You’ve probably heard me going on for months about the Amazon advertising dashboard statistic called ACOS
It stands for “advertising cost of sale.”
I recently had the wonderful pleasure of meeting an Amazon advertising rep at the 20 Books Vegas Conference.
And to cut a long story and a bit of judicious eavesdropping short, she agreed with me that ACOS is not the most reliable statistic.
There’s a lot of reasons why Amazon ads don’t track Kindle unlimited pages read.
And the Amazon ad platform doesn’t reliably track every single sale.
Plus ACOS is actually based on your gross sales rather than your royalties.
So if you sell an $8.99 paperback, it listed as an $8.99 result.
Which means you have to do calculations about royalties and profit in your head.
And we all know how live math goes…
I think the most interesting part is the fact that even an Amazon employee admits ACOS is not accurate.
And yet authors still use it to judge their ads.
So just remember that even Amazon doesn’t look at ACOS when deciding when an ad is successful or not.
And you shouldn’t either.