Support for Indie Authors discussion

I wonder if anyone would be interested in our experience in the past few months with promoting my wife's book (nonfiction history/memoir) using Amazon advertising.
The book was published in July 2016 and during its first year we had tried discount periods using various promotional email services and websites, costing from nothing to $50--60, with some circumstantial evidence of response but no real confidence in the benefit.
After it had been out a year we decided to try the Amazon (AMS) adverstising process, bought a book about it (sorry, can't name it here!) and gave it a try from late August 2017 until now, i.e. just over six months.
It started badly, but through trial and error we managed to improve the Return on Investment (ROI). How did we know? We downloaded the data every day and transferred some of it from each ad to a simple Excel spreadsheet. This took about 10 minutes each morning, once the spreadsheet had been designed. (We have just changed this to weekly.)At the end of each month, we worked out for each ad the cost and number of clicks and matched it up with the attributable revenue for the same period (using Bookreport - can I mention that, Christina?). It does need a certain amount of Excel-competence, but not really too much. AMS only runs in the USA -, which is a shame because the book is relevant in the UK and Germany - so only USA sales are attributable.
We quickly found that Product Display ads were useless for this book, probably because the book's download cost is high and the revenue per sale too low for us to be able to bid high enough per click (that's how you get clicks) to be competitive. So we stuck to the 'Sponsored Product' ads, which are based on keywords.
We ignored the sales feedback on the AMS dashboard page, because we think it's unreliable and we also more or less ignored the number of impressions for each ad. (You only pay for clicks, not impressions.) However, an important figure was the 'conversion rate', the number of clicks needed for an attributable sale. This started at 19, which is terrible, but by improving the book description we got it down to a consistent 13 or so. Could be better.
You'll have seen the plural 'ads' above. One is not enough, and some people give up too easily. Over the six months, we have run a total of 70 ads and cancelled about 3/4 of them that weren't working. However, one ad that started in August is still running and producing a few clicks per day.
What have we learned?
1. Each ad only produces a few clicks per day, if any, so we needed several going to get our 13 for a sale. However the sale is at full price ($5.97 in USA) so in our case each sale makes $2.43. We have about 20 ads running at the moment, but could easily run more.
2. It's quite easy to create a new ad by copying and adjusting an existing one.
3. It's best to start small, experiment, persevere and expand.
4. Each ad needs lots of keywords relevant to the book subject - several hundred! Try authors and titles in the same genre.
5. Although the amounts are scary compared with $15 to have your discounted book emailed to bargain-hunters, it's actually quite hard to spend 'enough' money. I suppose that, provided the ROI is positive, one should spend as much money as possible.

Our results?
Over the six months (including the early learning period), the book's ads had a total of 16.3m impressions, producing 14,500 clicks at typical average bids of 7 to 8 cents. One click per 1,000 impressions is supposed to be OK and of course depends on the copy in the ad. Every ad had a positive ROI (revenue less cost divided by cost). We have spent $855 on the ads, which sounds a lot, and is. However, we sold 333 Kindle copies and 197 paperbacks in the period in the USA. The book was also in Kindleunlimited; about 78,800 pages were read, which equates to 262 complete books. If you compare the revenue from a Kindleunlimited 'book' with the cost of 13 clicks, the profit is tiny - but we're just pleased with the evidence that people are reading it! The attributable revenue over the period from Kindle, Createspace and KU together was about $1,700. So sales are not in the thousands, but the book is not in a popular nonfiction genre like self-help. Overall, including the learning period, the ROI has been almost 100%. Not great, but not bad.

Sorry this has been so long, but I thought it might be helpful. We're just waiting for Amazon to open up AMS to the UK and Germany!

Peter

Thank you for sharing your experience :).

Yes, thank you for sharing. I am just trying my first ad on Amazon, so this will be very helpful!

Thanks, that's very interesting.

Interesting to hear others experiences with AMS ads, thank you :)

I've been running ads for a few months now and I've been pleased with them. Similar to Peter I found that the product display ads didn't really work so I only run the keyword based sponsored ads. I have over 200 keywords, which increases over time as I check new releases in my genre and add new authors and book titles to my list. My genre is psychological thrillers and my keywords are almost exclusively author names and book titles. I check a few times a week on the performance of my ads, mainly to see if any of my keywords are misbehaving - e.g. costing me lots in clicks but not making much in sales.

