Does Amazon Book Advertising Work?

Photo Credit: Amazon

Warning: This post is geared toward my fellow writers. For anyone that isn’t interested in the nuts and bolts of selling books, you might want to pass on this one. That said, let us continue!

If you spend any time at all browsing books on Amazon, you’ve noticed the Sponsored Products advertisements toward the bottom of every page. Being the eternal optimist that I am (Hey, no laughing) I decided to give this advertising method a try. Sure, my novel Storm Orphans has been out for years, but let’s be honest, almost no one has heard of it. Perhaps Sponsored Ads would be a way to get the word out there and find some new readers.

Setting up an ad through KDP is actually kind of fun. From your author page, click Promote and Advertise from the "..." button associated with your book then click the Create an ad campaign button. From there, choose the Sponsored Products campaign type. Then you choose the date range for your ad, the maximum amount you’re willing to spend each day on the ad, your maximum bid per click, and finally the keywords that should trigger your ad.

The cool thing about Sponsored Product ads is that you can try different campaigns while risking very little money. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad and once you meet the maximum amount you’re willing to spend that day, the ad won’t appear again until the next day, preventing the possibility of you spending more than you wanted to.

I followed some advice I found online and stuck to the default bid per click of $0.25. That means I’m bidding against other authors for ad space. I’m bidding up to a quarter per spot. If someone bids more, their ad gets shown instead of mine. Again, I don’t have to pay that quarter unless someone actually clicks on my ad, but I’m willing to pay up to $0.25 every time they do until I hit my daily maximum spend.

Being a newbie to this advertising platform and not wanting to spend a ton of money on something that might not earn me any sales, I started cheap. I set my daily max at $5 for my first campaign. As you can see in the graphic below, I needn’t have worried. Despite using keywords based on similar authors and books, I only managed 400 impressions in a week and from those impressions, I only received 4 clicks for an average of $0.17 each. None of the four people purchased my book so I earned nothing, but only spent $0.66 for a week of chances.

Undeterred, I tried again the following week with a slightly different book description in my ad and a revamped list of keywords. I kept the handful of keywords that seemed to provoke a bit of interest in my first ad, but then added two dozen new keywords to replace those that didn’t perform the first time around.

As you can see in the next graphic, my second ad received way more impressions. This time around, 1831 people saw my ad in a week, but my click percentage was much worse than my first attempt. I only received 5 clicks and again, generated zero sales. A full 2/3 of my impressions were generated on the keyword “Frank Tayell”, the indie author of a popular post-apocalypse series titled Surviving the Evacuation. I mistakenly thought his readers might find my book interesting since they’re based on a similar theme, but all I can surmise is that few other authors used his name as a keyword since I wound up winning that space so often. Only one of the 1225 impressions from his page actually clicked on my ad.

You’ll also notice I didn’t have any impressions on well known, traditionally published author pages such as Max Brooks. Tons of people are interested in his World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide books so I can only assume my $0.25 wasn’t a high enough bid to win any of those spots. This is kind of a bummer, but in the end I only spent $0.75 on the week-long campaign so I can hardly complain.

So what did I learn from my little experiment with Amazon advertising? It’s something of a fun game trying to figure out which keywords will generate interest while minimizing non-sales-generating clicks, but at least for me, Amazon advertising failed to do what it’s supposed to do. It didn’t help me sell any books.