Are You Overspending on Amazon Ads?

Hey,

It's all too easy to think that spending more money on Ads will result in more book sales.

If that was the case, authors around the world would be putting every last dollar they had into advertising!

Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that.

You have to put the money into the right places in order to see a return on that Ad Spend.

The difficulty is, those places where you get a good return on your investment, change over time. This is why it's important to check in on your Ads on at least a weekly basis.

The Amazon Ads Placement Report

Speaking specifically to Amazon Ads, I highly, highly recommend that you download a Placement Report.

This report will tell you which of the 3 possible placements your Ads can appear in, are driving the most sales and page reads, but also, which is the most profitable for you.

The 3 possible placements that your Amazon Ads can appear in are:

– Top of Search

– Product Pages

– Rest of Search

Typically, Top of Search is going to be the most expensive; it's also, for many authors, the most desirable. And, although Top of Search converts well for many authors, it doesn't mean to say that it's right for everyone.

If your the majority of your Ad Spend is going on Top of Search, but you find in your Placement Report that it's just not performing well (e.g. poor conversions), stop spending money on it!

The Rest of Search placement can be far more sustainable, because it's cheaper, and can still drive a ton of sales and page reads.

The issue here is that it's a little harder to direct our Ad Spend to the Rest of Search placement, because we have no Placement Adjustments for it, as we do with Top of Search and Product Pages.

The Product Page placement can suck up a lot of your budget, converts well, and is generally a little cheaper than the Top of Search placement for most authors, but not always.

How To Piggyback Off Top of Search

One sneaky way to indirectly benefit from the Top of Search placement without actually appearing there, is to target the relevant ASINs of books that are appearing at the top of the search results.

This will be a much cheaper and more sustainable way to target readers who are clicking on those books appearing at the top of the search results, but for a lower cost.

At this time of year, the cost of Amazon Ads is inevitably increasing as we move closer to Christmas, so it's important that you know your budgetary limits and stick to them.

If you see your spend increasing, but sales are remaining fairly steady (i.e. not increasing at the same rate as spend is going up), then stop spending!

Re-evaluate.

There are other ways to grow and reach more readers.

Wrapping Up...

The bottom line is that you should be doubling down on what is actually working, and pulling back spend on what isn't working.

With Amazon Ads, as I mentioned earlier, the first place I would go is the Placements Report. Look at where your money is being spent and adjust accordingly.

Move your budget to where the sales and page reads are happening.

This also comes back to the 80/20 rule, or Pareto's Principle.

Find the 20% of Campaigns, Keywords, ASINs, Categories and Placements that are driving 80% of your results (i.e. sales and page reads) and put more money into them.

Don't spread your budget across every Campaign, Keyword, etc. Focus it on the best performers.

You'll see far more book sales and a healthier profit too.


To Your Success

– Matt