Running Amazon Ads for Your Book with Book Launchers Ad Expert

Oh, there I am. Hello, everybody. I'm not sure if anybody's in here yet. Yeah, we got a couple people coming in. Sorry, I was dark for a moment there. I was trying to figure out how this thing works. Give a couple seconds or a minute here for some people to come in and check out what we have to talk about today. Hey, Angela, thanks for being here. All right, well, I will just get started and then people can come in. Yeah, drop in the chat, let me know where you are. We have Dublin, California, Chandler, Arizona. Thank you, Suzanne and Bonnie, for coming in. Hey, Kasha, over from Florida. All right, cool. Thank you for joining. So today we're going to talk about Amazon ads for authors. I'm Shane. I've done one other live stream before. I did another one on author websites, but I thought it'd be helpful to show everybody you know, what I know about Amazon ads. I have been running them for our Book Launchers clients for a little over two and a half years now. And during that time, I've done over $77,000 in sales just with ads. So it's. I've seen a lot. I've done a lot of testing and I've seen what has worked in the past and what hasn't worked in the past. So I kind of have a good idea of how, you know, how to get started and maybe some tips on what to do to improve your existing Amazon ads. Yeah. Hey, everybody. Thank you for telling me where you are at. I am actually. I'm in Boise, Idaho, so I live here with my fiance and a couple of our animals. We got a couple dogs and. All right. Yeah. So let's not get off too off topic here. Let's see. I have been at Book Launchers for, yeah, two and a half years. So let's see. Okay. Yeah. I also want to go over some winners for the live stream today. I know if anybody's tuned into our Twitter to our live streams before. We always do a giveaway for whoever commented the day a video was posted. So the winners of today's live Stream are Kent Harper, 2222. And Sheila Floors, 5608. So congratulations to you guys. You guys can reach out to Angela at Book Launchers and I believe it's team@book launchers.com or Angela book launchers.com to get your prize, you can choose between a journal or a copy of Self publish or Self Promote and Succeed from Julie. Julie Br. Our fearless leader here, Victor from South Africa. Cool. Thanks for coming in. All right. Yeah. So those are the giveaways that we gave today. Make sure that everybody sticks around to the end because we will be giving away some other goodies as well to the people who come in. Hey, Lynn. Thank you. All right, so I already gave you a little bit about my Amazon ads experience. Been doing this for a couple of years now, and I run around 30 accounts for our clients at the moment. So I kind of always, I spend a lot of hours every week in these Amazon ad accounts trying to make optimizations, starting new campaigns, testing new strategies, and finding out what works there. It's, it's not really, there's not really like a formula for success. There's a lot of variables that come with it. There's a lot of different things that you can dive into. But I, what I'm going to do in this breakdown on this live is I am going to tell you guys about, I'm going to give you three tips for authors who are wanting to start Amazon ads or maybe like still writing their book and they need to think about this in the future or maybe they've been like, weary on whether they should start and invest the time and money into it. So I'm going to give you three tips of authors wanting to start ads who haven't started them yet, and then three tips for authors who are already running them and give you some actionable strategies that you can take to improve your existing ads. So there'll be time for questions at the end. So I'll try and keep it pretty brief and not going to too much detail and kind of know, get confused, confuse anybody with what's going on. Because some of the stuff, especially the last three tips, you won't really understand what I'm talking about unless you've actually had experience working with Amazon ads. So let's get into it. All right. Yeah. Well, I just got here and I already won something. Yeah. Yep. Kent Harper, you won. Reach out to Angela for your prize. And for the rest of you guys, stick around to the end and we're going to be giving away some other stuff. So tip number one for authors wanting to start Amazon ads. So for those of you who you're either already kind of gave you a rundown of it, but who haven't started Amazon ads yet. One of the huge benefits of running ads is that they help you boost your organic ranking on the platform, meaning that every single book sold through ads counts toward your overall bestseller rank. So you use, you can use Amazon ads and you kind of have to look at it as an investment because you're yet, yes, you are paying to have people you know buy your book. And obviously Amazon takes its fees and it's kind of like, is it really worth it? Type of scenario. But I think it is because one, you get tons of exposure. You know, with a five to $10 a day budget, you can get upwards of 100 to 200,000 impressions on your campaigns. And every single time there's an impression that is somebody actually viewing your book, you know, and then out of those 200,000 impressions, you can expect a couple hundred clicks maybe if you're lucky. So those are all people actually going to your product