October 2023 Author Ad Profit Challenge Day #2

Quick Tip: Ad Dashboard Stats

When you’re getting started with Amazon Ads, one of the ways to avoid getting overwhelmed is to focus on just a few key ad stats.

Impressions are when a potential reader sees your ad come up in a search, on a sales page ad carousel, or on their phone (and you aren’t charged when a new reader simply sees that ad).

Clicks are when that potential reader clicks or taps on the ad and reaches your book’s sales page, which will then charge you at or below the price you set for your bid (we recommend setting this at 34 or 39 cents to keep your costs at or below those numbers).

Ad Spend tallies up all of the money you’ve spent for those clicks for your campaign and the account as a whole (and we eventually want to compare that Ad Spend to our Royalties over on the KDP Dashboard).

There are other stats on the Ad Dashboard, but when you’re at this stage of the game, there is not much need to pay attention to things like ACoS, Orders, Sales, Top of Search Impressions, etc.

Impressions and Clicks

When you see that an ad campaign has registered impressions, this means that the ad is being seen on Amazon and new readers are coming into contact with this information about your book (so, every impression is a win!). You’ll only see Clicks on a campaign if it’s gotten Impressions first and typically you won’t see a click until you’ve reached 1,000 to 2,000 impressions as part of an ad.

We recommend lower bids for this Challenge to keep the cost of your ad campaigns down, but this can lead to fewer Impressions and Clicks when you launch new campaigns. This means that it’s totally normal for some campaigns to get few or even zero impressions even after a few weeks (keep in mind, creating the ads themselves is something to celebrate).

Because of this lower spend, higher profit strategy, we need to create more than just Sponsored Product Auto and Sponsored Product Category ads to get more readers to find our ads and click over to our book pages.

The Right and Relevant Words

Since we want a maximum of one Auto Ad per edition of our book and a maximum of 5-10 (relevant) Category Ads per edition of our book, our path to regularly creating more ads per month lies in seeking out the best Keywords to put into our ads. A keyword (which can be a phrase, not just a word) can really be anything that a reader may search for when trying to find books like ours, such as a book title, an author name, or a genre-related search term (i.e. paranormal romance).

Our mission, if we choose to accept it, is to find 100-150 keyword phrases to put into one keyword ad on a regular basis, but we want to make sure these words are relevant (similar) to our books. Today, we’ll brainstorm relevant search terms related to our book and in the following video, we’ll share some tools you can use to generate even more phrases that could help us get more attention for our titles.

We may even be able to use some of the keywords we find to help our book’s all-important metadata, which will allow our Auto and Category ads to work better too (there is a method to the madness!).

Here’s What You’ll Learn Today

What makes a strong keyword that readers may search for when looking for a book like yours
How to set up a Sponsored Product Keyword ad
Why your 7 KDP keywords are extremely important for your book’s metadata

What’s a Keyword?

Amazon is a powerful search engine that readers use on a regular basis to find books for them to buy or borrow in Kindle Unlimited, and keywords are the way these buyers discover new books.

These readers may type in book titles, author names, or search terms (today, we’ll focus on search terms). Search terms are the one or more words that a reader will type into the top search bar on Amazon to find their next read like “superhero novels,” “coming of age fantasy,” “books on getting out of debt,” and “new cozy mystery releases.”

We can brainstorm the search terms that are relevant for our own book by putting ourselves in our reader’s shoes, looking through reviews of books similar to ours, and generally just knowing the tropes and story types that our readers are looking for.

Ask yourself questions like, “What would a reader love about my story?” “What do readers of my genre enjoy about these kinds of books?” “What elements of my story are similar to the bestsellers in my genre?” Thinking in this direction can help you to generate your own brainstormed list of search term keywords.

What’s a Keyword Ad?

A Sponsored Product Keyword ad is a campaign that targets books related to the keyword phrases you’ve chosen for that ad. This ad is the hardest of the three to set up because you’ll have to brainstorm or research the keywords that your book title would fit with. We recommend taking the time to come up with 100-150 keywords to put into each of your ads (though since we’re practicing, today just do your best).

Today, we’ll just create one, but eventually you’ll create a maximum of 5-10 keyword ads per week and the research tips you learn in the next video will help immensely with this.

Keyword Ads use your Custom Bid to determine how much you get charged each time a reader clicks on your ad, so just like with Category Ads, you’ll need to make sure you change both your Default and Custom bid to 34 or 39 cents to avoid any higher cost surprises.

