3 Amazon Ads Secrets to Help Boost Your Book Sales This Back-to-School Season

Authors. It's not just back to school time for the kids, it's back to book sales time for you. With all the people on Amazon doing their back to school shopping as an author, it's a great time for you to get back to book sales with some super awesome magical tricks leveraging Back to School with Amazon Ads if you want to know the three magical secrets to become an Amazon Ads wizard for back to school season, well, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad author and founder of this fabulous self publishing services company called Book Launchers. It's that time of year where pencils are sharp and our book marketing game needs to be sharper so we can take advantage of the shoppers hitting those online shelves. My son just started grade two and while I didn't have to buy a bunch of school supplies this year, hooray for that, I did have to buy shorts, shoes, socks, a new water bottle, a lunchbox. And while I'm back to school shopping, I am of course picking up a book for myself here and there and you know, some recommended reading books for him. You know, extras in case he might like to read that one too. And I know I am not the only shopper doing the same thing. So how do you get in front of these shoppers who are already in a buying mode and get them to see and buy your book? Well, Amazon Ads has some great features that you might not be taking advantage of. And since we're in the season of back to school shopping, if you're not running Amazon ads right now, or if you are, but they could use a boost. Well let me take you back to school so you can uncover these three magical secrets strategies to boost book visibility. Right now if you need some basic Amazon ad tips, I'll link to a video at the end to help you with that. But for now let's get into the secrets Magic secret number one, the down only bidding wizard move. If you're new here, well say hello in the comments below. I also have to tell you I have a team at Book Launchers and there are things that I really lean on my team for help with like some of my Amazon ad campaign material. So Shane has been running this back to school campaign for me and I asked him to show you what it looks like inside of the Amazon ad campaign for my books Self Publish and Succeed and Self Promote and Succeed. So take it away Shane.

So if you have any active campaigns in your account right now, you would want to go inside of the campaign itself and then scroll over to this left menu and hit campaign settings. And from here you'll be able to see all the campaign settings right here. So there's the campaign bidding strategy. You just want to change this from up and down, or fixed bids, whatever you have currently, to down only. So what this means is that Amazon will lower your bids in real time when your ad may be less likely to convert into a sale, which is a great tool to use during this time because there's a lot more shoppers on Amazon, so you don't want to be paying extra money for clicks that aren't really likely to convert. So once you've changed it down only, you just want to hit save. And then that's step one. Let's move on over to step two and what we recommend.

So every campaign has three bidding choices. In our case, we focused on dynamic bids down only. And this is where Amazon lowers your bids when you're unlikely to convert, so that your ads are shown to people who are most likely to buy your book, but you're not wasting money on people who are less likely to be buying your book. There's also two other settings which we're not using for these, but just in case you need to know them for the future. Dynamic bids up and down. This is what we often have our campaign settings at, just because in normal shopping periods it allows Amazon to optimize your campaign with their complex algorithm to raise bids when you're more likely to convert and lower them when you're not. There's also a fixed bid option, and this is where it doesn't change. We rarely use the fixed bid option because we generally want to have the Amazon algorithm working for us so that we're spending our money when we're most likely to get a return on that investment and we're not spending it when we're not. So for this period of time, while back to school shopping is heavy, probably until mid to late September, this is a great strategy. And then again, the next time you know there's a heavy shopping period like the holiday season. Okay, are you ready for magic secret number two? This is the Trojan horse product targeting technique. This is where you're going to pull a literary heist and borrow some spotlight from the popular books. I'm going to bring you back to Shane into the Amazon ads account so you can see how a campaign gets set up specifically to do this. By choosing manual targeting, selecting categories and targeting high flying asins. You got a great book. Now let's make sure it's seen in all the right places. So you're as popular as the cool kids in class.

