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.
- I’ve found that my best ads are the ones that have run for a very long time.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
M.L. Humphrey 