you could say why the doom and gloom?

I've read some of your thread, but I might not be up to date, and to be honest your ACOS scares me regardless of the increase in page reads. You have one ad on one book with an ACOS 80% with a sale price of 99c. With a royalty of 35% then that is still losing 45% per sale. Of course, I'm not taking account of page reads, or any sell on, which you estimate take you into profit. But then don't you have another @ 2.99 with over 200% ACOS? Are the page reads putting that into profit?

I'm not going to say that it won't or hasn't worked for everyone so far. There are many different motivations for bidding to lose money on a particular book, as far as the ACOS goes, but I can only talk from my motivaton and circumstances. You seem to have a series going on, which I don't is one observation.

I'd be interested in where you are with your campaigns in 4 weeks time now that we are seeing a jump to 80 + pages of ads on even mediocre books, from say 15 pages 4 weeks ago. And some are saying 100 pages now on popular books that 4 weeks ago where at around 39. All I am saying is what was, is not possibly how it is going to pan out in what is a fast changing marketing program that has suddenly had a megga leap in competition, which if it continues, bids will get out of hand to get any kind of visibility, and keeping bids as they are or lowering bids will only see contributors moving further down the line for placement. Lower visibility will eventually produce less page reads and sales. that's all I am saying.

EDIT: here are my screen shots from page 18

What these show is that I have increased my bids, but that I have not recieved a proportional sales increase from the first screen shot to the second. In other words it is getting harder and more costly. The exception to this is the 2nd book in the list which was underperforming until I changed the cover and blurb.

Dec 19th










Jan 22nd


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Decon said:


> In my last 2 posts I am predicting the near future. You are only telling it like it is now. I have a different story to tell just like you if you look on the page before this with screenshots for my results to the 22th Jan and my ACOS is around 20% on average on all five book campaigns, which are all @ $2.99 each book. So you could say why the doom and gloom? [...]


Hi Decon. Yeah, I was responding to the Doom & Gloom with my story, which may be different, but it is what it is. Admittedly, I'm only into AMS for about 17 days now, but that's 17 days of tracking and tweaking. I will also be interested in where I am with AMS in another 17 days, one month, or whenever. I may be whistling a different tune. Or maybe out of AMS. Who knows? But from where I sit now, it's a good experiment, and it's working for me, mainly for the series-entree Book 1, but even for my high-ACoS Book 2 (yes, it's a growing series with Book 3 about to drop). Both are earning beyond their AMS Spends, and also *because* of those AMS Spends. I'll let you know how it goes.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Do we have clarity on what an 'Impression' really is?  If our book features on page 28 of the sponsored ads of a keyworded book and nobody sees it, is that still counted as an impression?

Bit confused about this.

Philip


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## jackconnerbooks (Nov 18, 2014)

Does Amazon actually swat you down if you have too many active ads? If so, how many is too many? I'm trying to make sense of my keyword ads suddenly slowing down in the last week or two. Maybe I have too many ads running?


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Philip Gibson said:


> Do we have clarity on what an 'Impression' really is? If our book features on page 28 of the sponsored ads of a keyworded book and nobody sees it, is that still counted as an impression?
> Bit confused about this.
> Philip


Yes. Here's what Amazon says:
"AMS offers two ad types for KDP eBooks:
*Sponsored Product ads:* Drive sales with keyword-targeted ads that appear below search results and on detail pages.
*Product Display ads:* Drive awareness of your book with reader and genre-targeted ads on detail pages."

To me, that means: if the ad shows up somewhere/anywhere, it's an Impression.


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## TromboneAl (Mar 20, 2015)

I'm trying to picture how organic, not-directly-through-the-ad sales might happen.

1. Someone sees the ad, but doesn't click or clicks but doesn't purchase.

He or she remembers the name of the book and searches for it another time or remembers the name of the book, and, when it comes up in a promo or through browsing, he/she is more likely to buy it.

2. Someone buys the book via the ad, and tells someone else about it (WOM).

3. The rank is improved via ad sales, making it more visible.

*4. The reader finds the book via an ad on his/her mobile device, emails the link to his/her computer, and purchases it from there.*

Any other ways?


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

TromboneAl said:


> I'm trying to picture how organic, not-directly-through-the-ad sales might happen.
> 1. Someone sees the ad, but doesn't click or clicks but doesn't purchase.
> He or she remembers the name of the book and searches for it another time or remembers the name of the book, and, when it comes up in a promo or through browsing, he/she is more likely to buy it.
> 2. Someone buys the book via the ad, and tells someone else about it (WOM).
> ...


3b. The rank is improved via KU Borrows, making it more visible. (requires KU)


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

jackconnerbooks said:


> Does Amazon actually swat you down if you have too many active ads? If so, how many is too many? I'm trying to make sense of my keyword ads suddenly slowing down in the last week or two. Maybe I have too many ads running?


Not really sure about them targeting you for having too many active ads, but one page back Eric Z posted a reply he received from Amazon on a related issue of why keyword impressions suddenly slow (or stop):



> Hello Eric,
> 
> Yes, it is true. If customers did not engage with your ad campaign when there are many impressions (impressions are the number of times your ad was displayed.); but, no clicks for it, your ad may get stopped.
> 
> ...


So there's an overriding algorithm at work that will cease under-performing ads - no matter what you bid or when your campaign is supposed to end. Period.

I'm surprised Eric's post went largely unnoticed, because I think this is a real game changer for AMS.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Accord64 said:


> I'm surprised Eric's post went largely unnoticed, because I think this is a real game changer for AMS.


Speaking only for myself...

It's not that it went unnoticed. It's just been said before (for example, here and here)


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## jackconnerbooks (Nov 18, 2014)

>>>>So there's an overriding algorithm at work that will cease under-performing ads - no matter what you bid or when your campaign is supposed to end. Period.

My ads weren't underperforming, they just suddenly, about a week or two ago, began to move extremely slowly. Where before they were always maxing out their daily limits, now they're barely doing anything. They're not frozen, though. They're moving. Slowly. 

I'm trying to figure out how to speed them up again. I'm bidding high, so that's not it. This all started when, about a week or two ago, all my keywords ads vanished from my marketing dashboard (something that was mentioned several pages ago but then stopped receiving comments). The ad sets reappeared a few hours later, but the slowdown in my ads coincide with that incident (coincidentally or not), and they've never recovered. I'm knocking my head against the wall trying to figure it out because it has severely affected my sales.


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

Anarchist said:


> Speaking only for myself...
> 
> It's not that it went unnoticed. It's just been said before (for example, here and here)


Yes, it was noticed that something was going on, but is this the first time we got confirmation from Amazon? If not, sorry, I hadn't seen anyone post a response from them before.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Accord64 said:


> Yes, it was noticed that something was going on, but is this the first time we got confirmation from Amazon?


To my knowledge, yes. But no ad platform will survive for long unless such measures are taken.


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

jackconnerbooks said:


> My ads weren't underperforming, they just suddenly, about a week or two ago, began to move extremely slowly. Where before they were always maxing out their daily limits, now they're barely doing anything. They're not frozen, though. They're moving. Slowly.


Are you taking about clicks or impressions? If clicks slowed, and impressions are running the same, then I'd say there's probably an increase in ad campaigns using those keywords, and they're out-bidding you. If it's a slowdown in impressions, then I'd say the algorithm is taking over and starting to shut you off. That's what's been happening to me. Just my opinion based on observations so far.