The sales figures data is delayed by about 3 days, which means you have to wait a while to see how ads are doing. I think it is really good that AMS ads give you feedback on whether people have bought the book (even if this info is delayed a bit), as I also use facebook and bookbub ads and find it harder to work out if the clicks are resulting in sales.

I think I've mentioned this before in this group but I really would recommend the free course on AMS advertising on Kindlepreneur. I found it so helpful, and it covers examples of how to create ads for fiction and non-fiction books.

I think you have to be prepared to invest a bit of time in AMS ads - it took me about 4 hours or so to do the course I mentioned, and then about 3 hours to find keywords, then there is thinking of the ad copy and setting up different ads to test them. It is really handy that for AMS ads you don't have to create any images yourself to display in your ads, as that saves a bit of effort. Now that I have a couple of ads set up that perform reasonably well, I now spend maybe 5-10 minutes a few times a week just checking the figures and making small adjustments as necessary. I also spend up to half an hour adding new keywords which I do probably once every 3-5 weeks. I possibly should do this more often, but it seems to be working OK at the moment. It can feel frustrating to take time out of writing to work on stuff like this, but I think for me it's been worth it :)

Thanks, LK, I agree about the course.

Just to add to my previous post, it occurred to me that I could easily work out our ROI now, as opposed to the average of 100% over the period including the learning period. I did it for the month of February and it works out at 152%, so there was definitely an improvement.

I'm not sure everyone has to do complicated and scary statistics. It may be enough to know that someone else has done this and shown that it works. However, there are two important figures to keep an eye on.
1. The average number of clicks to get a sale. If, for example, you need 20 clicks at an average of .07 to get a sale and your revenue from the sale is $1.00, you're losing 40 cents per sale. This may be OK for other reasons, but it's good to be aware of it.
2. The ROI. Easily done monthly by looking at the charge to your credit card and adding up the revenue (Kindle + Createspace + KU, all USA only) for the same period.

Peter

Thank you Peter and LK for sharing such detailed information about AMS. I'm glad that it's worked for you both. As Peter notes, it's a pity that this isn't yet available for Amazon UK. Given that the majority of my ebooks are currently priced at only 99c/99p, I don't think that AMS would work for me, as I'd only receive 35% on these sales minus the cost of the clicks.

Thanks Peter! Awesome results and very detailed analysis. I dabbled a very small amount in Amazon ads a year ago, but didn't get any appreciable results. This makes me think I could try again.
Would you be willing to share your excel template as something to start from?

William. In principle yes, but I'm not sure if one can do that through the forum. Also, I'd have to modify it slightly and add some instructions, so that it would make sense to someone else.

It's probably not very professionally designed, but it makes sense to me!

Peter

I think you can send it through DM? If not, I can DM you my email address.

Don't take too much time on modifying--I was mostly interesting in how you're calculating day to day results vs. keywords so I can try something similar. I've got a lot of Excel experiences, so I can figure out some inconsistencies!

I haven't bothered to analyse daily results for keywords. I did create some new ads that only had keywords that had been successful in a previous ad, but I'm not convinced it was worthwhile.

If you get your email address to me, I'll send you the spreadsheet 'as is'.

Peter

Peter - just sent you a message. Thanks!

Thanks Peter, for your very helpful analysis. I've only recently started experimenting with AMS, and have seen some results in extra pages read, so it's interesting to read your experience. I think I need to add a lot more keywords!

Thanks, Peter and William! I love all the detailed info. I started using AMS sponsor ads (and Bookbub ads) in February. I am really liking them so far. I agree that I wish that BookBub could show which keywords triggered a click (or sale) like AMS. It is a very handy feature.

I’ve found the AMS ads to be great for getting Kindle Unlimited reads which actually pay more for my book. I started putting “Free in KU” at the tail end of every ad copy. That helps as otherwise the book still reflects the $2.99 price tag.

Oh, and remember when scheduling 99 cent promos to pause your AMS ads. Many of my keywords are 25 - 35 cents each so I would be in the hole quick if I ever forgot. I set a calendar reminder on my phone just to be safe :) I wish my genre wasn’t so competitive in bidding. Seven cents would be heavenly!

