Strategies for Marketing on Amazon?

[TheDillon__]

Hey all!

A few weeks ago, I released my first book on Amazon . I'm pulling the numbers below so far.

• #625 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Business Life > Time Management
• #763 in Books > Self-Help > Time Management
• #1234 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Business Life > Personal Success

I've only managed ~3 sales/week up to this point, and I'm thinking of boosting that with a test run on Amazon Marketing.

However - I'm concerned about the ad placement with sponsored products. Is it worth paying to get listed on the rock bottom of the first page? How niche should I be when choosing keywords?

Or are there more lucrative advantages to using Product Display Ads?

What's your experience with Amazon Marketing for your books?

Thanks!

 

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[amp0193]

Hey all!

A few weeks ago, I released my first book on Amazon . I'm pulling the numbers below so far.

• #625 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Business Life > Time Management
• #763 in Books > Self-Help > Time Management
• #1234 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Business Life > Personal Success

I've only managed ~3 sales/week up to this point, and I'm thinking of boosting that with a test run on Amazon Marketing.

However - I'm concerned about the ad placement with sponsored products. Is it worth paying to get listed on the rock bottom of the first page? How niche should I be when choosing keywords?

Or are there more lucrative advantages to using Product Display Ads?

What's your experience with Amazon Marketing for your books?

Thanks!

I haven't sold books, but I imagine it's similar to other products.

Product display ads are going to give you high impressions/costs, and likely not a lot of sales. In mine and friends' experience, these are difficult to make do well.

Sponsored ads are going to be the most visible ads on the site. Unlike google/facebook/other advertising channels, making sales through Amazon ppc, is going to increase your search rank, which will increase organic sales. So, I my favorite strategy is going aggressive with my bids, on the high volume keywords, and even if I lose a bit of money on the front end, the organic sales that come from increased search rank more than make up for it.

That being said, I don't like to sell in very competitive niches, so I tend to be very profitable on the front end, and only get more so after search rank is improved.

I hope that helps.

 

[EricZ]

Hey all!

A few weeks ago, I released my first book on Amazon . I'm pulling the numbers below so far.

• #625 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Business Life > Time Management
• #763 in Books > Self-Help > Time Management
• #1234 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Business Life > Personal Success

I've only managed ~3 sales/week up to this point, and I'm thinking of boosting that with a test run on Amazon Marketing.

However - I'm concerned about the ad placement with sponsored products. Is it worth paying to get listed on the rock bottom of the first page? How niche should I be when choosing keywords?

Or are there more lucrative advantages to using Product Display Ads?

What's your experience with Amazon Marketing for your books?

Thanks!

2 Best strategies:
1.) You can do broad interest based ads for 1-2 weeks and watch your ACoS like a hawk, when it nears 70% shut the ads down.
2.) Do keyword based ads -this will be your most lucrative ad- go to Goog's keyword planner and get the relevant keywords for your book. Dump up to 1000 keywords in your ad.
Watch how the separate keywords perform and after 3 days up the cpc for the good keywords.
In your niche you should be able to make around 2k with around a 20% ACoS.

For more info check the Kboards (authors' cafe) or here:
Amazon Ads For Authors

I'm also hosting a webinar soon so stay tuned!

 

[amp0193]

2 Best strategies:
1.) You can do broad interest based ads for 1-2 weeks and watch your ACoS like a hawk, when it nears 70% shut the ads down.

Why would you shut the ads down? Just add negative keywords if the keyword's irrelevant or reduce your bid if it is relevant. Or keep it running as is, if it is a highly relevant keyword, as the benefit of increased search rank might out-weigh the cost of a 70% ACoS ad.

Dump up to 1000 keywords in your ad.

This really isn't necessary. Broad and Phrase match should pull in searches for the majority of those 1000 keywords. Dumping in all those keywords is just redundant.

 

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[EricZ]

Why would you shut the ads down? Just add negative keywords if the keyword's irrelevant or reduce your bid if it is relevant. Or keep it running as is, if it is a highly relevant keyword, as the benefit of increased search rank might out-weigh the cost of a 70% ACoS ad.



This really isn't necessary. Broad and Phrase match should pull in searches for the majority of those 1000 keywords. Dumping in all those keywords is just redundant.

1.Interest based ads are not keyword ads - these are the "category" ads where you can only choose a broad category like "psychology".
2. The point with the keywords is to let goog do the work for you. You DON'T know what keywords are good. So use a keyword tool, (doesn't have to be goog, but could be Semrush or other) to find the good keywords for you.
You will be surprised at what words sell.
For example with my book "Be Freud" the keywords "Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud" (yes 2x!) was selling like crazy. Who would have thought that?
But you won't find this out unless you dump all the keywords in and see for yourself.

I call this "harvesting the long tail."

For the interest based category ads you shut them down because they are too broad and cast a too wide net.
You -will- reach audience exhaustion relatively quickly. Every further effort to revive or re-start such an ad fails. You can wait weeks, or months (depending on your niche) to re-start them but they are usually never as effective as the first run.

70% percent is cut-off point because you only get 70% of the royalties. However in the dashboard the ACoS is sales over ad spend, "sales" being the -zon price -not- yours.

p.s.
Looks like that's the difference for Books, the ads manager and options are definitely different.

 

[amp0193]

1.Interest based ads are not keyword ads - these are the "category" ads where you can only choose a broad category like "psychology".

Ah, my bad. I missed the "interest" part of your sentence. I haven't had much luck with these. Why shut it down though? Just drop the bid real low if the ACoS is going up. You'll get the occasional sale, and it will be profitable.

2. The point with the keywords is to let goog do the work for you. You DON'T know what keywords are good. So use a keyword tool, (doesn't have to be goog, but could be Semrush or other) to find the good keywords for you.

I guess if your product has lots of uses and crosses multiple categories, this might be the case. We are talking about books I suppose, so I'll concede that your way has some value. 1000 still seems unnecessary, as a lot of those 1000s that google will give you will be redundant. Pick the main keywords out of that, and just run phrase and broad match. Then, if you want to double down, run an Amazon search term report, pick out the search terms that getting lots of impressions, and bid on those keywords with exact match.

Amazon automatic campaigns are good for keyword discovery as well.

For example with my book "Be Freud" the keywords "Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud" (yes 2x!) was selling like crazy. Who would have thought that?

Yeah, there's no way anyone was searching Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud. Amazon just matched up "sigmund freud" searches to that keyword.

Looks like that's the difference for Books, the ads manager and options are definitely different.

It sounds like it's similar to AMS/Vendor Express ads.

 

[EricZ]

Thanks,
Tell us more about the Amazon search report!
I don't think we have that as an option on the "book" side of AMS.
I haven't seen the other side, so I can't say, just been doing book ads with AMS.
Sounds like a very good tool though.

Yes, automatic keywords generated by -zon are cool, what I do is use those and then ad some from the keyword planner.
It's a super easy strategy for beginners, and works well. Thanks for the insights!

 

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[amp0193]

Thanks,
Tell us more about the Amazon search report!
I don't think we have that as an option on the "book" side of AMS.
I haven't seen the other side, so I can't say, just been doing book ads with AMS.
Sounds like a very good tool though.

Oh shoot, I guess this is available through seller central. But if you're running sponsored products through AMS... then I don't know if you have it or not. I don't run my sponsored product ads through AMS, I run them through Seller Central.