> I'm trying to figure out how to speed them up again. I'm bidding high, so that's not it. This all started when, about a week or two ago, all my keywords ads vanished from my marketing dashboard (something that was mentioned several pages ago but then stopped receiving comments). The ad sets reappeared a few hours later, but the slowdown in my ads coincide with that incident (coincidentally or not), and they've never recovered. I'm knocking my head against the wall trying to figure it out because it has severely affected my sales.


I didn't experience that exactly. I got to see impressions/clicks take off in the first couple of days, followed by a spike in sales, followed by an abrupt slowdown that stopped sales cold. I too tried to increase my bids against keywords that had been working for me, but it didn't have any affect. Frustrating.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Harald said:


> 3b. The rank is improved via KU Borrows, making it more visible. (requires KU)


I'd not thought about the situation regarding page reads for those in KU.

That may just be the salvation of AMS in the future for the ones in KU. I predict many are going to try AMS and in the current situation give it up as next to useless. Here's why.

1, If you consider your own results as someone in KU the few sales you (or me) are getting, hardly set the rank on fire.

2. With the increased competition, many will start to have a higher % ACOS than the % royalty (Something you are experiencing) Therefore making a loss on every sale.

3, Those outside KU will not be able to take into account page reads when assessing profitability, which is something you can do. Nor will they benefit from the rank with borrows that could lead to visibility and additional sales.

I see this as a waiting game for the day when it implodes and everone starts to shun it. I've read a thread on another post today where many are saying they are experiencing a rapid slowdown, which sort of backs up my point I made earlier about competition.

My own data shows that in the last two days, my clicks on 5 books stand at 12 clicks in total. that is 6 clicks per day spread between 5 books.

If you look at my screen shots above (page19 if this takes it over the page) from the 19th of Dec to the 22nd of Jan I have had 660 new clicks over 34 days. Or 19.4 clicks per day.

We all know that clicks are not sales and different authors will have different results but I once calculated 11 clicks per sale from my data. At that reckoning I am unlikely to get more than 1 sale every two days across 5 books if the slowdown continues. That in turn will slow down the page reads as visibility declines. This is already happening to me.

Impressions - these are only useful to know how many times your book has appeared on a book page from a target keyword. They are next to useless if you are far down on the pages and therefore have next to no visdibility.

to the 19th December 1,213,679

to the 22nd January 2,264,002

That's an increase of 1,051,323 impressions averaging 210,264 per book for 34 days, or 6,186 impressions per day per book.

Averages don't tell the full story as impressions have been falling of over the past 2 weeks.

For the last 2 days I have had an increase of 29,356 impressions averaging 5871 per book for two days or 2,935 impressions per day.

That is showing a 50% decline, due in part to not winning bids and falling off or to the back of the pages, despite amazon increasing the numbers of pages per book.

Basically we are getting hit three ways just now.

1, More sponsored pages per target keyword reduces visibility

2, Increased bids in an attempt to get visibility = a higher ACOS.

3, Competition for bids to land on pages reduces the amount of impressions on low bids, and, or the need for Amazon to rotate out books due to competition, even with increased pages.

Don't know where else to go with this post, but hopefully it makes a point. If I have the math wrong, please point it out.


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Decon said:


> I'd not thought about the situation regarding page reads for those in KU.
> 
> That may just be the salvation of AMS in the future for the ones in KU. I predict many are going to try AMS and in the current situation give it up as next to useless. Here's why.
> 
> ...


My books have experienced the same drop in impressions and clicks that yours have, so I've paused three of them. After about 10 pages, I stopped looking for the books on the carousel. I doubt that people look beyond 2 or 3 pages, if they look that far. With so many people piling into AMS, this had to be expected. It was great while it lasted. I have no idea of what to expect when I start the books again.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

I have 5 modern history books that are using, among others, two bestselling history books as keywords: 'Hidden Figures' and 'Sapiens'.

Yesterday, those bestselling books had 90+ pages of sponsored products with my books way down the pecking order.  So I increased my bid on Hidden Figures.

I just looked today and now there are only two pages of sponsored products on both those (Kindle) books, not just the one I increased my bids on, with all my books dominating.

How does that happen?  Is it something only I am seeing?  How many pages of Sponsored Products do other users see on the Kindle versions of those books?

Philip


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

RBN said:


> I see 3 pages on Hidden Figures right now, but don't get too excited. Books I follow on a daily basis have been back and forth between 7 and 120+. The reasonable numbers don't stick around long.


Yeah, this is weird. One of my keyworded books (a classic in the genre with 5,000 reviews) just dropped to 6 pages total of Sponsored Product ads (I know it used to be well over 100). And my little series-opening book is on page 3.

Strange behavior! I wonder if Amazon is fiddling with the AMS algo.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

I was about to cancel all mine for good, then I took a look at my own books. All have had 80+ pages for around a week now, together the majority of my keyword's books. As mentioned in my previous posts, the result was that my impressions and clicks fell off a cliff.

Something has happened because I've just clicked on my covers and they now have 1,3,5,8, and 9 pages. The one with 1 page only has three books.

I Went to check TrumboneAl (Al Macy's) "Contact Us" which had 84 pages yesterday and I was nowhere on any page. He's back to 1 page now and I'm on there. Hopefully it will stay this way, or I'm out of it.

Some of the top books I've checked for such as Gillian Flynn and Stephen King are down from 100+ to 44 pages

My guess is that they have experienced so many pauses and cancelled campaigns, they've gone back to the drawing board with their algos.

As reported I had dropped to 6 clicks per day across 5 books. In the last 2 day period I've had 30 clicks (Most of them today) or 15 per day, so its all back to normal for now.


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## Cherise (May 13, 2012)

Sales rank affects the bidding war. The better a book is already selling, the more likely it will appear in the top ad spots. Sucks, but at least it explains some things.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Cherise said:


> Sales rank affects the bidding war. The better a book is already selling, the more likely it will appear in the top ad spots. Sucks, but at least it explains some things.


And yet, we are using AMS to _boost _our sales rank. Darned if we do and darned if we don't.


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

Decon said:


> Something has happened because I've just clicked on my covers and they now have 1,3,5,8, and 9 pages. The one with 1 page only has three books.
> 
> My guess is that they have experienced so many pauses and cancelled campaigns, they've gone back to the drawing board with their algos.
> 
> In the last 2 day period I've had 30 clicks (Most of them today) or 15 per day, so its all back to normal for now.


Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!


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## Christopher Bunn (Oct 26, 2010)

Is it for certain that an impression equates to a visitor hitting a book-selling page where your sponsored book ad is merely somewhere in the bundle of X number of pages of sponsored book ads (but not physically seen)?

As opposed to a visitor actually scrolling through those pages of sponsored book ads until your particular ad actually appears on screen?


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Christopher Bunn said:


> Is it for certain that an impression equates to a visitor hitting a book-selling page where your sponsored book ad is merely somewhere in the bundle of X number of pages of sponsored book ads (but not physically seen)?
> 
> As opposed to a visitor actually scrolling through those pages of sponsored book ads until your particular ad actually appears on screen?


No it's not for certain. This is what it says below, but I'm not sure that I believe them as in the customer has to scroll to the actual page where it is visible for it to count as an impression that is "shown". The reason I think that is because I've had some books as keywords where I have had thousands of impressions per day, but I have been say 40 pages down. I just can't imagine thousands per day scrolling through 40 pages. According to what they say the ad must be "shown" to them. It all depends on their definition of "shown"

"What are Impressions?