page. And every single time there's a sale that affects where your book sits on the bestseller list on Amazon. And the higher that you are on that bestseller list, the more likely that Amazon is going to rank your book organically. So in other words, free. So Amazon will help you show up freeze the more books that you sell. So think of it like an investment for that. That's tip number one, is, you know, Amazon ads help to boost your organic ranking. Tip number two, I kind of touched on this already, is a, it's a very, you can do a low initial investment. You can start out with like $5 a day. And that's really all it takes. You know, $5 a day, 30 days a month, that's $150 for the entire month. And that's like the maximum that you could spend, assuming that you exhaust your budget every single day and nobody buys your book. Which in the case of these ads, that likely doesn't happen because you know, if you are spending that whole hundred fifty dollars for the month, chances are, you know, somebody's gonna buy your book if, if you have a, a nice, nicely put together product page and it's of interest to them at all. And also Amazon doesn't really spend your money super fast, especially in the beginning, because they, the way that the Amazon algorithm works is it's all based on relevance. So just because you're, you know, putting money into these ads and you're telling Amazon, spend my money to show my book all over the place. Sorry, I'm getting distracted by the comments. So even though you're spending money in there, doesn't mean that Amazon's gonna spend all of your money like every single day. They're only going to show it to relevant people because they make money by people buying stuff on their platform more so than, than you know, you paying them for running Amazon ads so they make more money of selling stuff so they want to put things in front of their customers that they know they're going to buy. Okay, and then the last tip for authors wanting to start Amazon ads is don't expect high returns right away. So this is something that I've learned over the past couple years is a lot of people want to know what their return on investment is like right off the bat once they start, they're like, you know, and I was just throwing some numbers out a second ago, like, okay, If I invest $150 a month, how much am I actually going to get that back? How much of that $150am I going to get back? I would not expect high returns right away because it is really all just about testing and just getting your book out there, getting exposure and learning about your audience and learning about who is actually buying your book, who's searching for it. And Amazon does this awesome thing where you can see specific customer search terms for like, you can see what people actually typed into the search bar of Amazon to then arrive at your book. And most of the sales come from you targeting like other books as well on the platform. So, you know, somebody will go to a product page for a really popular book like 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. And then if you scroll down, there's always like those carousels of, you know, products related to this item type of deal. If you look closely, right at the top, there's a little sponsored. Sponsored brands logo right there. Those are the ads that we run for our authors. And believe it or not, you know, Amazon saying, okay, these are all related to this book. But in reality, those are all paid advertisements for people to show up there. And same thing with all of, you know, the sponsored ads show up all over the search results whenever you search for something on Amazon. Just next time you go take a look, look at the top left corner of the top three books that show up on the search terms. They'll all say sponsored on them because that's people paying to get in front of, you know, you, so you can maybe get their interest and they can buy your book. So that's kind of how that works. So, yeah. Top three tips for authors wanting to start Amazon ads. I think it's definitely worth the investment. You know, it boosts your organic ranking on the platform. Every time there's a sale. You can start out with a very low initial investment, you know, five, ten bucks a day. And yeah, just don't expect high returns right away. Look at it as an investment and more of just testing to see what works and finding those right audiences. Because once you do find the right audiences, you can then direct all of your budget money toward the ones that work and then omit all the ones that haven't worked in the past. Okay, so, yeah, and while I'm going here, I'm going to leave plenty of time for questions at the end. So if anybody does have any questions, just put them in the chat, Angela will gather them for me, and then I will answer them all at the end in order. All right, so three tips for authors who are already running their own Amazon ads. So this is, you know, anybody who's already, you know, dabbled a little bit or have, you know, invested a ton of money into their campaigns and, you know, aren't really getting anywhere. Some of the best advice I can give is tip number one is keep your campaigns organized and super specific. There are three different, like if you're gonna do a keyword targeting campaign, you can target the same keyword three different times, meaning you can target it in a broad sense and a phrase sense and in a exact sense. So