The folks who’ve read Excel for Self-Publishers will know that I recently shut down one of my best performing keywords on one of my ads after doing some analysis on how each keyword was performing.
Long story short, when I really feel like analyzing my keywords I take the amount reported for sales on my AMS dashboard, gross that up to include an estimate for how many KU borrows I’m not seeing in that number and then adjust for series sell-through. This lets me see that some keywords that initially appear to be non-performing are in fact doing just fine.
But with my “romance” keyword it was still showing as losing me money.
So I shut it down.
And the next day I had six paid sales at $4.99 on that book, so it didn’t seem to do any harm.
But I hated having that keyword shut down. According to AMS, that keyword was responsible for $198.49 in sales. When I gross it up for borrows and adjust for series sellthrough it was more like $430 in revenues from that one keyword.
That’s hard to walk away from.
So yesterday I decided I’d take my “loser” keywords that had generated sales but were net negative and figure out a way to keep them running but at a lower bid.
This is what I did:
I took that grossed up revenue number (the $430) and divided it by number of clicks (2396 in this case). That gave me a rate I could pay for that keyword and still be profitable. Then I doubled it, since most of the time the amount I pay per click is about half what my bid is.
Will this work? I have no idea. I suspect that for romance it’s too low a bid to do anything because I won’t win enough auctions for it to run. But with some of the other “losers”?
Hopefully.
It’s worth a try, right? Right.
M.L. Humphrey 