Step two is that we recommend creating a campaign that targets your relevant categories and also any relevant competing ASINs for your book. So to show you what I mean by that, I'm just going to create a campaign right here. I'm going to create campaign. It's going to bring me into sponsored products and allow me to choose the campaign type. We'll just choose sponsored products for this. Can go through the whole process of doing, you know, picking your book, what book you want to promote and what kind of targeting you all want to do, which is totally fine. So what you want to do for this is do manual targeting. And you'll have two options here. So you can target for keywords or target for products. This, the product targeting is what we're recommending here. So this is you're choosing specific products categories or brands, brands or other product features to target your ads specifically. So Amazon will usually recommend a few things here, recommend certain categories or individual products all right here. But it doesn't seem like anything's populating right now, so I'll enter in some ideas here. So since this is for Julie's book, what I would want to do is I'm going to search for self publishing and you'll notice that a bunch of different categories will show up here. With desktop publishing, book publishing industry, we'll use that one. That one's relevant book publishing reference, that one is also relevant. And we'll just use those two just for now. And then individual products, you know, we'll search for some other self publishing, books publishing. And then what Amazon will do is it will pull all of the relevant book titles or products, you know, whatever it is that you're promoting that are relevant to this search query. And there's 84,000 products that just showed up. And if I wanted to target all of these books in my advertising, I can certainly do that. So now my ads will be showing up in the book publishing industry category, book publishing reference category, and then also on these product pages.

Pretty easy, right? I can say that because I'm just watching Shane do it. But it really is a simple way to target the right books and categories. And because it shows you right in the view how many reviews a book has, you don't have to do a whole bunch of extra research to see if a book is a good one. Okay with that campaign ready to roll like a kid at recess. Let me introduce you to magic secret number three, the keyword chameleon Trick. Let's give your ads a language lesson so your ads stand out. Include some back to school language in your campaign so your book is appearing when people are doing their back to school shopping. Take a look.

And then the third thing that we recommend doing is adding back to school keywords into your campaign so that you can get in front of these new audiences that are searching around on Amazon for back to school supplies. So what you want to do here is go into into an existing campaign where you're already targeting keywords or create a new campaign for these specifically. You can do either or I actually recommend testing with both because you never know which one is going to work the best. That's kind of how advertising goes. It's you, you test and test and find out you know what works and what doesn't and then kind of use process of elimination from there. So what you'd want to do is go into a keyword campaign that you already have, go into that specific ad group, choose targeting. This is going to show you all the keywords that you currently have on your campaign right now. And you would just want to go up to this button where it says add keywords. And again, Amazon's going to give you a bunch of suggested keywords. You don't, you can use those, but you don't have to. But also you just want to go and enter list. You can choose the bid. So for this I'll do a bid of $0.55 per click. I'll do match type broad just so I can get as many shoppers looking at my ads as possible. And I'm going to use keywords like back to school, back to school shopping list, back to school sales, back to school supplies. And then you say add keywords and you would want to just hit save afterwards. That will add those keywords automatically to your campaign and then you can see the results that come from that in like a week or two. And hopefully you know, with all of these methods applied to your campaigns, you'll definitely get a boost in traction on the platform. So you get more volume going through to your ads. So more impressions, more clicks and hopefully more sales. So good luck.

All right, so there you have it. Of course, to maximize the chance that this new traffic will turn into sales, you'll want to make sure your Amazon product page is in tip top shape. We've talked about that many times before. But having a compelling first line of your book description followed by a well formatted and specific book description that tells the ideal reader this is the book they need to read right now with some eye catching. A plus Content well, these things will help you in your path to book sales with this new traffic, but this is not a set it and forget it kind of thing. Keep an eye on those results like a teacher watching for notepassing. If at first you don't succeed, tweak and tweak again. If you want more details, please check out the Amazon Ads page. See the link right here and I'll link it in the description below for you. Now. Future Amazon Ad Wizards, you're now armed with three magical spells to transform back to school season into your personal book selling bonanza. No apple for the teacher is required, but I do love a thumbs up and a subscribe. Don't just sit there like this is detention, head on over and implement these strategies faster than a kid racing to recess. And then after that check out this video on a content which will help your reader to realize your book is a must buy. And this video which I promised all about Amazon Ads right here. Your book deserves to be discovered, so get those back to school ads running and I'll see you in the next video.