by Competition is heating up in Amazon Ads for authors. With the introduction of published author gaining access to the platform, we can expect self-published authors to spend more on their marketing budgets when implementing this tool into their marketing mix.
A 2019 study shows just that. 80% of authors marketing on the site plan to increase their allotted budget for promoting their ads. You’ll need to step up your efforts with your campaings to keep pace. While increasing your marketing budget is one way to go about getting better results, there’s another option of succeeding without spending more money.
Understanding the optimal strategy to creating a campaign gives you a chance of competing with the big spenders, without increasing your budget.
Advanced Tip #1 – Understanding and Leveraging the Flywheel effect
If you’ve never heard of the Flywheel Effect, it’s the concept of utilizing your paid advertising strategy to generate earned media, thereby driving growth in your ad campaigns. Paid and earned media comprise detail page views, reviews, and product content are your owned media.
The paid ads you’re using drive qualified traffic to your book listings, boosting its position in organic search. Higher traffic flows and optimal positioning in organic search means your book has a better chance of receiving the coveted Amazon’s Choice label.
If your books receive the Amazons Choice designation, they get more attention from users browsing the platform for books in your specific genre. You’ll notice a boost to your traffic and higher conversion rates from this moniker.
This effect creates a positive feedback loop, known as the flywheel Effect, where it builds momentum continuously, pushing your listing to the top of organic search results.
Advanced Tip #2 – Create an Advertising Cost of Sale Goal
As with any other marketing strategy for business models, understanding your metrics assists with unpacking the components and tactics that increase revenues. While it’s important to avoid focusing on one metric independently of others, combining them yields effective results for your analyzing your marketing strategy.
For instance, it’s a common mistake to use the ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale) as a benchmark for assessing the efficacy of your Amazon Ads campaign. However, it skews results, and ACoS isn’t as effective a tool as you think.
Combining it with other metrics such as gross profit, total revenues, and TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sale) yields better results for understanding the impact of your ads campaign. TACoS measures how your ad spend affects your overall revenues and your organic reach.
To assess the impact of combining ACoS with TACoS, we look for a low ACoS rating, combined with a low ACoS rating. ACoS defines the ratio of ad spend to revenue generated through your campaign. With automatic campaigns, ACoS is at a group level, but in manual campaigns, ACoS features on a product level.
Your aim is to lower advertising costs for books already generating revenue, they don’t need the additional push from ad spend since they benefit from the flywheel effect.
Advanced Tip #3 – Reduce Ad Spend with Negative Keywords
Like Google Ads, negative keywords in Amazon Ads campaigns consist of keywords excluded from broader keyword searches. The role of negative keywords is to prevent your ad from ranking for the wrong search terms.
When defining your negative keywords, look for those keywords receiving large traffic volumes but low conversion rates. These keywords give you plenty of clicks, but few sales, costing you money while frustrating users.
Avoid using generalized keywords, prospects look for something more specific in their searches, using long-tail keyword searches such as “1980s American police thriller.” This strategy helps narrow your search reach, bringing you more qualified traffic to your book listings than using “thriller” or “police thriller” as your set keywords.
Without defining your keyword sets, there’s no way to ensure prospective readers will pull the buying trigger when landing on your listing, they might be looking for something totally different. By implementing this strategy, to reduce waste in your ad budget while improving conversion.
Leveraging negative keywords in your Amazon Ads campaigns eliminates a lot of wasteful spending by preventing your ads from appearing in the wrong search results. The benefit is that the Amazon algorithm promotes your books effectively, and begins to induce the flywheel effect due to better prospect engagement.
Advanced Tip #4 – Adjust Your Bids
Newcomers to Amazon Advertising often feel their lack of confidence with understanding the platform pushes them away from drilling down in their campaign design. Set-it-and-forget-it campaigns don’t produce the same results as those optimized for success.
The keyword bidding process is a great example of this phenomenon. Using ad group default bidding reduces the efficacy of your ad campaign because it’s not successful for all keywords. Rather set your bid at the keyword level using what you can accommodate in your budget for each click.
Adjust your bid rate in accordance with the feedback you receive when monitoring your campaign performance. If your conversion rate drops and you fail to adjust your bid you’ll lose out on conversions and revenue declines.
You can’t know the perfect bid unless you sit on the data, but no author has the time for that. So, optimizer the bidding process using the Automated Bidding feature and leverage Amazons algorithm to keep your bids relevant.
Advanced Tip #5 – Explore with Auto Campaigns and Exploit with Manual Campaigns
Set-it-and-forget-it campaigns seems appealing to new users because of the lack of involvement required in setting up the campaign. The fear of the unknown often prevents newbies from diving into the details to optimize their campaigns and improve their results.
Automated campaigns aren’t always the best choice for your strategy. They limit your control and you can’t set bids based on individual search queries. While automated campaigns are fine for setting your bid, they might slow progress.
However, using automation for sourcing your keywords is beneficial to your campaign success. The Auto Campaigns function discovers high-conversion search terms adding those terms as keywords to manual ad campaigns.
Look for ways to automate your campaigns wherever possible, including defining negative keywords. Blend these automated processes with manual search term migration for your campaigns and you’ll see better results.