broad means, you know, if you just type in, if you just have the, the keyword business books. And broad would mean if anybody goes to Amazon and types in business books 20, 24, or the best business books available today or something like that, your ad is a chance of showing up, you know, assuming that you win the bid against all the other people promoting the keyword. Business books phrase is when business books is used in an actual like sentence or like just a long term, a long tail keyword. It's kind of the same as broad, but it's, um, broad can actually, you know, if it's business books, your ads would show up for like business and then also books. But phrase keyword is business books for authors, business books for entrepreneurs. That's kind of how that works. And then exact keywords are. If somebody literally just goes into Amazon and types in business books, enter that is an exact keyword. So in order to keep the. Your ads super specific is what I would do is I would create a separate campaign for each one of those types of keywords. And then there's also. So, yeah, to touch on that a little bit more, the trying to think of how to put this. So you want to do three different campaigns, one exact campaign, one broad campaign, and one phrase keywords campaign. And so that show that tells you, you know, you let the. And then you give them like $2, $3 a day budgets between each of them and then let them run for a week or Two and see which one performs better. And you'll see, okay, people are, these ads are resonating more with the exact keywords. So let's move that $6 over into this campaign and then, you know, promote that the most because that one's working the best. And then do the same thing with like category, category and competing asins. So also in Amazon ad, target other books like specifically and then you can target entire categories. Don't jumble all those into one campaign. Separate all those out into different campaigns and see, that way you can see specifically which one is working the best and then you can replicate that success in the future. And you know, you'll notice that when you start multiple campaigns with multiple different strategies, target targeting different ad groups, targeting different audiences, you'll notice that some are going to perform better than others. And at that point, that's when you realize, okay, let's allocate more money to the stuff that is working and let's not invest money into this other stuff. So that's a really, especially with a small budget, that's a really quick way of learning, you know, who's going to buy your book. And since Amazon doesn't really spend your money that much, you can put like $5 per campaign and you'll like, it's not going to spend all that $5 every single day. I mean, you might want to keep an eye just in case it does, but it likely won't. In my experience, it takes a while for that spend to accumulate. Okay, this next one is something that is sometimes tough to do, especially running your own ad account with your own money is only make major changes or optimizations like once a week. So if you're in there every single day, if you're in your Amazon campaigns every day, you know, making changes, adding keywords, making new ad groups, and targeting all sorts of new stuff, you won't give enough time to all the keywords and targets to, you know, work as they should. And like you kind of whenever you make changes to a campaign, you need to give it time to let those changes sink in and let Amazon's algorithm realize who it is that you're trying to target. And so if you're in there changing stuff every day, it's only going to hurt the performance of your campaigns over time. And you're not going to learn a ton because, you know, campaign like you, you can't really tell much about a keyword if it's generated like a thousand impressions in one click and then you shut it off. And then if like in that case, you're like, okay, well, a thousand people saw it and didn't buy it. So I'm just going to shut that off. That's just, it's far too soon to determine the success of that keyword or of that campaign. You want to let it run for, you know, at least a week before making any major changes or even like, you know, pausing or adding keywords or anything. Just like add a bunch of keywords that are relevant to your book. Add like 20, 25 keywords are relevant to your book and then let those run. Go back and check it. You can check it every day if you want, like, just for like a minute or two. See how it's performing if you're curious. But I would really just leave it alone because you want to look at these ads in a bigger picture. You want to look at it on a bi weekly or a monthly rate to see what's performing and how it's, you know, improving over time. And then the third tip for authors who are already running their own Amazon ads would be to stay up to date on the current bestsellers and target them in your campaigns. So while you're in there, you know, every week or every other week checking things out, go look at the best sellers on the categories that your book is located inside of and put and target, like, see which ones shot to the top of the list or the ones that you see in there time and time again. Target that ASIN number, target that author, target the, the title of the book, the subtitle, some of their book description keywords, and then go into that, into that book's product page, Find the