An impression occurs whenever an ad is shown to a shopper. The impressions metric is a count of how many times your ad has been shown to shoppers. We provide you the total number of impressions for each campaign and keyword."

The only way to find out for sure would be to ask the question of Amazon.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Decon said:


> No it's not for certain. This is what it says, but I'm not sure that I believe them as in the customer has to scroll to the actual page where it is visible for it to count as an impression. According to what they say the ad must be "shown" to them. It all depends on their definition of "shown"
> "What are Impressions?
> An impression occurs whenever an ad is shown to a shopper. The impressions metric is a count of how many times your ad has been shown to shoppers. We provide you the total number of impressions for each campaign and keyword."


My *feeling* is that it's Christopher's #1 statement. That if you land on a book detail page with many Sponsored-ad pages, and your book is way back in the pack, you will get an impression whether the visitor scrolls through the pages or not. But I'm also not certain. Would make a great experiment to prove, don't you think? Hmmm....


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## Joynell Schultz (Oct 29, 2016)

Okay... this is 20 pages long and I remember this info being in here somewhere, but I can't find it now.

What are good ad ratios of clicks to purchases? I'm struggling if I have issues with my blurb (or comparable book titles/authors I'm targeting) or not.
I've had 82000 impressions; 41 clicks; 3 purchases.

I thought I remember that it should be 1 click per every 1000-2000 impressions and 1 purchase out of every 10 clicks?

Thanks for the help. This string had been a TREMENDOUS help for me setting the ad up.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

I've found that the number of books shown are now shorter too. Makes me wonder whether Amazon actually had a glitch rather than the explosion of long lists being planned.

For those of you who said your books show up sometimes and not others, make sure you look at both Kindle version and the paperback version of the page where your ad appears. A lot of times my book is on the first page on the paperback version but not the kindle version. Why I don't know. I also found that the paperback version tends to show books that are much more genre relevant.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Decon said:


> Click to sales/impressions
> 
> I would think it varies wildly from author to author and the results. Right at the beginning I was getting 11 clicks to one sale as an average across 5 books.
> 
> ...


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

[quote author=Decon]
(charts)
[/quote]

Pretty good looking ACoSes, Decon! On my primary book, the median of my selling keywords are clustered there, but I've got a couple of high ones that bring my overall campaign ACoS up. Trying to work on those. Thanks for the inside look.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

I keep a close eye on the ACOS for individual keywords. If one of them gets too high, I pause it.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> I keep a close eye on the ACOS for individual keywords. If one of them gets too high, I pause it.


Including if the keyword is selling?


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Harald said:


> Including if the keyword is selling?


I know it sounds counterproductive, but it also depends on how long it has been since I got a sale. A month ago, I sold four books right out of the gate on one particular keyword. Nothing since. At 323%, it was time to pause that keyword. The other one I paused was up to nearly 1K %. One sale at 99c just doesn't get it. Bids were too high to get any profit on that word and lowering the bid also lowered the impressions/clicks.

I've always gotten decent page reads on this book when I promo it, but I've only had four complete read-throughs from AMS. The payout (at 124 KENP) isn't going to make a difference. I've also sold a lot of audio books through other promos which would have also made a difference. Not one audio sold.

I've had other sales on other keywords (5 total) with a much better %. That's why I only paused two keywords and not the whole ad.


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> I keep a close eye on the ACOS for individual keywords. If one of them gets too high, I pause it.


I do the same, especially if there are no new clicks.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> I know it sounds counterproductive, but it also depends on how long it has been since I got a sale. A month ago, I sold four books right out of the gate on one particular keyword. Nothing since. At 323%, it was time to pause that keyword. The other one I paused was up to nearly 1K %. One sale at 99c just doesn't get it. Bids were too high to get any profit on that word and lowering the bid also lowered the impressions/clicks.


Good points. But what does one do when the highest ACoS kwd (also with the highest Clicks) is also *the name of the genre*? I just keep lowering the Bid hoping that kwd will turn itself around.



> I've always gotten decent page reads on this book when I promo it, but I've only had four complete read-throughs from AMS. ...


Q: How do you know the Reads are from AMS? Could be from anywhere, no?

Thanks for good details.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Harald said:


> Good points. But what does one do when the highest ACoS kwd (also with the highest Clicks) is also *the name of the genre*? I just keep lowering the Bid hoping that kwd will turn itself around.
> 
> Q: How do you know the Reads are from AMS? Could be from anywhere, no?
> 
> Thanks for good details.


 In my case, the name of the genre keyword is also a problem. When I check romance , all I see above the sponsored ad's and including sponsored ads, are manly chest covers. If you look at my signature you'll see the cover for A Slice of Life , the book in question, is illustrated. That indicates a sweet romance. So I'm knocking out all keywords that lead to the manly chest cover which usually includes things like billionaire romances, stepbrother romances, and that sort of thing. They definitely do not go with my clean, sweet romance.

Right. The reads could be from anywhere . Except for the fact that I only get reads when I promo. Right now AMS is my only promo.


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## NatPane (Aug 16, 2016)

I've never seen my ads in action so I can't help wondering about this. Is there any way to see our ads, or are we just trusting that what Amazon says is the truth? Who's to say that they're not behind the scenes fixing numbers to suit themselves? Hmmm. I always like to see what I'm paying for.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

NatPane said:


> I've never seen my ads in action so I can't help wondering about this. Is there any way to see our ads, or are we just trusting that what Amazon says is the truth? Who's to say that they're not behind the scenes fixing numbers to suit themselves? Hmmm. I always like to see what I'm paying for.


If your keyword is the name of a book, you can find that book and look at the sponsored ads on the bottom. It might not be on the first page and you'll have to go through the carousel. If it's an author, there will be a vertical list of that author's books and the sponsored ads will be at the bottom but will be a vertical continuation of that list. The same with a genre keyword. With the latter two, you may have to go through the pages to find yours and it may not be there at all since Amazon circulates the ads.


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## NatPane (Aug 16, 2016)

Thanks. I've actually done this, and still never saw my ad! Not once. My bids are not low, so it's not that. I'll keep looking. Maybe I'm missing something. I'm still new at this.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

NatPane said:


> Thanks. I've actually done this, and still never saw my ad! Not once. My bids are not low, so it's not that. I'll keep looking. Maybe I'm missing something. I'm still new at this.


Sometimes I find them and sometimes I don't. I don't put in a lot of time searching for them, but it is good to see my ads, especially when they're on the first page.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> Sometimes I find them and sometimes I don't. I don't put in a lot of time searching for them, but it is good to see my ads, especially when they're on the first page.


Not sure if they still do this but I had quite a few free promos with very decent paid sale tails in December. As a result, I was pretty high on the search list while the sales lasted (1st page an some) when I searched genre specific books.( Say kidnapping) [Not bestseller's lists] The cover showed it was a sponsored ad, so anyone clicking from there, or seeing it in a search, then it counted as both an impression and a click. If it is still the same that's an additional way they promote sponsored ads without it being on a book page. The sponsored tag didn't show everytime I searched, the same as it doesn't always show on a keyword book page as they rotate you in and out at times.

The only thing I didn't like about that, is maybe I would have had clicks and buys anyway from the searches without having to pay Amazon per click. Not sure if it was a trial at the time.


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## Harald (Mar 23, 2015)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> In my case, the name of the genre keyword is also a problem. When I check romance , all I see above the sponsored ad's and including sponsored ads, are manly chest covers. If you look at my signature you'll see the cover for A Slice of Life , the book in question, is illustrated. That indicates a sweet romance. So I'm knocking out all keywords that lead to the manly chest cover which usually includes things like billionaire romances, stepbrother romances, and that sort of thing. They definitely do not go with my clean, sweet romance.


