Talk
about the blind leading the blind. I’m a panelist May 19 with another
author, 'teaching' author/book promotion. I’m baffled about what to advise the
audience to do since lately, our efforts have yielded people who ‘impress,’ but
not people who 'buy.' Facebook hasn’t been much help in finding new readers
for us, so many of us are using Amazon Sponsored Ads. Alison and Alicia have spent
time working the system and have passed on some great ideas. Still, I thought
we might review best practices and fill in any blanks as well as ask questions
of one another. I did listen to a teleseminar by Derek Doepker and I read an
article by Shane Stinemetz, the director at Fetcher https://fetcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Ultimate_PPC_ebook.pdf
Here’s
a draft of steps to take for building Amazon Sponsored Ads that sell books (correct my errors, please!):
1.
Start with the obvious: Great Book, Fabulous Cover, Super Branding; gnat’s
eyebrow understanding of novels like ours and
who our
ideas readers are. We need good reviews, too...10 to 20.
2. For
each book, write a list of at least 200 keywords of broad and specific nature
about EACH book (Note: some words, like ‘suspense’ and ‘romance’ will appear on
all the lists). Important (I JUST LEARNED THIS): Put each keyword on a separate
line…a list but with no numbers. YOU CAN
COPY THIS LIST IN THE AMAZON BOX FOR KEYWORDS AND THEIR COMPUTER WILL SEPARATE
THEM FOR YOU. Don’t forget to save your list as well as print out your list
from the marketing site when you’ve gotten some feedback about ‘Impressions.’
Here
are some keyword search sites (Fetcher suggests these; I’ve only tried Google,
so far) besides Amazon: Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Tool io, AHREF’s
Keyword Explorer, Moz Keyword Explorer, LSI Graph, Ubersuggest
Decide
whether you want BROAD keywords, PHRASE keywords and/or EXACT keywords (see
Fetcher’s article for more on this), but here are his ideas, in general:
“Using a broad match type opens up your ads to a
wider audience which is great when mining for new keywords. This is a good place
to start when launching new products.
“Using a phrase match type
allows you to start to narrow down the amount of variants that can trigger your
ad, thus saving cost and becoming more targeted. But there are still some
variants which can continue to provide some useful insights.
"Finally, using exact
match is most targeted and allows for the least variance in the search term
that the consumer enters. This makes your ads more targeted, and usually
cheaper with an improved ROI. It also means your ad will show to less people (less impressions). It
will take some experimentation before you can transition keywords from broad match to exact match.”
3. Work VERY HARD on your ad text…you want to
spark the reader’s interest in only two sentences…make every word count! SAVE THIS TEXT!
4. Now comes what Derek Doepker calls ‘throwing
spaghetti against the wall’…put ‘keywords’ in the place of ‘spaghetti,’ and you
have your next step.
5. Start with .25 per click unless you know you
should bid higher based on past data. Look to see which words get the most
impressions and clicks, and raise the per click rate to .50 or $1.00
6. Decide on your overall budget and length of
campaign. Since there’s a 5-day lag for
results on most of these campaigns, make them at least two weeks. I go for monthly. Amazon says don’t terminate the ad, just
pause it. That way, you can start it up
again any time you choose. (See their instructions on the right hand side of
your marketing page)
7. The
analysis and adjustment of keywords and bids.
Here’s where I need your help. One of my campaigns earned 65,000
impressions and cost me $7 but not one sale.
Tell us how you learned to adjust keywords and bids to get sales.
Roses, thanks for helping me smarten up for my panel!
Web and
Blog:
Facebook page:
Twitter:
Goodreads:
Amazon
