Day 5: Amazon Ads Refinement

Marketing

  • Sellthrough chain: can encourage cross-sellthrough between series by including an excerpt + link in the last book (or box set) of Series A for Series B (and vice versa).
  • Clarity trumps cleverness when it comes to marketing and advertising, so don’t hesitate to be clear about what you’re selling / what the offer is in your ad creative.
  • Tested new BookBub Ad creatives to try to quickly refresh the ads. These are being used as a supplement to chip in sales, but if I was using them as a centerpiece of the launch, then I’d probably test both creatives and audiences aggressively.
  • With the Amazon Ads, you want to refine the ads via: negative targeting, turning off poor performers, focusing more of your budget on your best performers, and dialing in your best performing / highest volume search terms via revenue per click (RPC). RPC is the way you can compare performance of various ads / targets on an equal playing field.
  • Be careful with high sales + borrow volume Amazon Ads / search terms when turning them off, as they could be producing organic visibility by pushing a lot of units.
  • Test things in one region, then roll out best performing search terms to another to save money.
  • Auto and category ads tend to be very inefficient, but might be necessary if you’re looking for a certain amount of scale. Watch out for your own name / books skewing the results on the auto and category ads, making them look better than they actually are.
  • There’s a mistake around 1:30 where I add “anne bishop” as both a broad match and exact match; you only want to target one match type per campaign. I prefer broad match in most instances because it produces more impressions / clicks, but you can use exact match if you like since it’s more precise.
  • I’m treating the analysis / management approach for Amazon as I would a backlist book, since these are long-term ads that have been running for a while and there’s no urgent need to push things more aggressively. When managing backlist Amazon Ads, set a specific day of the week (Monday is easy to remember) and then come in consistently once a week to perform your refinement / management.

Productivity + Craft

  • Glitches, setbacks, and mistakes are all part of the game, so you can’t dwell on these; once they occur, identify ways to improve or prevent them in the future, then move on. Otherwise can ruin not just the current launch but subsequent marketing endeavors as well.