Oh! And follow bookbub, ENT, Robin Reads, etc daily emails for great keyword leads. Those books will be getting spiked activity and views on Amazon. I put in new ones all the time.

Amie wrote: "Oh! And follow bookbub, ENT, Robin Reads, etc daily emails for great keyword leads. Those books will be getting spiked activity and views on Amazon. I put in new ones all the time."

Terrific ideas....and thanks!

Something else, sparked by Amie's comments.

The reason we found Product Display ads useless for us was that we were (deliberately) not bidding enough to be competitive. This was because the revenue is only ($2.43, even at full price and 70%,, because the book has 99 images and the download cost is high. It would be more or less wiped out if we bid too high. After the learning period, we have set the maximum bid at 11 cents (for Sponsored ads) and paid anything from 6 to 9 cents per click. As I mentioned before, even at that level the KU revenue is marginal, but we typically make about $1.50 per book sale.

Peter

Really great info... and yes making my way through the AMS advertising course on Kindlepreneur. (As an aside Peter... what is the download cost of a book with 99 images?)

It's about $1.60, and yes we did minimise the image sizes! We considered reducing to 35% royalty where you don't pay the download charge, but it wasn't an improvement.

Peter

Ouch! Yeah, in that respect I am lucky. My download delivery fee is only 12 cents. I just have a long novel. 452 pages.

Unfortunately, the images are a key element of the book.

Peter wrote: "I wonder if anyone would be interested in our experience in the past few months with promoting my wife's book (nonfiction history/memoir) using Amazon advertising.
The book was published in July 2..."

Hi,
I have run multiple ads over the last year. I currently have more than one going per book. The keyword ones were working the best.
I suspected recently that the sales column is just a guess. They don't know which sales really come from a click from paperbacks that were ordered. I saw this because I was ordering a paperback copy for each contributor in my book (about six people) and had to do it separately since they all had different addresses. Createspace was too slow--I did order one through them at first, but it took three weeks until they even mailed the book!-- and I needed to get a copy to one person fast. ( I knew she moved around a lot.) I discovered the amount from my personal paperback sales were showing up in the sales column in my ad report.
It happened with my other book too. I decided the feature was not reliable to know which clicks led to sales. Which is disheartening. I'm sure they know for sure if a click does rightfully lead to a sale, but if CreateSpace paperbacks from my own doing are detected as sold, I'm not sure why they attribute it to a click if it was not.
Has anyone else seen evidence of this?
I don't get a bunch of sales, so that's why it was noticeable.

Hi Chele,

That's odd about the paperback sales. I don't know what to say about those, but I can say that I've had many ebook sales during AMS ad campaigns that have not registered in the "est sales" column. I figured Amazon had a way of tracking which ad clicks resulted in actual sales.

Yeah, that’s odd. I don’t have AMS ads on my paperback so not sure if that is a special situation. But with my ebook I started out with AMS only for a month and then began running daily Bookbub ads too. I have sales generated from Bookbub ads each day and although they show up instantly on my KDP dashboard those sales do not show up on my AMS campaign dashboard, only the sales that happen through the AMS keywords. Also, my hubby told a lady that was reading next to him (on a plane) about my book a couple of weeks ago. She said she would buy it that night and sure enough she did. I had 3 sales that particular day and my hubby was wanting to know if he had been a successful salesman. I told him give me 3 days for my report to load that info and we’ll see ;) Sure enough, only 2 of the 3 sales showed up on the AMS campaign report, and that told me my hubby was spot on with his sale. Hope that helps.

Amie wrote: "Yeah, that’s odd. I don’t have AMS ads on my paperback so not sure if that is a special situation. But with my ebook I started out with AMS only for a month and then began running daily Bookbub ads..."
Amie,
You're lucky your husband is an advocate for you! Mine won't even read my books, and the first one I wrote for him personally! (He's an avid reader.) Oh well... I guess that gives me free range to write whatever I want.
I just have ads running for the book as a whole, not particularly separate for each format, so whether a click led to a paperback or an ebook, it just says a sale. My baffling is on paperbacks I ordered myself, not through the ads. Why would they show up as sales thru that?

