Self-published authors must learn how to leverage Amazon Ad campaigns if they want to increase sales of their novels. Amazon Ads offers a platform to reach your target readership that’s scouring the site for books to read.
With bookstores accounting for a measly 1% of total global book sales, it’s a must-have tool to include in your marketing mix. Google Ads and Facebook marketing are useful, but they don’t offer you the kind of direct reach you get through utilizing Amazon Ads.
Newbies marketing their work on Amazon might feel overwhelmed at the prospect of setting up their first Amazon Ads campaign. The fear of the unknown often pushes us into procrastination, assuming we don’t need to use Amazon and are fine with conventional marketing methods.
If you brush aside the fear and learn how to leverage the Ads manager on your account, you’ll find it isn’t as challenging as you think to set it up and see the sales start climbing towards success.
Amazon Advertising for Authors Explained
Amazon Advertising for self-published authors offers you a platform dedicated to running ad campaigns on the site. You get access to a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) model, similar to Facebook Ads and Google Ads. So, Amazon won’t charge you for impressions or when it presents your novels to prospects browsing the site for new books to read.
It charges you when those prospects click your ad and view the listing. If 1,000 see your ad and 10 click on it, you pay for the 10 clicks, and the rest of the impressions are free, helping build your author brand and visibility on the site.
A Brief PSA on Amazon Ads for Authors
Amazon Advertising runs a user-friendly model geared for easy access and monitoring. Unlike other sites, you don’t pay for placement – that’s free. You’ll bid for keywords to assist the Amazon algorithm in categorizing your novel.
The Amazon algorithm uses data like keywords to assume what prospects browsing the site want to see. You’ll couple your keyword selection with genres and similar titles to optimize your advertising campaign on the site.
Amazon suggests bids, and you have the option of creating custom bids. Your bid goes into an auction process, competing with other authors’ bids for ad placement. In most instances, the highest bid gets the best recognition and placement on the site, but that’s not always the case.
Amazon uses factors like reviews, relevancy, and conversion rate alongside bids to determine the best-performing ads the algorithm feels offer its users the most value. So, Amazon won’t display your ad because you’re the highest bidder.
If you have an irrelevant ad, the prospective reader might skip your book, lowering user engagement, and they might choose to move to another platform to make their purchase. Amazon wants its business, so it’ll promote the ad it feels offers the best chance of a conversion.
And if the ad is irrelevant to the customer’s search or links to a book with dismal reviews, the customer may not purchase the book.
Additionally, the author or the algorithm might not use your entire bid to promote your novels on its site. The bid is the maximum you’re willing to spend if a user clicks your ad and reviews the listing. The second-price auction system means if you’re the highest bidder, you’ll pay $0.01 more per click than the next highest bidder.
What are the Amazon Ads Categories Available to Authors?
Amazon ads run a model using three categories for its ad campaigns.
Lock Screen Ads
The ads appear on Fire and Kindle devices when the user unlocks their screen.
Sponsored Brands
These banner ads display at the top of the search results page. It displays up to three ads per search, and it’s a great campaign for building awareness of your books.
Sponsored Products
These ads display in search results and listings pages of your competitor’s books.
Newcomers to Amazon Ads should focus their ad spend on the Sponsored Products campaign. This strategy allows your ads to display similar books and relevant search keywords.
How Do Authors Set Up an Amazon Ads Campaign?
Structuring your Amazon Ads campaign requires you to navigate to your KDP or products catalog and select the book you want to promote. Select the “Promote and Advertise” feature.
Choose the marketplace where you want to promote your novel. We recommend going with developed markets like the UK, the US, Australia, and New Zealand.
Select Create an ad campaign.
Select the Sponsored Products ad campaign.
Amazon will direct you through the rest of the steps required to successfully set up your first ad campaign.
Keep the following in mind when setting up your ads campaign.
Set your ad campaign’s end date, especially if it’s your first time using the platform. Failing to do this means it runs to perpetuity, and Amazon will keep charging you until you tell the algorithm to stop.
Choose the automatic targeting option for your ad campaign.
We recommend the dynamic bids option from the three presented for your ad campaign. This strategy allows Amazon to decrease or increase the bid amount based on the possibility of generating a conversion.
Use the standard ad format option, and the platform will do the ad copy for you.
Use negative keywords to improve the relevancy of your ad campaign. This tactic stops your ad from showing up in irrelevant searches.
How Much Does an Amazon Ad Campaign Cost?
Amazon ad campaigns are remarkably affordable compared to Facebook and Google ads. You can start with as little as $1 per day, but that’s not going to get you very far. We suggest increasing that to $5 to $10 per day if you want instant results from your ads.
We recommend running three different ads for each book. Assess which one is the top performer after 30 days, cancel the other two ads, and pour your marketing budget into the ad producing the best results.
Run the campaign for 60 days before making any adjustments, and check on it every three weeks to change elements that increase your book sales. You’ll need patience with this strategy, as it takes time for your ads to work and produce results.