I'm in Historical Fiction so it's a less-popular genre. No 6-Pack Abs showing on my books' Page 1 Sponsored... yet. There's one Billionaire, but he's wearing Black Tie  I'm lowering and lowering this kwd bid. Next step is to Pause it.



> Right. The reads could be from anywhere . Except for the fact that I only get reads when I promo. Right now AMS is my only promo.


Ah... I see. For me, my one price promo did not increase Reads, but starting AMS ads *really* did (700+% !). It's trailed off a bit but still higher than the pre-AMS trend line.


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## TWLuedke (Nov 8, 2013)

I've been restarting my ads. Some ads are on the 3rd generation, others only 2nd. 

I also routinely max out keywords in my quest for the best. 

I'm now hitting .25 and .30 as a default bid to get visibility. Cost on keywords is rising steadily.

But, my cost of ads versus daily sales/pagesread isn't really too high.

I'm still making a good ROI. Best I can figure its about 200%. 

The stats in AMS are all showing high ACoS, but my sales and pagereads tell a different tale. Not sure if its alsoboughts and organic sales, or AMS is just not quite able to properly track, but I am regularly getting more sales and pagereads than what I'm paying for in ads.

Plus, I've seen my audiobook sales double. So that's an added win on the ROI that I'll have to factor in when the actual payout data becomes available.

Nutshell, yes, AMS is getting costlier, but its still viable, and it has tripled my income. Its a viable way to blast exposure and sales. It gives me motive to continue writing with the knowledge that I can instantly market a new release without chasing down a gagillion other promo outlets. 

But it is time consuming.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> ... you may have to go through the pages to find yours and it may not be there at all since Amazon circulates the ads.


Amazon circulates the ads?

I'd like to know more about this. It might explain why I can't seem to see consistent results from my AMS sponsored product ads.

Anyone know more about this?


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

Question for the AMS experts.

I'm running a campaign that's racking up a lot of impressions, but hardly any clicks. I've checked my ad position on my top keywords and they are well placed, and in many cases are right on the first page of the sponsored products carousel. My inclination is to try changing the blurb, because it's obvious (to me) that the ads are being seen my hook could be weak.

I don't see a way to change the blurb in an active campaign. Do I need to terminate and set up a new campaign, or am I missing a way to change it?


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Accord64 said:


> Question for the AMS experts.
> 
> I'm running a campaign that's racking up a lot of impressions, but hardly any clicks. I've checked my ad position on my top keywords and they are well placed, and in many cases are right on the first page of the sponsored products carousel. My inclination is to try changing the blurb, because it's obvious (to me) that the ads are being seen my hook could be weak.
> 
> I don't see a way to change the blurb in an active campaign. Do I need to terminate and set up a new campaign, or am I missing a way to change it?


You can't change a blurb in an active campaign. I found that out when I had the same problem. I set up a separate campaign with a new blurb which failed entirely.


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Philip Gibson said:


> Amazon circulates the ads?
> 
> I'd like to know more about this. It might explain why I can't seem to see consistent results from my AMS sponsored product ads.
> 
> Anyone know more about this?


At the beginning of your campaign, your ad may start out on the first page of the carousel, but it doesn't stay there. Your ad gets moved further down the carousel as other, newer ads replace it. Higher bids may also affect the placement.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Marian said:


> At the beginning of your campaign, your ad may start out on the first page of the carousel, but it doesn't stay there. Your ad gets moved further down the carousel as other, newer ads replace it. Higher bids may also affect the placement.


I think someone said that the likelihood of sales (or lack thereof) also affects placement. In other words, the more you sell, the higher your placement. Apparently, lots of factors influence your placement on the carousel.


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> I think someone said that the likelihood of sales (or lack thereof) also affects placement. In other words, the more you sell, the higher your placement. Apparently, lots of factors influence your placement on the carousel.


Adding new keywords and upping your bids may also be a factor.


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

I just started doing google adwords using the more successful keywords from AMS. Will let you know how it works out...


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## TheLemontree (Sep 12, 2015)

GrandFenwick said:


> I just started doing google adwords using the more successful keywords from AMS. Will let you know how it works out...


Excellent. I am very keen to hear how you fare with this! Thanks so much for letting us all learn over your shoulder.

Are you using Adwords or Adwords Express?


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

Adwords. So far I've had 32 clicks, and I THINK I can attribute a couple of paperback sales but I'm not sure. I need to learn how to use the tracking template to do that, but I've definitely seen a SLIGHT uptick in sales. My ACPC is high at 26-cents, so I've got to get that down.

Summary right down? Breaking even?


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## IB (Jan 31, 2012)

GrandFenwick said:


> Adwords. So far I've had 32 clicks, and I THINK I can attribute a couple of paperback sales but I'm not sure. I need to learn how to use the tracking template to do that, but I've definitely seen a SLIGHT uptick in sales. My ACPC is high at 26-cents, so I've got to get that down.
> 
> Summary right down? Breaking even?





GrandFenwick said:


> Adwords. So far I've had 32 clicks, and I THINK I can attribute a couple of paperback sales but I'm not sure. I need to learn how to use the tracking template to do that, but I've definitely seen a SLIGHT uptick in sales. My ACPC is high at 26-cents, so I've got to get that down.
> 
> Summary right down? Breaking even?


I'm also interested in knowing how this works out for you. Thank you for keeping us updated!

I have a question for you or any other AMS experts. If you have an AMS ad that has a decent ROI, how do you maximize the results of that ad?

-- Do you raise the overall budget for the ad? For example, if you're spending $5.00 a day, do you just double that?
-- Or, if your bid is 50 cents for the keywords that are generation both clicks and sales, do you raise your bid for just those specific keywords and pause the ones that don't work? (Or just raise the budget for the entire ad?)


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

OK here're some numbers after running for almost a month:

5550 impressions
313 clicks 
CTR 5.64%
CPC $0.31

I haven't been able to get my tracking pixel to work, so I don't have the most important number which is conversion rate. Sales seem slightly up since I started running Google Ads, but I'm not sure it's covering the cost of the ads.

It's addicting though. Once you get your ads running, Google suggests new keywords and ad groups. The learning curve is pretty high but fun if you have a few dollars a day to test it.

That said, I think AMS is a waaaay better investment of time and $.
AMS ads seem


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## IB (Jan 31, 2012)

TwistedTales said:


> It depends upon what you're trying to do and how much you can afford to spend.
> 
> If my objective is to increase sales for a book, then I'll raise bids on the keywords that are getting the most clicks and sales, and suspend those that aren't performing as well. If you raise bids then you may need to increase budgets. It doesn't always work that way because sometimes your more successful keywords are the cheaper ones. If you're suspending the less successful keywords that will leave more budget for the other keywords.
> 
> If my objective is to raise awareness of my brand then I want to keep a wide sweep of keywords. Raising awareness is about readers becoming familiar with my name so I don't care if they click on it or not. For those I have low budgets with plenty of unusual keywords. They tend to run out of budget fast, but they cost me $2 a day. Often, they'll sell a copy of two and that covers the cost anyway.


Thanks for the response. My bids on the successful keywords are already high enough to get the spots, so would you recommend now raising the budget for the ad itself?


