Category: AMS Ads

AMS Ads Require Patience

Seth Godin has this book called The Dip.  It’s all about knowing when to quit and knowing when to push through because you just need to put in the time and effort.  It’s a good little book and one I try to keep in mind with this writing thing.

It occurred to me this morning that it sort of kind of applies to running AMS ads as well.

I was trying to help someone out with their ads this week, but it didn’t go well because the other person was very quick to give up on the ads, so ended up pausing the ads before they’d even run a day and then turning on other ads on the same books the next day (which in my experience can interfere with ad performance), and it looks like has now turned off ads that were actually performing for them and gone back to non-performing ads that look sexier because of number of impressions.

(I say this in my book, but for those of you who haven’t read it: To judge your ad’s performance you need to do two things.  One, look at your book’s sales as reported on your KDP dashboard, not your AMS dashboard–because it’s anyone’s guess when they’ll show up on your AMS dashboard.  And, two, if your book is in KU, monitor your book’s rank.  Not your page reads, because those come with a few day lag usually, but your rank. Each time your book is borrowed, your rank will reflect it.)

Anyway, back to the point.  It can be hard sometimes to know when to quit and try again and when to keep going on the path you’re on.

I’ve heard people say that they start an AMS ad and let it run for a couple of weeks before they touch it. I don’t do that.  I’ve had ads that immediately racked up impressions and clicks but had no sales or borrows to show for it and I shut those down within a day or two.  Good thing, too, because they cost me $20+ each for nothing.

I’ve also had ads that started out completely dead, but when I pushed up the bids they started to move and became well-performing ads for me.  Letting them sit there dead wasn’t going to change anything.  They needed to be worked to find what would get them going.

(Although I have heard at least one person say that some of their ads have taken a month to finally start moving, so you could try that, too.)

What I see a lot of people do is try one ad, usually with the wrong keywords and bids, not get the results they wanted, and then quit.  Or try one ad that would be good if they gave it time, decide it isn’t working, try another, decide it isn’t working, try another, etc., etc.

AMS require a steady, consistent approach.  Try something with a clear goal in mind.  See if it works.  Tweak things to see if those will impact it any. Tweak something else. If you see movement in a good direction, try to zero in on why.  Only when you’ve tried what you can do you give up and try something new.

And, at least in my opinion, if you aren’t getting sales/borrows, it isn’t a successful ad no matter how many impressions or clicks it gets. You might be able to fix that by changing your blurb, because everything needs to be aligned–book cover, ad copy, book description–to get a sale, but exposure alone shouldn’t be your goal with AMS ads. It should be about generating sales and at a profit, ideally.

Now, I’m not going to tell  you what strategy is “the one” because I’ve seen a number of strategies work. I know of one person who did very well for a very long time with low bid ads.  I know of another who has done well running hundreds of ads on the same book. I do well running one higher-bid ad per book.

But I can tell you that starting and stopping and switching strategies before they have time to play out will likely cost you a lot of money with no discernible results.

Bidding and AMS Ads

So over on a writing forum thread devoted to AMS ads, one of the users shared an interesting response they received from Amazon about AMS ads and bidding.  I’ll quote part of it here so you don’t have to wade through all those pages to find it:

CTRs build up overtime, so if you are just beginning to advertise with AMS it is wise to go with a high bid in order to win impressions and thus build up your CTR. Once you have a high CTR for an ad and this is based on longevity so the longer you run an ad the better, you can lower your bid, but only if you have a high CTR.

Which is interesting and fits with my own experience in a few ways.

  1.  I’ve found that my best ads are the ones that have run for a very long time.
  2.  I have been able to back my bids down on some of my longer-running ads as time goes by. (My romance ad had bids over $1 at one point which just isn’t sustainable. I still bid high by many standards, but not that high.)
  3. I recently tried some low bid/low budget ads for books I’m not focused on right now just to keep some sort of momentum on them and found that my impressions were high but my clicks were low, and that the ads ultimately stalled out and really don’t deliver.
  4.  My most successful ad is one that I ran through a free run which I’m sure boosted my click ratio and is the reason the ad got sticky. I think of it as AMS rewarding momentum, but maybe what it is more is AMS seeing an ad that’s getting a lot of activity and pushing that ad more and then as long as that ad continues to get activity keeping it running.