also bots in there, find the categories that they're in, what are the people shopping for or what are the people buying for that book specifically? So make sure that you're just staying on top of that because if you can get your book in front of those buying trends, you know, you're probably going to get some sales from that. It's just a great way to test how different audiences change and how they, you know, come to be. So it's, that's kind of the way that I look at these things. It's about these things, these Amazon ads is, it's all about testing and it's all about finding what's going to work for your book specifically. There is no formula saying if you do this, if you start these campaigns and do this, it's going to work for your book. Like, that doesn't exist. It's all, there's like General guidelines to follow. And you don't want to spend too much money and you know, you want to recoup your investment. I totally understand that. But in the beginning, you have to look at it as an investment. You're getting exposure for your book, you're increasing the bestseller ranking of your book. And over time, then you look at the performance and say, okay, in the last three months, I've spent $350 and I've only recouped back 75 bucks. Let's look back at, you know, all the campaigns that I've created and see what were the successes and what were the failures. Take those successes and start a new campaign with just the keywords that generated sales and then, you know, increase the, the bids for all of those and promote the heck out of those. But you won't know this data. You won't understand that until you start testing and finding out what people are buying on Amazon, what, who's buying your book, where are they coming from, what are they searching for? These are all things that Amazon ads tells you in the campaign dashboard. So, yeah, there's a lot, a lot of data that they give you is, it's very overwhelming. But yeah, it's, that's, I mean, those are my tips for running ads right now, without going into too, too much detail, I'm happy to start answering some questions now. Angela, do you, are there any queued up on here that you can put in the chat? Let's see. All right, so we got a question from Kent Harper, one of the winners of the contest today. Like having one billboard space and pasting everybody's poster over each of the last person. Are there like different tiers to their advertising? What determines who is pushed first in line? So what determines who's first? Like when you're running Amazon ads, it works on a, on relevance. So Amazon's algorithm determines how relevant your book is to the actual searcher and also it determines, it's determined by a bidding system. So my example earlier, if you just, you know, targeted business books as a keyword in that's probably a very competitive keyword. A lot of people are going to be targeting that. If you have a keyword bid of like A$25, Amazon's only going to show that if it feels that based on that person's recent search history and based on however many other people are bidding for this same keyword, it's like a combination of the two what makes you show up. So it's not like you can't just put ten dollar Bids for every single keyword and expect to win every one. It's all determined by Amazon's amazing algorithm of what's relevant to the customer. You know, they're customer obsessed. They want to make sure that they're putting the right products in front of it. So it's kind of just based on that. And the longer that you run Amazon ads, the longer that Amazon's algorithm has to learn about your book and learn about your customers, your or your readers buying habits. So that's why I say it's a great investment to start running these ads because Amazon itself learns more about your book the more that you promote it and the more that you sell it on their platform. So hopefully that answers your question. Ken. Okay. Suzanne Murray, do you start running ads the minute your book is launched? We don't. We actually, the way that our process works at Book Launchers is we, once the book is published, we start Amazon ads 30 days after the launch. Mainly that 30 days is just because, is just so that the author has time to gather reviews for their book. Because Amazon ads perform much better when you have, you know, more than 25 reviews on your product page. Mainly just be. I mean, Amazon's algorithm gives you a boost. But also, you know, whenever you go to a new product on Amazon, what's one of the first things that you do is you check out the reviews to see if it's any good. So that's, we wait 30 days to give the authors enough time to generate those reviews. But you can start them right off the bat if you want to. If you want to, like if you didn't really do much of a pre sale and you just want to get your book out there, by all means you can start them right? Like the minute your book is launched. That's totally fine. Yes. Kevin hall, can you briefly explain three campaign types? So they're not actually campaign types, those are actually keyword types. What I was talking about is exact, phrase and broad. The campaign types that we run are their sponsored product campaigns, which are all of the sponsored ad. They're the only ads that don't show up in like, like the big video form or like on the front page of, of your Kindle, like on your loading screen of your Kindle. Those are different types of ads. So we run sponsored