Don't worry, Chele, my husband doesn't read mine either and shows no interest so certainly doesn't help by doing any marketing. It should be kept secret as far as he is concerned. But as you hint at, at least ours don't start critiquing them for us!

Anna Faversham wrote: "Don't worry, Chele, my husband doesn't read mine either and shows no interest so certainly doesn't help by doing any marketing. It should be kept secret as far as he is concerned. But as you hint a..."
Haha, Anna, that is true!

Ha ha. Mine does lean in with his opinion sometimes! But I like to press him with questions every now and then to see what a male character might think or say in a situation. He finds little hidden nuggets when he reads my manuscripts. He’ll be like, “Wait a second, that was me!” And not just suggestions he’s made. Little character ticks or witty comments too. It’s kind of like an Easter Egg hunt for him ;)

As a husband myself, I feel like an eavesdropper!

I've promised my family I won't use them as characters. Perhaps I should... that'd make them read them.

I think my daughter has read them because her friends have so I'm presuming she didn't put them off!

That’s awesome about your daughter, Anna. I’ve yet to let my daughter read my novel, other than small bits here and there. We share a kindle account and I often wonder if she’s ever pulled the book up on her device and read it anyway! It’s totally on there.

She’s 15 now, but probably still wants to shield her eyes from mom’s harem romance! And it’s not steamy by any means, but I appreciate the respectful distance :)

Peter wrote: "Over the six months (including the early learning period), the book's ads had a total of 16.3m impressions, producing 14,500 clicks.."

So you had approx 1100 impressions per click? Correct?

Amie wrote: " I agree that I wish that BookBub could show which keywords triggered a click (or sale) like AMS...."

Hi Amie, specifically how do you find out which keyword worked to cause a sale with AMS?

Hi Graeme,

It's really easy. You have a dashboard filled with reports on each ad campaign you create and AMS actually tracks each keyword's performance separately. You see clicks and impressions as they occur (or at least within a few hours), but if you're patient and remember to look at your report daily or at least twice a week, the sales portion of the report will post to the keyword about 2-3 days after the sale. Now what doesn't show up is downloads for KU. I actually have a handful of keywords that at a glance one would think are not cost effective because their costs either outweighs or is at 60% or higher the cost of sales. BUT, I keep an eye on my Amazon rank throughout the day and can see where those clicks are rendering downloads and pages read that I am getting paid for through KU. So just keep all things in mind as you view your report.

I also go in there and disable keywords that have too many impressions without a click. For me, I do this at 1,200 impressions. I don't want a poor performance rate on a few keywords to lower a particular campaign's overall performance. I prefer to see a click for every 200 - 400 impressions so that Amazon gives my ad more visibility. But 1,000 isn't bad (kind of normal) and the impressions cost me nothing, only the clicks.

Finally, be flexible and use the ads as a learning experience. I am having a new book cover designed for my novel as we speak. I feel like my book does well with email advertisements with folks like BargainBooksy, etc. However, without the blurb, I don't get as many clicks. Not on facebook, Twitter, Bookbub CTR ads, etc. I'm historical fiction and I guess my cover has more of a contemporary design (even though it's just a girl's face! Grrr. Totally didn't want to give up my cover.) It must be throwing a good percentage of folks off. Earlier this winter, I also increased my conversion rate by having a professional write up my book description and AMS ads. It just wasn't my wheelhouse and I couldn't deny the data that was coming back to me via AMS showing it wasn't working. So yeah, look at it like a blind taste test. AMS ads are showing us how strangers feel about our pitch to them. It's worth the little bit of money :)

P.S. With AMS, it's really important that you try loads of keywords, easily a thousand. Try pitching 3 to 5 different slogans. If it's free in KU, mention that too! That really helped me as AMS ads will not show anything but your current list price under the sponsored ads area.

Amie wrote: "Hi Graeme,

It's really easy. You have a dashboard filled with reports on each ad campaign you create and AMS actually tracks each keyword's performance separately. You see clicks and impressions a..."

I wish I could convey how helpful these discussions are for me. My heartfelt thanks to all who are so willing to share their knowledge and ideas for marketing. It truly is fascinating and helpful. Thanks, Amie!

You are so welcome ;)

Thanks Amie,

I found the second dashboard for each individual campaign. I.e. the "Campaign Name," is a link, so I can see the performance of individual keywords.

