3: Tracking Ad Sales and Page Reads (Conversion and Profitability)

 

AD CONVERSION ANALYSIS PROCESS:

  1. Turn off all your ads except for the one with the lowest CPC. Log conversion, book rank, and cost per sale for 1 – 3 days. The longer you track, the more accurate conversion and cost per sale data will be.
  2. Repeat process with your next lowest CPC ad(s) until satisfied.
  3. Compare ads’ cost per sale (CPS) to the series revenue per sale (RPS).
  4. Turn ads back on with a CPS lower than the series RPS.

If you’re in Kindle Unlimited, comparing CPS to RPS is much less useful and accurate, but CPS can still give you a general idea of which ads are performing best.

Note that regardless of whether you’re wide or in KU, RPS is an estimate. When you turn the ads back on, you want to confirm profitability with your weekly/monthly net profit calculations. Net profit is ultimately king.

ALTERNATIVE METHODS:

  1. Affiliate links (not recommended; not accurate) [use: never]
  2. Relative method (looking at sales and profit in the period prior to starting or increasing ad spend to eyeball conversion) [use: launches and promos, since you have no baseline]
  3. Relative + baseline method (using the relative method in combination with the baseline, which is the average daily sales and profit in a period where you weren’t running any ads, or ad spend was consistent) [use: backlist, most accurate; if you have no stable baseline, just use relative method]

The relative and relative + baseline methods are my preferred approaches for analyzing conversion. Conversion and profitability go hand in hand, so I tend to look at them in tandem, which both of these methods do.

For equations, download the ads best practices PDF (nicholaserik.com/ad-checklist) OR use the Excel Multitool (nicholaserik.com/multitool).