Free Guide: Amazon Ads Big Picture Thinking

Today, I'm going to share with you something I don't hear talked about often enough amongst authors. And that is...

Always look at the big picture

You should NEVER look at your Amazon Ads inside a vacuum for 3 key reasons:

Reason #1: Amazon Ads form just one part of your marketing pie (you're probably doing other forms of marketing/advertising activities).

Reason #2: Sales of other books (i.e. later books in a series, other stand alone books, etc.) that you're not advertising with Amazon Ads, aren't being attributed to your Amazon Ads.

Reason #3: The Sales figure reported in your Amazon Ads Dashboard is based on the list price of your books, NOT the royalty you receive from each sale.

A better way to understand how your Amazon Ads are impacting your sales (and this is what I do), is to compare your Ad Spend with your Total Royalties.

You can find your Total Royalties in your KDP Dashboard; it looks like this:

It's very normal to have Amazon Ads, that, on the surface, look like they are losing money hand over fist, whereas, in fact, when you take a step back and look at the big picture (taking your total royalties into account), you're actually wildly profitable.

I have authors get in touch with me on an almost weekly basis saying that their Amazon Ads "aren't working".

This is because, in most cases, they aren't looking at the big picture.

They're looking at what they've spent on Amazon Ads and how many sales they've generated with the Amazon Ads, but they're not looking at their Total Royalties in relation to their Amazon Ads spend.

For example, if you're advertising Book 1 of a 5 book series with Amazon Ads, you can make a supposed "loss" on the Amazon Ads and still be wildly profitable because of read through to your other books.

And that's just one series.

My wife's series, for example, is a 4 book series where I focus on advertising Book 1, in the main. Yet, all the sales of Book 1 that the Amazon Ads generate will go on to generate sales of Books 2-4, as a percentage of readers move through the series.

If you've written multiple series and you're only advertising your best-performer, if they've enjoyed their first taste of your books, readers will organically go and find your other series. 

If you write non-fiction books and have products or services available on the back-end, you could be spending $100 per day on Amazon Ads advertising a 99¢ book and be generating huge numbers of leads and sales because of your business model.

None of these additional sales of other books, other series, products or services, will be directly attributable to your Amazon Ads.

This is why treating your Amazon Ads as their own entity without taking other factors into account, namely your overall earnings, will cause you to be making decisions based on incomplete data.

It all comes down to your goals and looking at the big picture.

That's how you win.

Big picture thinking. Always.

You got this.