The response doesn’t say what a high CTR is, but in my experience my ads that do well have around 1 click per 1,000 impressions with individual keywords doing much better than that.

So if you’ve been trying AMS and not seeing results, maybe try a new ad with higher bids combined with a price promotion that will result in more clicks early on and then you can raise the price later and back your bids down a bit once the ad has established itself.

AMS Ads and Names With Initials

The other day someone mentioned that they’d run an experiment with names that use initials (like R.K. Thorne) and that they’d determined that you get the most impressions from AMS ads if you leave the periods out of the name.

I haven’t done as systematic of an experiment as the individual who posted about it, but I had been thinking that AMS ads do behave strangely with author names that have initials in them and had wanted to go look at my results to see what I could see.

While I generally agree with that person’s conclusion, I’m not sure for me that it was quite as black and white.

So let me share some numbers.

One of the authors in my fantasy novel’s also-boughts is R.K. Thorne who is listed on Amazon as R. K. Thorne, which interestingly seems to be the one variant I hadn’t tried. At various points I had used r k thorne, r.k. thorne, and rk thorne. And the clear winner was rk thorne which had almost three times as many impressions as r.k. thorne.  The r k thorne option had almost none.

Another one though isn’t as clear-cut as that.  It’s T.A. White who is listed that way with no space between the two letters. In that case I had at various points used t a white, t.a white, t.a. white, and ta white.  The one that had the most impressions was the one with the typo, t.a white, followed closely by t.a. white and ta white which were almost equal.  The last one, t a white, had the least. (One reason for the difference might be because when I type ta white into the Amazon search bar it shows towels instead of books.)

One more example would be K.A. Linde.  I had tried ka linde, k a linde, and k.a. linde.  By far the best performing of the bunch was ka linde. Neither of the others did much.

The problem with my numbers is that I didn’t do this in a controlled experiment where the bids were the same and the words were started at the exact same time. What I think I’m comfortable in saying is that if you do go without a period in there don’t bother with spaces between the two initials.  So use ka linde not k a linde or rk thorne not r k thorne.

Also, if you do have names with a period in them anywhere, definitely be sure to test out variants of the name without the period included.  I have a few with full first names and a middle initial where dropping the period from the middle initial seems to have resulted in more impressions as well.  (But others where it didn’t.)

The Difference AMS Can Make

Time for my first AMS post.  I’m fairly active on some writing forums, but I’m horrible at posting screenshots on those places, so this blog gives me the chance to show something I’ve been talking about there for a couple of months now.

AMS is definitely the reason my sales have increased over the last year. I had played with them some in 2015, but I really started running them consistently in July of last year. I didn’t say much about it for the first four or five months because, well, the more people who use them the more expensive they get.  And it was nice to actually have steady full-price sales for once.  I’m not busting out the champagne by any means, but to be able to sell my books at full price month after month?  That I like to see.

I will say that the more genre-targeted your covers are, the better you’ll do.  That’s why, for example, my Rider’s Revenge series does well with AMS whereas Erelia never really did the few times I tried to advertise it.  (I define well as consistently ranking under 100K.  If you’re someone looking to move from 25K to 2K ranking, I’m not the person to look to.  But if you want to move from 250K+ ranking to under 100K, then AMS and what I’m going to talk about may help with that.)

Ironically, the example I’m about to discuss is for my first-in-series romance novel which I have yet to link to here on the blog.  But it’s the ad that’s really doing well these days and the one that most clearly shows how a free run combined with AMS can really help move a book to a higher rank.

Here’s the visual of that:SWH AMS Snapshot Free Run Comparison - Copy

As you can see above, in February 2016 I did a free run on this book which resulted in about 3,750 downloads and a free rank in the top 50 of the Amazon store.  The book was in KU at the time and I was happy that the promo paid for itself through page reads since it was a standalone with no other books under that author name.

But you can also see that the free run didn’t result in ongoing sales of that title.  It quickly sank back down to the 700K range where it stayed until I started running AMS ads on it in November 2016. (I had tried a few ads on it before and they sort of kind of worked, but November is when I finally had an ad that worked steadily to generate a few sales here or there.)