Creating a Keyword Ad

Prior to creating the ad, brainstorm or research at least 100 keyword phrases that you’ll be able to use as the targets for your campaign
From your Ad Dashboard, you’ll click on the Create Campaign button followed by the Continue button under Sponsored Products
For “Ad Format,” you can choose Standard Ad which will bring up the Ad Groups header where you can use the name SPK 1 for now
For “Products,” you’ll select your book from the list or search for your book title in title case and click Add and for “Targeting,” you’ll select Manual Targeting and Keyword Targeting
Under “Keyword Targeting” and next to “Bid,” you’ll select Custom Bid from the drop down menu and change it to 34 cents for a standalone and 39 cents for a series starter (and then repeat the step for the Default Bid as well)
Next to the word “Filter By,” you can uncheck the box next to Phrase and Exact to ensure your keywords will use Broad targeting, then click the Enter List tab
Take your list of Keywords, make sure they’re displaying with just one phrase per line, and copy them into the keyword box and click the Add Keywords button
Amazon does not accept keywords with special characters or that are 50 characters or longer, so if you have any phrases that aren’t accepted, you’ll need to edit or remove them before clicking Add Keywords again
You can leave Negative Keyword Targeting blank and for “Campaign bidding strategy” you’ll select Dynamic Bids Down Only from the list and ignore the “Adjust bids by placement” link
For “Campaign name,” you’ll use the same shorthand formula for your book + the ad type + the target + the bid you’ve selected (i.e. SPWAA SPK Search Terms 39)
For “End,” you’ll choose the last date of this month as your end date and for “Daily budget” you’ll set $5 as your amount
Double check each of the sections (especially the two types of bids of Custom and Default) and then click the “Launch Campaign” button

How Does a Keyword Ad Work?

When you add a Keyword target to your Sponsored Product Keyword ad, Amazon draws from that specific phrase and some phrases that are related to your keyword. When a reader searches for a phrase related to your keyword or when they browse the sales page of a book title you’ve used as a keyword, your book’s ad campaign has a chance of displaying there. Keyword ads tend to yield more impressions and clicks when the keywords you’ve chosen are as relevant as possible to your book, leading to the right kind of readers clicking on your ad and hopefully buying your book.

If all this talk about keywords is ringing a bell, it’s because you actually had to pick 7 keyword phrases when you published your book. If you’re like many of us, you didn’t have any clue what to put into those 7 boxes. We refer to those as the 7 KDP Keywords, but a lot of the same rules apply when getting these 7 Keywords to be as relevant as possible to your book. And while your metadata has more impact on your Auto and Category ads than your Keyword ads, since we’re on the subject of Keywords, let’s see if we can nail down this essential component to your metadata at the same time.

Metadata #3: 7 KDP Keywords

When you publish your book through Kindle Direct Publishing, you select 7 keyword phrases that are meant to describe your book so it shows up to the right readers. Even though there are great pieces of software for this task (like Publisher Rocket), it’s up to you to put in the phrases that Amazon will deem as relevant to your book.

The first instinct for most authors is to go extremely broad with words like “romance” or “fantasy” and the second instinct is to stuff as many words into a box as possible like “cozy mystery paranormal witches with a cat familiar.” Unfortunately, much like trying to put your book into an irrelevant category just to hit the #1 ranking, neither the broad nor the keyword stuffing approach appear to help books show up in more searches or help ads get more impressions and low-cost clicks.

The best approach seems to be finding the relevant keyword phrases that readers actually search for and making sure the result of that search yields books that would fit on the same shelf with yours.

Picking Better Keywords

Brainstorm all of the phrases that make up your book, paying close attention to the tropes of your subgenre, for instance “small town” and “enemies to lovers”
Create specific variations on each of these phrase ideas, for example “coming of age” could become “coming of age new adult” and “enemies to lovers” can become “contemporary clean enemies to lovers”
Open an Incognito browser window by clicking “File” and “New Incognito Window” and bring up Amazon.com with Kindle Store selected from the drop-down menu
Search your specific keyword phrase ideas one at a time and put a star next to the ones that yield search results that would belong on the same shelf as your own
No matter how many great keywords you come up with, we recommend changing no more than 2-4 of your keywords at a time and test to see if you have an improvement of ad impressions and/or clicks after making these changes

Note: Some advertisers, such as those residing in the EU, may be subject to VAT (Value Added Tax). We recommend being aware of your local tax requirements to ensure you budget appropriately.

Potential Pitfalls

Fear of Statistics: One of the best ways to avoid “Data Panic” is to limit the # of columns you see on your Ad Dashboard. By going into Columns and Customize Columns, you can uncheck the boxes for anything other than Impressions, Clicks, Spend, and Sales for the time being to avoid information overload.

