Julie Broad walks nonfiction authors through Amazon Ads basics: why they work, realistic budgets, and the ACOS metric that matters. You need a solid cover, title, description, and reviews before you start. Publisher Rocket finds the keywords.
Have your book sales stalled out or you just launched and you want to take advantage of the great momentum you've already built up? Amazon ads could be the perfect way for you to reach new readers and take advantage of the amazing selling machine that is Amazon. But if you've never done it before or you've tried it and it didn't work out that well, then this video is for you. Hey, I'm Julie the Book Broad, an award winning author and the founder of a fantastic company called Book Launchers. We're your fabulous professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and sell a nonfiction book that will grow your business and make you money. Amazon Ads. Here's why they work. They are putting your book in front of people who are ready to buy. With one click they can make that purchase and they could even have it delivered straight to their Kindle device and start reading right now. Amazon is powerful and while they still show your book as also bots to doing a little bit of free promo for you, they are giving more and more prominence to sponsored ads and advertised books. It's becoming a pay to play kind of platform in many cases. And you know what? Why wouldn't you pay to play when you can find new readers and make a positive ROI in many cases? Now we run Amazon ads for our clients, but I wouldn't say we're the number one experts on Amazon ads. But based on the courses and books we've taken and the ads we've been running that are working and not working, here are my five best tips for you to try Amazon Ads. Number one, don't be afraid of setting your budget at five or ten dollars a day. This is an easy thing to fear if you've done Facebook ads. Facebook seems to magically spend your budget every day and it doesn't matter if you get results or not. Amazon won't spend your budget like that. We actually find it challenging in the early days of running ads on a book to get enough clicks to hit the budget. These ads are charged on a pay per click basis. You only pay when people click and you're not setting your click rate anywhere near what you might pay on Google for a click. So it can take a lot to hit a $5 per day budget because you're setting your click rate at like $0.15 to $0.50 per click. So you need quite a few clicks to get to $5. Now if you set this too low, you won't get enough data to make decisions that will help you optimize your ads. So don't be afraid of setting your budget at five to ten dollars a day. Number two, look at the first few hundred dollars you put into ads as an investment in knowledge. You need data to make decisions and learn and it's rare you're going to get a positive ROI on your first month of running Amazon ads. Now, if you're not getting a positive ROI after 60 to 90 days, there's some things to look at and I'll touch on that in a second. But the important thing here is that you have the that you need data to improve your ads so you can get an overall positive roi. Number three ACOS Advertising Cost of sales if you've got that of 100% or less, it's a good thing. ACOS of 50% or less is ideally what you want. ACOS is the percent of attributed sales spent on advertising within 14 days of clicks on your ad. This is calculated by dividing total spend by attributed sales. This means your royalties earned are covering the cost of your ad spending. While when you get that under 50% ACOs, when it's under 50% ACOs spend more money. You're making money. Number four, use publisher Rocket to generate keywords. And yes, I'm affiliate for them, but it's because they're awesome. And this is a great way to generate the hundreds and hundreds of keywords you need for your Amazon ads. This isn't Google or Facebook where you're isolating a couple of keywords. You need to use a lot of keywords. And to do that, you're going to use a tool like Publisher Rocket to to make it easier. Because check this out, all you're going to do is click on the AMS keyword search right here. Then you're going to enter in a general keyword, a phrase or a book title and Publisher Rocket will find a large list of AMS keywords for you to use in your campaign. And voila, you have a great big list. Of course you're going to want to sort through this list a little bit and probably add to the list you generate from your manuscript review descriptions that you've written, previous keyword research. But you take all that and then you set it up in your ad dashboard and you begin tweaking on a regular basis. Number five, Run your ads. Once your Amazon page is complete and looking good. What does this mean? Well, you know, you have a book that is selling, you've got Amazon reviews so important, your cover is great, your title is good and your book description is awesome and ideally keyword rich. If you're currently not selling books and you don't have reviews, Amazon ads are probably gonna be a waste of money cause Amazon ads will help you sell a book that is selling well or used to sell well. If it doesn't sell well, the fundamentals probably aren't in place for for Amazon ads to accelerate performance. So again, the fundamentals to success with ads on Amazon are a great book cover, a title that speaks to your ideal reader, a keyword rich book description that sells your book, and Amazon reviews that provide social proof to that person who clicks through. Amazon ads are simple in principle. They are definitely much simpler than Google or Facebook, but it's not as easy as they look at first glance. The big thing is you really do need to manage them and spend time tracking on a weekly basis at a minimum. Besides, Publisher Rocket as a tool I think is a must have for running Amazon ads which I'll link to below. I also highly recommend you grab Brian Meek's book Mastering Amazon Ads. There's also some Facebook groups you can check out as well as some Amazon courses that can help you master this, which I highly recommend. Educating yourself. Amazon is really becoming a pay to play market, so if you're not working with a company like Book Launchers that will manage your ads, then I highly recommend you invest some time and money into getting a good grip on Amazon ads for your book business. Do you have an Amazon ad tip? Share that in the comments below. I almost always respond to every comment, but I'm especially active the day a video is posted and when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet noboringbooks swag like this tip. Smash that thumbs up button. Go ahead. It feels good. Try it. And make sure you subscribe to this channel and turn those notifications on so we can hang out every Tuesday and Friday when a new video comes out. I've had a really lovely time hanging out with you today and I would hate for our time to end. How about we hang out over here on this video about book pre sales and whether they're important or not or this video right here that's all about your Amazon page and what you need to make sure it has. I'll see you on one of those videos. Go ahead, click on them. I'm waiting for you.
Should You Skip Amazon When You Publish Your Book? #digitalmarketing #amazonauthor
