Amazon Sales Rank VS Amazon Popularity

Amazon is a mysterious book selling machine, isn't it? And there are different places books are ranked and sold on Amazon. So if you're not sure of the difference between Amazon Sales Rank, Amazon Popularity and Amazon Bestseller lists, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book Broad, the founder of a fabulous self publishing services company called Book Launchers. My disclaimer, nobody outside of Amazon actually knows the Amazon algorithm. So much of what I know is because of my fabulous team at Book Launchers. The production experts that are in the platform every single day that observe and report to me and because I've read some great books, done some tests and watched what happens with my books and our clients books when we do different things. So with all that said, let's dive in. Amazon sales rank is what will hit first and it's the one you're most likely to be familiar with. When you go to Amazon's product listing for a book, you'll see the COVID the title, the subtitle and the description. As you scroll on down you'll see books you may like and products recommended. Like this item sometimes, but less these days. This section was called the Customers who also Bought. Then you'll see editorial reviews if the author has some and about the author section. And then finally you get to the product details section. The product details here. Publication date October 16, 2020, file size 3893 word wise, blah blah blah blah blah. The ASIN number B08HX98B2B. All right, so now you get to the bestsellers rank. So in this case 427,879 in the Kindle stor. So this is ranking you overall in the Kindle store. And then you see the subcategories like motivational business management and Business motivation and self improvement. Then you've got customer reviews and so forth. So what is that Sales rank? It's calculated by an Amazon algorithm and it's not a measure of your overall sales. It's a relative measure of how you are selling relative to the other books in your category. And overall it's also based on type of book. So you notice that was for the Kindle store. So Kindle versus paperback versus hardback versus large print. This is not a game of highest number wins here by the way. Lower numbers are better. So this number is based only on sales. But not all sales are treated as equal in this. Sales that happened in the most recent hour are given more value or weight than sales that happened yesterday or even half a day. Ago. There are a lot of online sites that talk about this, but one of the best sources I found explaining this is David Goggren's book Amazon Decoded, which I'll link to in the description below. So this is how it works. The sale value degrades every hour, so so that after 24 hours it's worth half a sale by the time a week has passed. That sale from this hour today is worth almost nothing as far as your Amazon Sales Rank go. Sales Rank is updated hourly, but it's not something that happens immediately after the hour has passed. There's a lag. So if you're refreshing that page every 10 minutes during a launch to see how you're doing, well, you're not getting instant results. There can be a 90 minute, you know, sometimes four hour lag after a sale happens for it to get reflected in your sales rank. All the Amazon Bestseller ranks are based on Amazon Sales Rank, so the top 100 in the Kindle store or any other rank is based on recent sales volume. If you're curious about a ranking typically means for sales volume, there's a resource for you. I'll drop the link in the description below from Dave Chessen to help you calculate what a sales rank might mean in terms of overall sales on Amazon. For that book, shout out to Dave for his amazing content. And we did a video together too, which I'll also drop a link for you below if you want to check that out. Okay, so back to how they rank sales and weight it. Amazon made changes to how the sales were ranked after there were so many gimmicks to get your book a bestseller in a category. For that flag, you're no longer rewarded well for a single push of sales. Let me repeat this because I know you're still secretly coveting that orange Amazon flag. I know it. I can read your mind. Now, doing that one time push to get sales up once doesn't really do anything with Amazon. Thanks to this change, Amazon wants conversions on a regular basis. One time push plus continued sales is good. A one time boost in sales and then crickets not good. So those are bestseller lists. That's what most people focus on. But there is another list to be found on Amazon, the Popularity List. Now, it's not actually called the Popularity List, that's just what people refer to it as. Like David Gogarin for example, it's updated hourly like Sales Rank, but it's calculated completely differently, which explains the lack of overlap between the two lists first. Now, before you head to Amazon and Try to find this list. Again, it's not called Popularity List, but thanks to David Goggren's book, I actually found this list that people call Popularity List. So let me show you where this little beauty is hiding. Nope, not in the backpack, not under the pillow. Nope, not in the Lego truck. But when you go to the three little lines on the top left, click that, click Kindle E Reader in Books and then go to Kindle Store. Click on Kindle Books. You're going to be taken to a page that seems normal. But if you scroll all the way down to the bottom past all the recommendations, you're going to see a big list that says one of 70,000 or 90,000 books. Keep on scrolling. And the listings are there. Above it are some selections of genre. So I click nonfiction and voila, I got more choices and I picked business and money. And then you start to see a new list. This is the Popularity List. So what is this obscure list and why does it matter? Or does it? Again, I didn't really know until I was reading a forum post. It kind of triggered me to dive into this. And then I saw David Goggren's content and explained Popularity plus Sales rank feed into the overall recommendation engine. So Popularity plus Sales rank feed into the recommendation engine. And we want our books to be recommended by Amazon, right? So if you know what feeds that beast, you can give it the food it likes, right? So this Popularity List is a rolling 30 day average of sales with no decaying value of a sale from one day to the next. But a sale completely ages out after 30 days. We've known for a while that Amazon rewards consistent sales, but now you can see it's based on recency of sales plus 30 days sales performance for their overall recommendations. Then you can see why consistent conversion is everything. So just a reminder, this unnamed Popularity list is a measure of what has been selling consistently well recently. Whereas the best seller list is a measure of what is selling most at this exact moment. Back to this Popularity list. Amazon clearly uses both sales rank and this sales performance measure for its reader recommendations. They even have a highlighted book section which is largely books that are bestsellers. But when I went through, there were a few self published titles in there that had decent sales but weren't long time bestsellers. Now a few other things to note. Free books are counted for this popularity list, which is also a big difference from bestseller lists where free books are not included. But Free and cheap doesn't seem to have really a high rating overall. A 99 cent book isn't considered the same value as a $4.99 sale. There also is no separate top 100 for free and paid books on the Popularity list. They all commingle. There is a free list for bestsellers. They don't wait pre orders for this list, but when it launches, boom, they're there again. So what do you take away from all this? Well, we can chat about it in the comments and I want to hear from you. And when you comment the day a video is released, you get entered to win our suite hashtag no boringbook swag like our mug and our oh so soft journal. So subscribe and turn those notifications on. You know, hit that bell so you don't miss any videos. But I'll summarize in three points. Number one Amazon wants your book to sell. Not sell once, sell over and over again and you will be rewarded on Amazon for consistent momentum and conversion. It's fun to talk about these things and check your ranks, but don't worry too much about the nitty gritty of these things. Focus your efforts on the thing that's going to generate ongoing sales on Amazon. 2. Amazon will help you sell your books and it will do it better if you don't try to game the system, but rather focus on the things that set you up for foundational success. A grabbing title with keywords, lots of great reviews, and then traffic that converts to book purchases. 3. Metadata with Amazon matters a lot. Get the right categories, sell consistently, and sit beside the books your ideal reader is already browsing and you're setting yourself up for better sales success. Alright, so as noted, huge source for this video, David Gobrin and then also Amazon keywords written by Dale Roberts. Both helped me reaffirm and further research for this video. Next, head over and watch this video with the fabulous Dave Chessen on writing book descriptions or this one right here on book metadata. If you don't know what that is or how to figure out yours for your book, I'll put the coffee on. See you there.