Finding Enough Keywords: After mentioning that you’ll eventually want to make 5-10 keyword ads on a weekly basis, you may choose to run for the hills. Don’t worry if you can’t come up with 100 keywords today (just do your best), but in the next video we’ll cover some additional techniques for finding relevant keywords faster.

Staying Relevant: As we keep thinking of new ideas that are related to our books, it can be easy to go too far outside of the box of what truly describes our book. Just because there’s action IN a book doesn’t make it “action adventure.” Avoid the temptation to include phrases that describe elements of the book rather than the book as a whole.

Picking the 7 Best: Try not to stress out too much over your 7 KDP keywords today. We want you to start thinking about the importance of metadata like your subtitle, categories, and your 7 KDP keywords, but you don’t have to do it all right away. Eventually, you will develop the knowledge and the confidence to start tackling this!

Want to See How to Find Some Keywords and Improve Your Book?

Be sure to watch the screen share at 21:44 to follow along with the visual portion of this lesson!

Relevancy for the Win

To keep our spend lower (and our profit higher) we need to pick the most relevant targets for our books, and making sure we pick the most relevant search terms, book titles, and author names for our ads can help. Furthermore, ensuring our subtitle, categories, and 7 KDP keywords are relevant will also help our campaigns to get more impressions and clicks (which we hope will lead to more sales and KU pages read as well).

Hunting down hundreds of additional keywords per week may seem like a tall order, but using certain free tools can get us the relevant phrases we need to regularly create ad campaigns and send more readers to our book sales pages. With more ads and more relevant metadata, we’ll start gathering the impressions and clicks we need to serve a bigger purpose: determining if our book in its current state is profitable and how well it converts (how many clicks it takes to get a sale).

In the coming three videos, we’ll discuss those very things to help us get closer to a profitable and sustainable author career (you’re doing great on this journey!).

Recap

Pay close attention to your ad Impressions, Clicks, and Ad Spend and don’t worry too much about other stats at this time
Think about the types of phrases readers would type in on Amazon to come up with a book like yours and use those keywords in your Sponsored Product Keyword ads
Our goal is to find 100-150 keywords per keyword ad campaign and to eventually find those keywords for new ads on a regular basis
The most relevant keywords of them all can be used as your 7 KDP keywords, but only if the search results are as relevant as possible to your own book

Video #2 Homework

What did you learn today about seeking out and choosing keywords for your ads in this video?
What did you learn about choosing the right keywords for your own book/books?
Do you think you’d previously been close to hunting down the right kind of keywords? Why or why not?
You can answer these questions in a new post in the Ad Challenge Facebook or Slack group with the #AdVid2 (and your own hashtag)
And please make sure to comment on another author’s post in the group to cheer them on for doing the homework!

Video #2 Extra Credit 1

Using the guidance of thinking of tropes that make up your book, brainstorm as many search term keywords as possible for your book
Visit Amazon and look through some of the bestsellers that are relevant to your title and check out book subtitles as well as customer reviews for ideas
Try to generate a list of at least 50 keyword phrases (with 100-150 being the ideal) that could go into one of your ad campaigns
Do you think any of the keywords you’ve discovered might be a good fit for your 7 KDP keywords too? Try to plug them into a search on an Incognito browser and see if the search results are relevant to your book
You can list the keywords you’ve found and your answer to the question in a new post in the Facebook or Slack group with the #AdVid2EC1 (and please comment on two other posts to spread some love!)

Video #2 Extra Credit 2

Take the 50+ keyword phrases you brainstormed in the Extra Credit #1 and create a Sponsored Product Keyword ad
Use names you’ll remember, select the last day of this month for the end date, and use a $5 daily budget
Use a 34 or a 39 cent bid, change both your Custom and your Default bids to the right numbers, and choose Standard ad for no copy
Create your campaigns, take a screenshot of your newly set up ads, and post the picture in a brand new post in the Facebook or Slack group with the hashtag #AdVid2EC2 (and your own hashtag)
Spread some happiness to 3 or more authors in the group by commenting on their posts

In the Next Video

We’ll share our process for how to find even more categories and keywords to go into our ads. We’ll also share how to come up with riveting ad copy to entice your target readers.

It’s now your wonderful opportunity to go off and do that homework.

I’ll be at our Live Q&A at 2pm ET over in the Facebook Group or on Zoom

You’re doing an awesome job! Thank you for watching and I look forward to seeing you for the next video!

Sincerely,
Bryan & The Team

PS: You can either join our 2pm ET Live Q&As on Facebook or through Zoom. Click here to join our Zoom today at 2pm ET!