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## IB (Jan 31, 2012)

Cassie Leigh said:


> You can go into each ad and download an Excel file with your keywords and stats for all the words. You kind of have to keep versions of the spreadsheets to see what's happening with that ad now since Amazon just shows total numbers for the entire time period the ad has been running.
> 
> It can be a big time suck. I just spent an hour or so going through two ads with 200 or so keywords each and pausing all of them related to authors in KU since I just let me books roll out of KU. Others spend even more time seeing if their ads are on the first page of results or not as mentioned up thread. I find they do need some maintenance or else they stop working.
> 
> As for ads that don't fit with the books they're on...One of my better performing keywords for one of my novels has been "fiction". I have a very genre-specific cover so I count on that to keep the number of inappropriate clicks down but I'm sure it ends up on all sorts of pages. Although, interestingly, today when I was going through all those author names I pulled them all up on Amazon and on a few was like "why the hell did I choose this name?" and almost all of those had a very low level of impressions on them. So I'd say Amazon is pretty smart about showing the right books even if it doesn't seem like it to a casual observer.


Cassie, Do you raise your budget on the ads that have a decent ROI, or do you create a new ad (with the same copy) and only use the keywords that worked from the old ad?


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

IB said:


> Cassie, Do you raise your budget on the ads that have a decent ROI, or do you create a new ad (with the same copy) and only use the keywords that worked from the old ad?


Neither. I tried both approaches and had problems with both of them. I had an ad that had been running since July at $5 a day and in December I bumped it up because it was maxing itself out some days. I hit a point, I think $25 per day, where it seemed to kill the ad and it stopped running at all. So I had to pause it and then drop the daily budget back down to get it running again. I also tried creating a new version of the ad with just the successful keywords when that happened and found that the new ad didn't perform the same as the original. No idea why that happens, but a keyword can be great on the first ad and get no impressions on the second. Or lead to buys on the first ad for that keyword but not for the second. I ended up just keeping the original ad running instead.

I know there are folks contributing to this thread who are spending more per day and getting it to work, but I've had to keep my ads closer to the $5-$10/day range to keep them running.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

I keep my daily budget at $5 a day. I ran out of money a couple of times so I went through my keywords to lower individual spending. I think the trick is to stay on the first or second page and not necessarily bid high to be the first in line.

I wish Amazon would add column for borrows. I get a decent amount of page reads which contribute heavily to my overall ROI. Because they don't, I have no idea which keywords are contributing to KU borrows. That means I have to keep keywords that might or might not be producing.


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## 67499 (Feb 4, 2013)

My experience with AMS suggests AMS offers just a little boost in sales, tho' more in reads.  I'd really like to hear from those who've generated 100s/1000s of sales from AMS.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Steven Hardesty said:


> My experience with AMS suggests AMS offers just a little boost in sales, tho' more in reads. I'd really like to hear from those who've generated 100s/1000s of sales from AMS.


According to my dashboard, the two main ads I have running on my fantasy novel have generated $1038.87 in sales so far. (One running since May, the other since December.) I also had the book in KU for three months of that and had a decent amount of borrows.

I currently have the book at $6.99 and MTD I have 18 sales on the book and assume those are all from AMS with maybe one or two from FB ads.


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## mmandolin (Oct 16, 2014)

Steven Hardesty said:


> My experience with AMS suggests AMS offers just a little boost in sales, tho' more in reads. I'd really like to hear from those who've generated 100s/1000s of sales from AMS.


As one who has generated 1000+ additional sales from AMS, my general advice for those who want to make more is simple: Scale up.

Obviously your results will vary, use common sense, things change, etc.


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## IB (Jan 31, 2012)

Cassie Leigh said:


> Neither. I tried both approaches and had problems with both of them. I had an ad that had been running since July at $5 a day and in December I bumped it up because it was maxing itself out some days. I hit a point, I think $25 per day, where it seemed to kill the ad and it stopped running at all. So I had to pause it and then drop the daily budget back down to get it running again. I also tried creating a new version of the ad with just the successful keywords when that happened and found that the new ad didn't perform the same as the original. No idea why that happens, but a keyword can be great on the first ad and get no impressions on the second. Or lead to buys on the first ad for that keyword but not for the second. I ended up just keeping the original ad running instead.
> 
> I know there are folks contributing to this thread who are spending more per day and getting it to work, but I've had to keep my ads closer to the $5-$10/day range to keep them running.


Cassie, Thank you! It sounds like you're saying that if I'm spending $5.00 a day on an ad and I'm making $10.00 a day on that ad, then doubling the budget won't necessarily net double the profits. Which makes it hard to determine when to spend more. Is there a good resource for learning more on how to interpret the data our ads are generating to increase the ROI?


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## IB (Jan 31, 2012)

TwistedTales said:


> Sales fluctuate by day, week, time of year, etc. There is no way to guarantee what you'll get each day. If you're worried about budgets then increase them in small increments throughout the day based on how well you're selling. I usually keep an eye on total sales and bid accordingly. Some days are what I call "tire kickers". Everyone is clicking, but nothing much is selling. On those days I'll let the ads run out of budget. Other days everything is selling well so I'll add more to the budget.
> 
> To sell 1,000s using AMS as the primary promotional tool you generally have to:
> 
> ...


I appreciate the detailed response!


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

My daughter's AMS ads have generated $2500+ in sales which is why I started running them for Leonard's books.


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## IB (Jan 31, 2012)

GrandFenwick said:


> My daughter's AMS ads have generated $2500+ in sales which is why I started running them for Leonard's books.


Congrats! Do you also raise the budget of the ads that work, or do you create a new ad (with the same copy) and limit the new ad to the keywords that work?


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

Here's her method:

Raise the bids on the keywords that have low ACOS (to as high as $0.75)
Lower the bids for high ACOS ($0.25)
Give keywords 30-40 clicks before you cut the cord on anything.
Run a few campaigns with different copy, but DO NOT DUPLICATE keywords, otherwise they compete with each other and raise your CPC.
Add keywords to a campaign when new releases come up.

She never raises her overall budget, just the bids per keyword. She's never gotten close to her daily budget ($7 per campaign), and her overall ACOS for all her campaigns is 48%.


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## Philip Gibson (Nov 18, 2013)

GrandFenwick said:


> Here's her method:
> 
> Raise the bids on the keywords that have low ACOS (to as high as $0.75)
> Lower the bids for high ACOS ($0.25)
> ...


I'm fairly sure I read somewhere, from Amazon themselves, that duplicate keywords in different campaigns do not compete against each other as long as they are from the same KDP account.

I don't know how that works in practical terms, but it's what Amazon stated as I recall.

Maybe someone could confirm or refute that for us.

Philip


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

That's good to know thanks!

That also makes AMS ads better than Google ads


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## Douglas Milewski (Jul 4, 2014)

I've seen varied responses from AMS as well. Some ads have trickled off after just a few thousands views while another one hit 100,000 views in just a few days, then stopped cold. I have no clue. That's why I'm here trying to make sense of this tool.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure I've had multiple titles show up next to one another as ads.  So I don't think the same title competes against itself but Title A and Title B can even if they're under the same author account.

Doug--My experience with the ads is that some work, some don't and there's no real rhyme or reason as to why one does and one doesn't.  I just make sure that none of my ads have expiration dates set on them so I can keep the good ones going for as long as I can.  When they stop running I pause them, change the bids, add keywords, pause keywords, change the bids on keywords, whatever I can do to get the ad moving again.

