#060: Amazon and Facebook Ads – One, Both or None?

Read Time: 4 Minutes

"Should I run Amazon Ads, Facebook Ads, both or none?"

This is a question I've asked myself countless times over the years.

To cut to the chase, though we'll dive deeper in a moment, I like to use a combination of both Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads, but Facebook Ads are (by far) our biggest spend and sales generator.

Whatever situation you're in:

– Running Facebook Ads only

– Running Amazon Ads only

– Running Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads

– Running Ads on a different platform

– Not running Ads at all

My hope is that today's newsletter will provide some insight and food for thought on how to approach your advertising strategy.

Let's dive in...

Working In Harmony

A very definite trend I've witnessed again and again is that when our Facebook Ads performance is down, so is our Amazon Ads performance.

When our Facebook Ads performance is up, so is our Amazon Ads performance.

To me, this very clearly spells out that Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads work beautifully together in harmony.

It's not clear cut, any of this, and the scenarios mentioned above don't always play out.

But 8 times out 10, our Amazon Ads performance has a direct correlation with our Facebook Ads performance.

How I Use Amazon Ads

For the past 18 months, my Amazon Ads strategy (if you can call it that) has been very simple.

In fact, it's been so simple, up until the past 2-3 weeks, that I haven't touched our Amazon Ads since the beginning of 2023.

I've just let them run (very profitably).

Although I'm advertising all the books in the series with Amazon Ads, most of the budget naturally goes towards advertising Book 1.

My "strategy" for Amazon Ads for the past 18 months has simply been to target brand keywords and brand ASINs to protect our product pages and search results.

For example, keywords I've been targeting include:

– the ancestors saga

– the forbidden

– daughter of ninmah

– enemy tribe

– the last kamaali

– lori holmes

I target all of the above using Phrase Match keywords in order to pick up searches such as "lori holmes ancestors saga" and "the forbidden lori holmes".

I'm not currently running any cold audience (i.e. reaching new readers) targeting campaigns; though this is something I'm working on.

The focus for the past 18 months has been on capitalizing on warm traffic who are specifically coming to Amazon to look for Lori's books.

How I Use Facebook Ads

If you're a member of Facebook Ads Mastery For Authors, you'll know the ins and outs of my Facebook Ads strategy.

But from a high level, I use Facebook Ads to drive people to Book 1 of Lori's series.

From there, a percentage of people go on to read Books 2, 3 and 4.

I'm currently just using the Traffic objective with Facebook Ads, but next week I'll be launching a test where I'll be using the Sales objective, optimizing for Purchases, and driving people to this landing page:

I'll set things up in the backend with the Facebook Pixel and Conversions API to tell Facebook to consider anyone who clicks the Buy on Amazon button (shown in the image above and directs people to Book 1 on Amazon) as a Purchase.

That way, Facebook can optimize to find people who click on the button.

Is it going to work? I have no idea.

I know of several authors who this approach has worked for, but I also know of others who it hasn't worked for.

We can hypothesise all day, but the truth is, we're only going to know if this works for us if we test and collect our own data.

I'll set up a different page for every Ad I run and a different Amazon Attribution link for every Buy on Amazon button to track things as accurately as I can.

I'll report back when I have some data and results to share with you :)

Getting back on track...

The Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads Flywheel

As I alluded to above, there definitely seems to be some correlation between Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads performance.

This makes sense to me.

Amazon Ads would rather show Ads that generate Sales and/or Page Reads, over Ads that have little to no sales history.

Facebook Ads are cheaper than Amazon Ads and can drive a LOT of traffic to your books very quickly.

Provided you have a solid book product page and good Facebook Ads, you can start generating sales/page reads from your Facebook Ads within hours.

In my experience, the same isn't true for Amazon Ads; I find it can take several days, sometimes weeks, to start getting meaningful data from Amazon Ads, but maybe that's just me.

When Amazon sees your book is selling well and your bestseller rank is improving, they'll be more inclined to show your Amazon Ads to more people.

This then leads to more sales/page reads (both organically and from Ads), improved bestseller ranks, more readthrough, more reviews/ratings, and so the cycle continues.

A beautiful flywheel.

Wrapping Up...

The purpose of this newsletter wasn't to say you must use Facebook Ads to see success with Amazon Ads.

There are plenty of authors out there who have incredible results from Amazon Ads alone.

This newsletter was more to share my experience of how I use Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads in tandem and how the results of both platforms seem inextricably tied together.

Will your results be identical to mine?

Probably not.

But they could be similar.

Or they could be wildly different.

To find out what works for you, the only way to truly know is to test.

Thank you for reading.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

To Your Success
– Matt