Amazon Ads

There's been some talk about these things on several message boards lately, so I've decided to start a campaign and see how well it goes.  Something I put off for a very long time, because well.  Let's be real here, Amazon's whole KDP system is really opaque and difficult to wrap your head around sometimes.  The minimum amount you can spend on advertising with them is $100, which put me right off.  I had assumed this was an up-front fee for ads in targeted emails.  Which I would definitely pay for, if I had that kind of money to just spend all at once.

But it's more like Baby's First AdWords.  In which I mean it really doesn't give you any anaylitics, which is also kind of a deterrent.  There's no way to know how your targeting is working, and which of your targets aren't performing.  For which I suppose the solution is to just have all the targets you can possibly have.  More on this later, because despite this, I've decided to try it with Sky Treader.  It's on a pay per click model, which means I only pay if people click my ad.  I've set my bid at 5¢ per click, so I just have to have one sale per 40 clicks to break even.  Which are just about the only analytics Amazon gives you. 

They tell you how much you've spent, how much of your budget is remaining, your number of impressions, your number of clicks, and your number of sales.  Which apparently all like to reset at random, or so I've heard, so I'll have to keep a close eye on it.  Either way, I will still be able to see my sales on the main dashboard, so it's not like I'll be going at this completely blind.

I've also set my campaign to run for the maximum allowed time: six months, and selected the option for my budget to be spread out evenly over that time.  I'm looking at a maximum spend of about $16 a month, which is far more reasonable.  That would be a minimum of 320 clicks, from which I should be able to make eight sales in order to break even.  In reality, with my low, low bid, I probably won't wind up spending even half that amount per month. 

The reason I've set my campaign up to span six months is with the speculation that my impressions, clicks, and sales should gradually increase over time.  This system is brand new, and lots of people are using it.  People who are promoting to every single category on Amazon with little regard to target demographics.  And because they're competing with everybody else, I'm seeing average bids of upwards of $1.00 on several message boards.  By taking the low-risk approach of a low bid and marathon campaign, rather than a sprint, I may only wind up spending a dollar or so for the first few months.  As everyone else depletes their budget and their campaigns end, I'll still be there with my 5¢ bid, still making $2 for every sale instead of 50¢.  If it looks like it's working for Sky Treader, I'm going to set up a campaign for several other books, using the same model.  If it seems like it is going to somehow cost me more money than I'm making back, I can always end the campaign without being charged my full budget.  But if I can't make a single sale off 40 clicks, there's something wrong with what I'm selling, and not with the ad I'm running.