IB--That's been my experience--that upping the bid on an ad doesn't mean upping performance on the ad.  Same with a winning keyword.  Upping the bid on it didn't seem to result in better performance after a certain point and sometimes seemed to shut it down instead.  I think we all approach the ads in different ways so it's just trial and error to figure out what works for each title.  I run them on full-price books ($4.99-$6.99) and don't have a lot of backlist for people to buy after that one book so my strategies are different from those running them on free or discounted titles or who have a large backlist.


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## IB (Jan 31, 2012)

GrandFenwick said:


> Here's her method:
> 
> Raise the bids on the keywords that have low ACOS (to as high as $0.75)
> Lower the bids for high ACOS ($0.25)
> ...


Nice! Thanks for clarifying!


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

GrandFenwick said:


> Raise the bids on the keywords that have low ACOS (to as high as $0.75)
> Lower the bids for high ACOS ($0.25)
> Give keywords 30-40 clicks before you cut the cord on anything.


This is the suggestion I have heard from various sources that always stops me in my tracks as far as being able to use it. I've had ads for four books running all month with 500-1000 keywords. mostly authors and titles of other action thrillers. I only have a single keyword that has hit 30 clicks across all the books in that time. I have maybe 50-75 keywords that have at least one click. Most of the keywords that have any clicks at all have a decent click/impression rate of 1-500 or less. ACoS you have to wait at least a week to be sure all the sales are accounted for (and I have three from early in the month I know have to be due to the ads that have never appeared). But once you're a week on, you now have a bunch more impressions and clicks. It seems like you'd have to export your results each day and then a week later start making your decisions based on those week old results. Is that really what people are doing?

I did try raising bids to 75 cents from 31 cents on keywords with low Acos last week - after three days I stopped because the cost per click had tripled and they went from reasonably profitable to definitively unprofitable even assuming every sale in KDP was due to the ad.

The only thing I've noticed is that my $2.99 book has a much better ACos than my $3.99 book and $4.99 books. I get almost the same number of clicks if I use the same keywords, but a lot fewer conversions. This is the only time that I've ever seen a big difference between $2.99 and $4.99 over the past few years, which is why I've leaned towards pricing higher. But I'd be more than happy to sell for $2.99 instead of $4.99 if it turns out ads get more more income that way.


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

Douglas Milewski said:


> I've seen varied responses from AMS as well. Some ads have trickled off after just a few thousands views while another one hit 100,000 views in just a few days, then stopped cold. I have no clue. That's why I'm here trying to make sense of this tool.


If you go back to page 18 and read a post by Eric Z, Amazon has confirmed that there is an algorithm at work that might stop your ad if it's not performing well. Of course they won't disclose how it works, so it's basically a wildcard in the process. If your ad suddenly slows in terms of impressions, then the algorithm likely killed it.


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## skylarker1 (Aug 21, 2016)

GrandFenwick said:


> My daughter's AMS ads have generated $2500+ in sales which is why I started running them for Leonard's books.


Just wanted to say, I read 'The Mouse that Roared' and other Grand Fenwick books many years ago and loved them!


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## JaclynDolamore (Nov 5, 2015)

I've found it almost impossible to up my budget because every ad I make, it'll get a lot of clicks at first but then will slow. I think when an ad is new they'll show it more, but then refine the algorithms after a short amount of time. All my ads continue to get sales and are successful, but the $ spend always seems to top out at the several dollars mark.


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

skylarker1 said:


> Just wanted to say, I read 'The Mouse that Roared' and other Grand Fenwick books many years ago and loved them!


Thanks for saying! It means a lot to the family that Leonard's books were loved (and still remembered!)


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## Reveries (Feb 7, 2016)

GrandFenwick said:


> Here's her method:
> 
> Raise the bids on the keywords that have low ACOS (to as high as $0.75)
> Lower the bids for high ACOS ($0.25)
> ...


This is very helpful because:-

a) My AMS results seem to vary wildly. I obviously need to get more systematic about it at a keyword level.

b) I didn't know the Mouse series was on Kindle! You have a sale!


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## GrandFenwick (Aug 24, 2015)

Awesome! The family appreciates it and hopes you enjoy it


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## Paul Hector Travis (Mar 2, 2017)

Hi all! I've read through this whole thread, and I'd firstly like to thank everyone for their insights. Just a quick question: do you think there's anything to gain from pausing then, a short while after, unpausing your campaigns? Could this somehow "fool" Amazon into thinking the recommenced campaign is a new one, thereby injecting fresh life into one that's stalled? Or is this just wishful thinking?


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Jip Jaap Stam said:


> Hi all! I've read through this whole thread, and I'd firstly like to thank everyone for their insights. Just a quick question: do you think there's anything to gain from pausing then, a short while after, unpausing your campaigns? Could this somehow "fool" Amazon into thinking the recommenced campaign is a new one, thereby injecting fresh life into one that's stalled? Or is this just wishful thinking?


There's no way to know whether pausing and restarting a campaign will "fool" Amazon. It's safe to assume multiple factors affect how ads are displayed. So, even if you were to see a bump in impressions after pausing and restarting a few campaigns, the effect could only be accurately defined as correlation rather than causation.

More importantly, even is such exploits exist, they're bound to be short-lived. They're going to be patched soon. It's far better to study the psychology of how ads work. That is, what attracts the eye (cover); what compels the click (copy); and what prompts the purchase decision (speaking to the conversation already happening in the customer's head).

Regarding exploits...

A friend and I were talking last night about Google. Back in the day, we were filling its index with low-quality sites to generate Adsense revenue. We were using a few exploits. It took years for Google to patch the holes. During that time, it was relatively easy to make mid-five figures per month.

Once Google patched the holes, the game was done.

I mention this because the time frame over which big platforms allow exploits to exist has shrunken. Look at the past exploits in the KU program. Those were plugged in _months_. The folks relying on them are either out of the game or have moved on to leverage other exploits, which are likely to be plugged in an even shorter time frame.

All to say, don't rely on exploits. They're short term. Instead, learn the psychology of ads. That'll pay dividends years down the road.


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

Anarchist said:


> More importantly, even is such exploits exist, they're bound to be short-lived. They're going to be patched soon. It's far better to study the psychology of how ads work. That is, what attracts the eye (cover); what compels the click (copy); and what prompts the purchase decision (speaking to the conversation already happening in the customer's head).


Yes, but the problem is that it is a bear getting Amazon to actually deliver those attractive covers and copy via AMS. That's why we're having these discussions about how to set up bids/keywords/impressions/pauses, etc. Ignoring copy and cover is indeed a fool's errand. Focusing on those to the exclusion of the other variables of AMS is nearly equally foolish. It's not an either/or. I suppose if you want to call trying to figure out how it actually works "exploit," that's fine. But the reality of most internet advertising is that they intentionally obscure things about the advertising in order to avoid major exploits. By doing so, they create a situation where to be successful one has to either get lucky or do trial and error to figure out some of what is obscured to improve results.

Not all internet advertising is like this, but certainly FB, AMS and to some extent google are.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

edwardgtalbot said:


> Yes, but the problem is that it is a bear getting Amazon to actually deliver those attractive covers and copy via AMS. That's why we're having these discussions about how to set up bids/keywords/impressions/pauses, etc. Ignoring copy and cover is indeed a fool's errand. Focusing on those to the exclusion of the other variables of AMS is nearly equally foolish. It's not an either/or. I suppose if you want to call trying to figure out how it actually works "exploit," that's fine. But the reality of most internet advertising is that they intentionally obscure things about the advertising in order to avoid major exploits. By doing so, they create a situation where to be successful one has to either get lucky or do trial and error to figure out some of what is obscured to improve results.
> 
> Not all internet advertising is like this, but certainly FB, AMS and to some extent google are.