product campaigns but for the three different keyword types is exact, phrase and broad. Broad is kind of how it sounds if you just are targeting, you know, the, the keyword. If your book is about pharmaceutical sales or something, you know, you could just Broad would be. What would that be? It would be sales book. Anybody who types in sales or book in any sort of connection with any other words or sentences or any. Regardless of their previous search history, all that kind of stuff. Like your ad has a chance of that showing up. Phrase is somebody types in sales book for Sales Book 2024 Best Sales Book, you know now best sales book on Amazon. These are all very general terms, but that's. It's phrases like, kind of like a short phrase sentence of what you're targeting and then exact is somebody literally just types in sales book on Amazon and hits enter. Those are just three different types of keywords. So that's what I was explaining. So inside of the campaigns, you can target the same keyword three times in three different senses. And what I was saying earlier was trying to. You got to be specific with how you're creating the campaigns because you want to find out what works. If you have all sorts of different keywords and competing asins and categories all jumbled up in one campaign, then you're not really. It's not super clear on what's working or what's not and the numbers are kind of all bunched together and you don't really realize what's working to sell the book. So you want to separate everything out and, and make individual efforts for all of these different types of keywords and, and different types of ad groups as well to find out what's working so you can actually replicate it. Okay. We're talking about our book showing a spot as a sponsored book on Amazon or a book showing. I'm just reading Michelle's question. We're talking about our book showing as a sponsored book on Amazon or our book showing on an Amazon ad which appears on a different website such as Facebook. Yes, we're show. We're talking about the book showing as a sponsored book on Amazon ads. They. They don't. Amazon doesn't have a. It's. They don't allow it to. The Facebook ads is something totally different. That would be something else you would have to. You would have to setup on your own Facebook account. So that's separate. And if you wanted to run those, I actually recommend to our authors to run those alongside the Amazon ads because it's just more exposure for your book. And the more times that somebody actually sees your book out there in the world, the more likely that they are to, you know, recognize it and then make that that initial purchase. So somebody might come across your. Your book page like three, four times and not buy Anything, but then they see it somewhere else or see some, somebody else talking about it, and then they come that fifth time and then they buy your book. But the ads do their job by just getting in front of these shoppers all the time and just making sure that it's top of mind whenever they go to search for anything. Another question. Should people be checking their Amazon, their ad results daily? No, I touched on this earlier, but you don't want to check them daily. I recommend at a, at like a maximum is you check them once a week. Like, I would not be. You can just go in and see how they're performing daily if you'd like. But in my experience, that will probably just drive you crazy because every single time there's a sale, you know it's going to look great, it's going to look awesome. And then every single time you spend 10, $20, you don't get a sale. You're going to be like, well, what the heck? Why is my, why is my campaign not performing today? Like, what's going on? So you want to look at it, you know, over a couple weeks or at least a month, I would say, you know, it's hard to just throw money at it and let it sit for a month. So I'd recommend checking it once a week. All right. What do you do to get into the sponsored category? It's not a category, Michelle. It's a, it's a, it's. You have to register for advert for Amazon Advertising. So it's just as long if, if you have a KDP account on Amazon, if you have your book published and you have a KDP account, there should be an option right in your dashboard to run ads from there. Or you can just go to advertising.Amazon.com and then it'll walk you through the whole setup process. It'll have you hook up a credit card and then you can start to run ads from there. I think that's it for questions. Unless anybody has any other ones. Yeah. So, Michelle, so once you do publish, you'll have a KDP account and then from there you can start the ads. Is there a way to monitor these algorithms before launching your book? I mean, no, I wouldn't say there's a way to monitor the algorithm. It's you. And I'm not monitoring the, the algorithm. It's more of monitoring like the campaigns. And the algorithm is much too complex for I think anyone to any one person to understand, so. To choose good keywords. Yeah. So I, I guess I understand what you're asking is there a way to monitor, like, what keywords you should be using in the Amazon ads? So what I would recommend doing first is obviously gathering the keywords that you think are relevant to your book, kind of put those into a list, find out what all the best sellers are and the categories that you plan on putting your book into. So those are all, those can