I have been doing a relatively terrible job promoting my book, Agile Discovery & Delivery. I do a lot of talks related to it, but aside from that, I’m basically ignoring it. When I retired from full-time work, I thought I would focus more on book promotion, but here I am six months later and I haven’t done much yet. It is much more fun to write the book than market it. So, when Amazon Ads offered me $100 of free advertising, I decided to try it out. Here’s what I learned from the experience and how you can set-up your first campaign too.
Setting Up an Amazon Ad Campaign
I started by clicking the link in the email which brings me to a separate Amazon Ads website. You can sign-in and create an ad campaign in minutes. That’s where my good impression of Amazon Ads began and ended.
Quick Start Guide for Amazon Ads
Amazon ads has quite a bit of help built into their tool. Here’s what I did for my first campaign.
- Select Single Country from the left menu.
- Click on the Create Campaign button.
- You’ll be offered two options: Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands. You’re probably familiar with sponsored products already, they’re the products that show up at the top of your Amazon search with the small grey word “Sponsored”. Sponsored brands lets you advertise a collection of products. Select Sponsored Products to start with one book.
- You can choose between Add Custom Text or Standard Ad. With custom text, you’ll have to provide new ad copy and you can only advertise one book. With standard ads, Amazon will just pull a portion of the text from your book’s page for you and you can advertise more than one book (i.e. various formats or a series). Choose Standard Ad for now.
- Name your ad campaign, then add the book(s) you’d like to include.
- Choose between Automatic Targeting or Manual Targeting. If you want to add your own keywords, pick manual. If not, choose automatic.
- Then it gets interesting. Amazon works on an ad bid system. You can set how much you’re willing to pay per click. There’s a default, which they started me at $.55. Then, there is a way to set bids by target group where you can decide to pay more or less for keywords that more closely match yours. You can also set negative targeting (i.e., don’t show my ad when people are looking for “agile dog training” because that is completely different from my book’s subject matter of “agile software development”). For my first campaign, I set the default bid to what they suggested and moved on.
- Then there’s a campaign bid strategy. You can tell Amazon to adjust your bid based on the bid market at the time by selecting Dynamic Bids – Up and Down (there’s a cap of 100% on this option). Or, you can choose Dynamic Bids – Down Only so you know you’re always going to be bidding at your default bid rate or lower. Finally you can pick Fixed Bids to always use your exact default bid(s). I decided to try Dynamic Bids – Up and Down to see how it worked.
- Then, you can increase your bid by a percentage based on where you want your ad to fall (top of first page, somewhere in the rest of the search page, or just on product pages). I left these at zero.
- Last, but not least, you pick your campaign start and end dates. A couple of things to note:
- Amazon must approve your ad campaign, which could take up to 72 hours. Mine was approved within 24 hours, but this is important to note if you absolutely need it to start on a certain date.
- I found out that if I wanted to use my promotional credit, I had to set-up the ad campaign as “ongoing”, which means I didn’t pick an end date.
- Finally, you set your daily budget. Amazon will not charge you more than this each day. They suggest $12. I put $20 in for my campaign. Amazon rarely charged me more than a few dollars a day. I never hit my maximum.
- Then, click Launch Campaign. Note there is now a forecast widget on the right that can help you adjust your settings to get better results. I don’t recall that being there during my campaign!
Amazon Ad Results
Amazon Ads has a dashboard with a lot of information about how your ad campaign is doing. You can see how many impressions, clicks, sales, and how much you’re spending all in one spot.
I had my campaign running for a couple of weeks in October. For days, I waited to see if I would sell anything based on the ads. I’d be charged $1.24 one day and up to $5.35 the next, but nothing was producing a sale. In the end, I apparently sold one book through Amazon Ads. As you can see, the ad appeared almost 30,000 times and I sold one book. How much did I spend to sell that one book? $14.69. The book cost $22.24, so my Advertising Cost of Sale (ACOS) was 66.05%, which is very high. A good ACOS is around 15-30% or up to 40%.
Campaign managers can change the stats at the top of the dashboard and see many more items. Most interestingly to me, my click-through rate was only .06%. Which is very, very low. Could I have increased that by changing the campaign defaults or writing my own copy? Maybe?
Where’s my $100?
Before you get started with Amazon Ads, you must add a credit card that they can charge for the ads. It gets charged every few days. Even though I supposedly had $100 of free credit, I was charged for the whole campaign and since it was fairly inexpensive, I didn’t spend time trying to figure out where my promotional credit was. Maybe it’s a scam to get me to try Amazon Ads or maybe there was an advertising threshhold I had to reach. Who knows! I couldn’t find much information about it online either, which I found odd.
Do I Recommend Amazon Ads?
No, I don’t. They are easy enough to set-up and were fairly cheap. But, I feel like it’s a coincidence that one book was sold during the campaign. I sell far more books from organic search and by promoting the book at my talks. It’s cheap enough to try, but seems largely ineffective.
What Else Is There?
I’ve also gotten emails about promotional deals from Google Ads & LinkedIn Ads. I suspect Google Ads will be very similar, but I am somewhat looking forward to trying LinkedIn. My book is a business / tech book after all, so LinkedIn likely has more people who might be interested. I’ll give it a shot and I’ll let you all know how that goes!