I see what you're saying, but I have a different perspective.

For me, whether the "exclusion of the other variables of AMS is nearly equally foolish" depends on the nature of those other variables. Here's my litmus test:

1. How easy would it be for other advertisers to leverage this variable?

2. How does this variable improve the customer's experience?

Let's use the act of pausing and restarting campaigns as an example. First, every advertiser with a beating heart can do it (no skills required). Second, it does nothing to improve the customer's experience. That being the case, this variable _fails_ my litmus test.

Let's take keyword research as another example. First, it's difficult to do properly. Second, good research improves the customer's experience as he's more likely to find books that complement his interests. This _passes_ my litmus test.

Note that I'm not saying you should agree with me. You're obviously a smart guy. I'm just explaining my perspective.


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

Anarchist said:


> I see what you're saying, but I have a different perspective.
> 
> For me, whether the "exclusion of the other variables of AMS is nearly equally foolish" depends on the nature of those other variables. Here's my litmus test:
> 
> ...


Very fair response! My litmus test is whether there is some chance that what I am trying can be effective at increasing sales without spending more money to generate the sale than I get from the sale. I include things like mailing list signups, KU reads, sell-throughs, etc under the large umbralla of "sales," though I consider each of those in a different manner.

Now I suppose I could add that another part of the litmus test is that what I do must be ethical. I don't find working within the basic tools provided by the advertiser to be unethical unless I am really taking advantage of something they clearly didn't intend to allow. But different folks may feel differently about the ethics. I don't know how to REALLY judge whether you are improving the customer experience. You could argue that any ads on Amazon are detrimental to the customer experience given that Amazon is so good at figuring out on their own what the customer wants.

Anyway, I do understand your reasoning, I guess I just draw the line in a different place.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

edwardgtalbot said:


> Very fair response! My litmus test is whether there is some chance that what I am trying can be effective at increasing sales without spending more money to generate the sale than I get from the sale. I include things like mailing list signups, KU reads, sell-throughs, etc under the large umbralla of "sales," though I consider each of those in a different manner.


My original post was too draconian.

To Jip Jaap Stam, I should have said "focus on the basics of how ads work in the context of customer psychology. _But don't be afraid to use every other tool at your disposal, no matter how short-term in nature, if doing so will move the needle on impressions, clicks, and sales_."



edwardgtalbot said:


> Now I suppose I could add that another part of the litmus test is that what I do must be ethical. I don't find working within the basic tools provided by the advertiser to be unethical unless I am really taking advantage of something they clearly didn't intend to allow. But different folks may feel differently about the ethics. I don't know how to REALLY judge whether you are improving the customer experience. You could argue that any ads on Amazon are detrimental to the customer experience given that Amazon is so good at figuring out on their own what the customer wants.


Ethics, of course, is a thorny issue. Certainly, my past as a marketer is littered with tactics some would consider unethical. But as you say, ethics vary from person to person. If I added it to my litmus test, I'd probably take a lot less action.

As to whether ads on Amazon actually harm the customer experience, that's a good point.



edwardgtalbot said:


> Anyway, I do understand your reasoning, I guess I just draw the line in a different place.


Oh my gosh. Did you and I manage to disagree without either of us getting offended and passively aggressively calling each other names? That's pretty amazing around these parts.


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

LilyBLily said:


> Where the ethics of AMS ads get cloudy is in using keywords that deliberately put your books into a category in which they clearly do not belong, which we have seen with those horrid titles that say "Romance BBW blah blah blah" and use keywords as the title. Which, I am happy to say, Amazon seems to be addressing at last.


Agreed, although this isn't directly related to AMS. Indirectly, as keyword stuffing titles may cause certain ads to be more likely to be shown, though we really don't know either way.



LilyBLily said:


> We happen to be in a weird world in which we usually have to qualify to buy an ad, or we get repeatedly rejected to buy an ad from the one company that produces a very good result, and now, with AMS, in which the ad venue arbitrarily decides whether to show our ads or not--and does not notify us, either. Nowhere else in the advertising world would this happen. You're Pepsi and you buy an ad and NBC doesn't show it when and where you've contracted for? You'd sue.


I take your point, but I wouldn't say "nowhere else." In fact, two of the biggies online, facebook and google, work at least a little bit this way. Both of them offer options to ensure a certain number of impressions, but those options generally cost more (YMMV of course). I guess AMS takes it somewhat further, but all these vanues are closer to each other than to the traditional ad you see on broadcast televesion or print media.


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

Anarchist said:


> Oh my gosh. Did you and I manage to disagree without either of us getting offended and passively aggressively calling each other names? That's pretty amazing around these parts.


I think we may have! Better keep it quiet or the moderators will have to step in


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## Paul Hector Travis (Mar 2, 2017)

Anarchist said:


> There's no way to know whether pausing and restarting a campaign will "fool" Amazon. It's safe to assume multiple factors affect how ads are displayed. So, even if you were to see a bump in impressions after pausing and restarting a few campaigns, the effect could only be accurately defined as correlation rather than causation.
> 
> More importantly, even is such exploits exist, they're bound to be short-lived. They're going to be patched soon. It's far better to study the psychology of how ads work. That is, what attracts the eye (cover); what compels the click (copy); and what prompts the purchase decision (speaking to the conversation already happening in the customer's head).
> 
> ...


Thanks for your reply! Perhaps "fool" was too strong a word. I don't think there's anything ethically wrong with my suggestion. Amazon stimmies campaigns on a seemingly arbitrary basis, and I don't see anything wrong with us essentially doing the same thing. No doubt they have their own reason for doing so, (making money for themselves) and I can't see it being ethically superior to mine (making myself money). I don't believe Amazon can be excused with the customer experience/relevance argument; if that were their sole motivation, they wouldn't allow product display ads for electronic toothbrushes on Kindle ebook pages.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

For me, the idea of pausing and restarting a campaign, is not to "fool" the system . It's to remove the book from the ads so that people will see it with fresh eyes. I believe once somebody sees the ad several times, unless they actually click, their eyes will automatically move away from it and onto something they haven't seen before.

One of my ads that was doing very well is now completely stalled . So I'm going to try pausing it and restarting it in a few days. I'll see what happens.


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> For me, the idea of pausing and restarting a campaign, is not to "fool" the system . It's to remove the book from the ads so that people will see it with fresh eyes. I believe once somebody sees the ad several times, unless they actually click, their eyes will automatically move away from it and onto something they haven't seen before.
> 
> One of my ads that was doing very well is now completely stalled . So I'm going to try pausing it and restarting it in a few days. I'll see what happens.


I'm wondering if a few days is enough of a pause.


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## Paul Hector Travis (Mar 2, 2017)

Marian said:


> I'm wondering if a few days is enough of a pause.


In theory, it could be. If you think about it, browsers visit Amazon all the time. They find what they want, stop browsing for a few days and are replaced by fresh customers, to whom your ad will be new.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Marian said:


> I'm wondering if a few days is enough of a pause.


I'm pausing it today and adding keywords between now and Thursday when I'll reopen it again. For some reason, Thursday is usually my best sales day. Anyway, fingers crossed.


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> I'm pausing it today and adding keywords between now and Thursday when I'll reopen it again. For some reason, Thursday is usually my best sales day. Anyway, fingers crossed.