I agree, it's a learning experience and the 'blind taste test,' strikes me as a good analogy.

Amie wrote: "You are so welcome ;)"

Amie...I'm wondering if you, or others, could answer a question for me. In the ad I'm running, there are words which are getting no impressions at all, even though I consider them very relevant to my book content. I've adjusted the click price upward to show I'm serious, but still no impressions. Is there a remedy for this, or should I take these keywords out because they are failing to perform? Do these words make the campaign appear less productive, thus making Amazon less likely to pair them with my book? Any advice about those keywords not producing any impressions would be appreciated!

Thanks for asking that Carmel, I have the same question.

If you change the prices of your books, I assume the adverts automatically update to the new pricing along with the product details page - is that correct?

Graeme wrote: "If you change the prices of your books, I assume the adverts automatically update to the new pricing along with the product details page - is that correct?"
Thanks for asking that, Graeme, as I was wondering the same thing! :)

Hi Carmel!

Okay, so it could be a handful of things...

Perhaps the keyword or phrase isn’t very common to others (or that exact wording) and hasn’t come up yet for your bid to have a go at it. Sometimes certain keywords have fields that stay empty for me throughout the week and then suddenly get hits on the weekend when readers are searching more. I have this happen with some Ottoman historical terms that are part of my book’s culture. Very uncommon to the average buyer but render sales for the right person. :)

But it could be that the keyword has too much competition and your increased bid still isn’t high enough. I have some keywords I pay 38 cents per click for. I’d say most of mine are between 20 - 30 cents, but some are as little as 10 cents. So you could try increasing your bid (right within your report on the same line as the keyword) and see if impressions are served. You can always disable those same keywords if that turns out to be the issue and you decide the going rate is just too much for you to pay.

One more thing that could be the reason you’re not getting impressions. Sometimes Amazon determines words to not be relevant and then you may not technically be in the bidding war for the search term. I read an article about that once.

But the important thing to remember is that impressions cost you nothing. Only clicks. If a certain word is not rendering ANY impressions then it shouldn’t hurt you to have it left open. You are judged by how many clicks result from an actual batch of impressions and further judged by how many clicks resulted in actual sales and/or downloads. Amazon wants to make money, so they will start suppressing an ad that gets tons of clicks but zero sales in favor of an ad that the bid is less but produces sales. Make sense?

Best of luck to you!

Graeme - In theory, that thought seems right. I would think it adjusts as it’s all metadata Amazon is pulling. (But don’t hold me to it!)

But I want to suggest something. I pause my AMS ads when I do a 99 cent promo or countdown deal as I am already paying ad services at that time to drive traffic to my books. I don’t want my AMS ads racking up clicks on a 99 cent book that I am making 57 cents from during a countdown deal and only 30 something cents on a manual price change. I could very quickly lose money as it often takes 3 or 4 clicks for me to produce a sale or download. I also hold off as long as I can on reactivating my AMS ads after a big promo. I figure I’ll get sales from the boosted visibility for a solid 10 days or longer and just keep my full royalty per sale. But once I slip down the Amazon algorithm as far as say 40,000 overall ranking, I turn those bad boys back on. I coast for a bit with AMS and then I add back in my CTR ads with BookBub.

I hope that helps :)

Hi Amie, yes that makes a lot of sense.

All of that helps tremendously, and thanks once more for your willingness to share.

thank you for this thread product display ads have worked for me.

I am going to combine my books now numbering five into one book and sell all five in one book.

Has anyone done this before. I will combine two books 3 4 and 5.

Also where do you promote your books before you release them

Product display ads have worked for me I meant to say.

I've been running an AMS advert for a week,

"What if the rules of reality could be changed, and vampires vs heroes were fighting a secret war for control? Would you like to find out what happens?"

Which has generated 6 clicks off 2855 impressions at an avg cost of $0.17 per click - no sales yet, but number of clicks per impression is <1000, which seems good.

Graeme wrote: "I've been running an AMS advert for a week,

"What if the rules of reality could be changed, and vampires vs heroes were fighting a secret war for control? Would you like to find out what happens?"..."
I like your blurb!
Is the $0.17 per click a fixed amount?

Thanks. It's an average.

My bid price per click is 30 cents. But I've never spent that.