all be keywords. The, the authors of those books can all be keywords. And like the categories themselves can all be keywords as well. So you can target kind of just everything about where you're selling your book. So, and that's kind of how you find out who your audiences are as you test all of these different keywords. So I guess, yeah, to answer your question, Michelle, is make a list before you even go in to start these ads. To start with that, you make a list of keywords that you think are going to be relevant to your book. That, and think of it as, you know, somebody searching on Amazon. What is it that they're going to be searching for that they're going to find their answer with your book. Thank you, Darla. Kevin hall, if you are beginning to place ads, what do you think is a good minimum or max range to start with? A minimum to start with is $5 a day. That's what I would recommend is like the minimum. And you'll notice that after running those ads for a month or two and you're increasing bids and you're trying new keywords, all this kind of stuff, you're going to notice that it's probably going to go out of budget, you know, with only $5 a day. What I, I like to start with 10 bucks a day and run like two different campaigns at 5 bucks each. So $10 a day in a 30 day month, the maximum that you're going to spend is 300 bucks. And yeah, it just gives you a lot more data to work with, a lot more testing to work with. So that's what I would recommend. Five to ten bucks. Yeah, no problem. Michelle, thanks for asking great questions. All right. All right, Angela, last question that I have, unless others post some. Yeah, no problem. Kevin, thank you. Are there specific tools you use to make keyword decisions? I actually, no, I don't use any tools actually for the keywords that I choose, mainly because at Book Launchers, we have an entire team that does very intensive research for, for all of our authors. So by the time they come to me, I have stockpiles of keywords and research to work with. I think one of the Tools that they use is KDP Spy. I don't use that. It's just, I know that that's something that they use. But what I gather a lot of my information and data by testing this. The, the research that comes, you know, with our clients information. And I like all, I grab keywords from their book description, from their title. I look at all of the best selling books in each one of their categories that the book is in. What else do I do? I look at customer search terms a lot. So whenever you, if you ever notice when you're typing in, when you're, when you're looking on Amazon, right. And you're starting to type, you're starting to type things into the search bar at the top, you'll notice that it auto populates, you know, half a dozen or a dozen things that just show up there. Sorry. So those are all great keywords because all those suggested terms that are showing up underneath the search bar, those are all customer search terms that people have searched in the past. So I would use that. That and then. Yeah, just whatever keywords you think are relevant to the book. Yeah. And Angela's right. We also use Publisher Rocket as well and she put a link to it down there on the chat. It's just book launchers.com rocket. All right, well, I think if there's no other questions, I'll start wrapping this up. I think Angela's gonna choose some more giveaways at the end here. And yeah, make sure you hit the thumbs up for me if you found anything that I said today valuable, I would really appreciate it. All right, one more question here from Michelle. Do you have any random launching suggestions for people launching nonfiction books when they don't have a doctorate? I wouldn't say you need a doctorate to launch a nonfiction book, but random launching suggestions, I think that would be. I would just check out some of Julie's videos on this YouTube channel because this is more geared toward, you know, published authors who are ready to start promoting their book on Amazon ads. Very cool. Yeah, Kent, that's, that's, that's a big dog. I hope my screen's blurred out. I mean you guys can probably see a little bit of my kitchen behind me, but it's supposed to be blurred out a little bit. Okay. And yeah, Angela's got two winners for the random name suggestions selection. Let's see what they are. And yeah, while she's doing that as well, Michelle, it's, it's. Since we aren't naturally seen as experts. Yeah. I mean a lot of authors publish and don't have it just depends on the subject matter, I guess. Like, and you just can't make, you know, claims in your book that aren't researched or you know, footnoted at least. So it's, it's not that you need a doctorate to publish a, a non fiction book, but yeah, I think, I think you'll be fine with, with what you got and just make sure it's edited, copyrighted, and I'm sure you'll be fine with it. Okay. Thank you, Angela. Background is blurred. Okay, cool. And yeah, the two winners are Michelle D. And Bill Miller. So congrats. Yeah. Reach out to Angela, Angela at Book Launchers to win your prize. But I think I'll wrap it up here. Yeah. Oh, Teamoklaunchers.com to claim your prize. Sorry about that, but yeah, that's it. Thank you all so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. I hope you found some value from this and good luck with everything. Good luck with publishing, running Amazon ads and we will see you all next time. Goodbye.