I like your plan. Five days seems like decent length of time to test it. Adding keywords should help. I add keywords every few days if I can. They seem to give sales a boost.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Marian said:


> I like your plan. Five days seems like decent length of time to test it. Adding keywords should help. I add keywords every few days if I can. They seem to give sales a boost.


Yes. I have to devote some time to maximizing my keywords.


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## PeterRowlands (Mar 19, 2016)

Hi everyone

This is a wonderful thread - full of invaluable experience and advice that must have helped a lot of people. I've read many many pages, and learned a massive amount, which is helping me in my first AMS promotion - but in fact there are so many pages here that I no longer know exactly where to find the answers to a couple of basic questions! So with apologies for the inevitable repetition, could anyone comment on the interconnected issues below that are bugging me?

1. I keep reading that AMS "metrics" can take three days to reflect true ad performance, but I'm wondering which metrics? My dashboard is already reporting over 3,000 impressions within a day of starting my ad, and it is regularly updating through the day, but it is only showing ONE click (and no sales, needless to say). Can I assume that the number of clicks reported is in sync with the number of impressions, and that this particular metric is likely to be true and up to date? Is it only calculated items like ACOS that lag behind reality? (At the present rate, there will be no sales to average the cost over, so I'm not holding my breath!)

2. If there really has been only one click, perhaps (as many have suggested here in similar circumstances) my ad is not actually being seen; but perhaps more likely, either my blurb is not working or my bidding needs a different approach. I believe my cover is OK, and I'm not in a hurry to change that, but I'm happy to change the wording or tweak the bids. I'm just uncertain about how long to wait before trying this. Should I leave things as they are for three days even with the microscopically low apparent click-through rate?

3. Should I consider playing with bids before messing around with the wording of the ad?

Thanks for indulging me in going over what must seem like old ground.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

It takes up to three days for a sale to show up on your AMS dashboard. Impressions and clicks also sometimes lag behind. 

Many clicks with no sales MAY mean your product page isn't working. Cover, blurb, Look Inside.

You cannot change your ad copy without starting a new ad. 

Give it some time. I don't know how long you've been running your ad, but it might take a few weeks to kick in. Are you in Select? The AMS dashboard does not show page reads or borrows although it does show print sales. 

There are a lot of factors to take in to consideration. How many keywords do you have? Did you pull keywords from your also boughts? Are you just using categories or are you using authors and book titles? Have you pulled keywords from sponsored books on your product page?


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

PeterRowlands said:


> 1. I keep reading that AMS "metrics" can take three days to reflect true ad performance, but I'm wondering which metrics? My dashboard is already reporting over 3,000 impressions within a day of starting my ad, and it is regularly updating through the day, but it is only showing ONE click (and no sales, needless to say). Can I assume that the number of clicks reported is in sync with the number of impressions, and that this particular metric is likely to be true and up to date? Is it only calculated items like ACOS that lag behind reality? (At the present rate, there will be no sales to average the cost over, so I'm not holding my breath!)


It's hard to say which metrics are delayed. I've always seen impressions & clicks within the first hours of a campaign, but it's possible that not all metrics within that time period are showing yet. There's just no way to tell. I can say with certainty that sales take at least 48 hours to show up because I always see them first on my KDP sales report.



> 2. If there really has been only one click, perhaps (as many have suggested here in similar circumstances) my ad is not actually being seen; but perhaps more likely, either my blurb is not working or my bidding needs a different approach. I believe my cover is OK, and I'm not in a hurry to change that, but I'm happy to change the wording or tweak the bids. I'm just uncertain about how long to wait before trying this. Should I leave things as they are for three days even with the microscopically low apparent click-through rate?


The only thing you can really do is change bids, add/pause keywords, and adjust your daily limit. You can't change the ad blurb. You'd have to start a new campaign to do that. Of course you can make changes to your product page at any time, but I'd be careful with that. You don't want to risk Amazon doing something like making your product page unavailable while changes are being made.

I'd wait a couple of days before making any changes to the AMS campaign. That way you'll have more data to work with.



> 3. Should I consider playing with bids before messing around with the wording of the ad?


Since you can't change the ad blurb (without starting a new ad), bids are the only thing you'd be able to change.


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## PeterRowlands (Mar 19, 2016)

> Since you can't change the ad blurb (without starting a new ad), bids are the only thing you'd be able to change.


Thanks to Accord64 and Gertie Kindle for your useful responses to this. I don't know how I was expecting to change my advertising blurb - I'd already noticed that you can't! Taking account of your other points, I think I'd better wait for a few more days before drawing any conclusions at all about my AMS metrics.

To answer your specific questions, this is my first ever AMS campaign, and is just two days old. I have used about 175 keywords so far - some defaults, but mostly my own choices, including relevant author names and book titles. (Well, I mentioned that I'd been studying this thread!) By far the most impressions have been clocked up by "mystery", but I'm in two minds about dropping it. I realise it must be exceedingly popular, but it's also as relevant as you can get, and I'm not quite clear about the merits of retaining or avoiding obvious terms like that.

What I haven't done so far is include terms found in "also boughts" and other sponsored books. To be honest I'm not sure how to go about exploring these. Sorry to switch to sounding like a total tyro, but any suggestions on tracking them down?


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

PeterRowlands said:


> Thanks to Accord64 and Gertie Kindle for your useful responses to this. I don't know how I was expecting to change my advertising blurb - I'd already noticed that you can't! Taking account of your other points, I think I'd better wait for a few more days before drawing any conclusions at all about my AMS metrics.
> 
> To answer your specific questions, this is my first ever AMS campaign, and is just two days old. I have used about 175 keywords so far - some defaults, but mostly my own choices, including relevant author names and book titles. (Well, I mentioned that I'd been studying this thread!) By far the most impressions have been clocked up by "mystery", but I'm in two minds about dropping it. I realise it must be exceedingly popular, but it's also as relevant as you can get, and I'm not quite clear about the merits of retaining or avoiding obvious terms like that.
> 
> What I haven't done so far is include terms found in "also boughts" and other sponsored books. To be honest I'm not sure how to go about exploring these. Sorry to switch to sounding like a total tyro, but any suggestions on tracking them down?


The also boughts will be toward the bottom of your product page. Use the authors whose books are on that carousel as well as the names of some of the books. Sponsored ads are just below the also boughts. Grab those authors and book titles as well.

You can also go to yasiv.com and search on your book's title. If there any also boughts there, they will show up. I've gotten as many as 400 keywords through yasiv. Sometimes you won't see any. Wait a few hours or days and try again. I find the site is sometimes very temperamental.


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## PeterRowlands (Mar 19, 2016)

> The also boughts will be toward the bottom of your product page.


Ah! Got it! I was overthinking this, and imagining that other cleverer writers were somehow discovering something about keywords relating to those also-boughts. You're simply saying use the titles and authors themselves as keywords. Of course! I seem to suffer the curse of always making life more complicated for myself than it actually is. I will definitely follow through by adding some of those.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

PeterRowlands said:


> Ah! Got it! I was overthinking this, and imagining that other cleverer writers were somehow discovering something about keywords relating to those also-boughts. You're simply saying use the titles and authors themselves as keywords. Of course! I seem to suffer the curse of always making life more complicated for myself than it actually is. I will definitely follow through by adding some of those.


Add _*lots*_. 

Okay, don't add those that have a very low star rating. Other than that, add as many names and titles as you can.

Good luck!!


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## PeterRowlands (Mar 19, 2016)

> Okay, don't add those that have a very low star rating. Other than that, add as many names and titles as you can.


Many thanks! Will do.


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