Marketing: Amazon Advertising Learnings

Above are statistics from my top 3 successful campaigns (successful being subjective - read on).

Over the year's I've tried numerous marketing campaigns on Amazon and can't say that I've been super successful with any of them. At the end of the day, I'm spending more than I'm making. For now, I've been okay with that strategy since I would still consider myself "new" to the industry and getting my books and my name in front of people seems important to continue to grow my author brand. This has been the way I've acquired the majority of my sales, so presumably my book would not be selling if it weren't for these ads that are running.

Here are some things I've learned along the way.

Amazon has 2 main types of campaigns when promoting your products: auto targeted and manually targeted. When you select an auto-targeted campaign you are essentially allowing Amazon to determine who, when and where to show your ads to. When you select to manually target a campaign you get to select things like keywords, categories or relevant products to showcase your product with. On top of those selections, there are numerous configurations for you bidding strategy, negative targeting, ad content and preferred placements (none of which I have mastered).

I have found that the auto-targeted ads tend to lead to more sales and the average cost per click tends to be somewhere in the middle. I've tried numerous manually targeted campaigns over the year where I target similar books, specific categories, etc and have only been successful with one manually targeted category. If it's not a successful campaign from the beginning, it doesn't seem leaving it running longer makes any significant difference. If it's not working, it's not likely to change.

I've been prioritizing impressions over sales as again, I think at this time I'm still trying to build my "brand" awareness and hope that if I continue to show up on the site it means I may get noticed by a potential buyer. This means my impressions are high, and my click through rate tends to be pretty low.

I have had successful campaigns all of a sudden tank and I wish I knew the reason why, but there is a cyclical pattern to success on Amazon. If you make a sale and your rank goes up, so do your impressions. This is then more likely to lead to another sale and hence a successful loop tends to be achieved. Unfortunately, the longer you go without a sale and the lower your rank drops, the less impressions it seems you get. That said, the books I have that maintain a higher rank (due to more sales over time) do not seem to suffer from this same fate.

Have you heard that 20 reviews is a magic number on Amazon? I would have to say this seems true. I have one book that has reached this golden number and it benefits from more impressions, more clicks and more sales.

It also seems that Amazon prioritizes new books as I've had successful campaigns with newer books, vs overtime them starting to drop in impressions if they don't also pick up in sales. On occasion, I have paused campaigns for various reasons and typically find that when I reactivate them they aren't usually as successful and in some cases end up costing me more money (especially if it was for a newer book that hadn't gained much traction yet). This is particularly frustrating for auto-targeted campaigns and makes me wonder about the success loop I mentioned previously-in that Amazon is potentially prioritizing campaigns that are now in that loop that maybe weren't previously.