May 2017 I decided to do another free run.  I’d just released a related standalone and wanted to goose sales of that title while it was still in its first 90 days.  This time I had about 3,500 downloads and the book once again made it to the top 50 free in the Amazon store.

But now I had AMS ads running on it.  And when it came off free, those ads allowed me to maintain the rank I’d achieved through the free run as you can see very clearly on the chart above.

See below to understand what a difference that made in terms of sales and page reads.

SWH AMS Snapshots Pre and Post Free Run - Copy

I was sort of limping along with my AMS ad on this book but the free run and the momentum it gave me, goosed that ad into running.  Since that free run I’ve had 145 sales at $4.99 and 193,000 page reads on that novel using AMS ads.  The only reason I’ve been able to sustain rank and continue to generate sales is AMS. I start my ad at $10 every morning and bump it up as it hits its budget throughout the day. If I don’t keep the ad running I can see my rank start to drop when the ad runs out of funds.

It’s also pretty clear to me that AMS ads run better on books that already have some sort of momentum. This is the same ad I was running before the free promo, but now it actually spends my budget.  And it takes me a lot less effort to keep this ad going than it does my other ads.

It hasn’t been cheap to keep this ad running. Romance is expensive to bid on.  (I pay about twice as much per click for a romance click as I do for a fantasy click.) I’m basically barely profitable on the ad for book 1 but that makes all the sales for book 2 profit.

For someone with a deep backlist or books in a related series where readthrough is really high, combining a free run with AMS could have a very powerful result.  Even for me with just two standalones under this pen name it’s been profitable.

Now, some caveats here if you want to try this strategy:

  1. This is only possible if the book is in KU at the time of the free run.  Some people will borrow a book rather than download it for free if it’s in KU. This means you can come off of a free run with an improved paid ranking, since those borrows count towards your paid rank. If you’re not in KU your ranking will drop after a free run because you’ll have no sales for the days while the book was free.
  2. Also, I think I’ve managed to sustain that rank because the book is still in KU. My full-read to buy ratio is about 2:1 in romance, so without those borrows boosting my rank I couldn’t have sustained the rank I reached.
  3. I think this approach is easier to do in romance, at least for me.  I think romance readers are more prone to borrow during a free run than fantasy readers.  Also, I find it easier to promote romance than fantasy. I did a free run on Rider’s Revenge with one of the same ad sites as I used for this book and only had about 2,400 downloads. That wasn’t enough to crack the 25K mark when it came off free.
  4. I’m not sure if it makes a difference, but I left the ad running during the free run for the book.  That means my ACOS numbers look horrible for this book, but that’s not how I judge ad performance anyway.
  5. This was also a book that I knew had some potential.  When it released in 2014 it sold maybe 50 copies without any advertising and has always performed well when I promote it and been fairly well-reviewed, too.
  6. These were legitimate readers borrowing or downloading the book.  (I feel I should mention that given recent click-botting issues we’re seeing these days.)  I wouldn’t recommend using some sort of service that gets you rank without exposing you to legitimate customers who will actually read your stuff.  Yes, I think the momentum from the promo goosed my AMS ad and let me get in front of more potential customers, but I’m just not sure that would be true if the book were botted to the top. And, honestly, the promos I used for each of those free runs were $100 or less to buy, so it’s not the like the honest approach is prohibitively expensive.

So there you have it.  My first AMS post.  A free run to get momentum plus AMS ads to sustain it can work and work well.

If you aren’t using AMS yet I’d recommend it even if that means more competition for me.  There is a learning curve and the ads do require maintaining, but they’re worth it to me to have steady long-term full-price sales.  The information is out there.  I taught myself through reading the help documents and experimenting to see what worked for my books and now there are forums where the ads are discussed routinely and people share their experiences.

Of course, if you don’t want to take the time to read through blog posts and forum posts and all of that to figure them out, I do have a book I published on AMS, AMS for Authors, that walks through the different types of ads and my experience with them and recommendations for how to use them. I think it’s helpful, but I’m probably biased.