If you’re advertising through AMS, and you should be, then you’ve probably realized there is a learning curve involved. It’s not as easy as throwing up a few ads and raking in the money. (It never is.) AMS ads take time, careful planning, and proper keywords to make them effective. I’m going to share with you 3 mistakes that are killing your AMS ads and how to fix them.
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choosing keywords no one is searching for
This one should be a no-brainer. If no one is looking for the keywords you target, then no one will see your advertisement. Remember: Sales = visibility + conversion. People need to see your book before they will read the description and buy it. Visibility is the whole purpose of advertising. So you need to choose keywords people are actually searching for when they land on amazon.
Your book might be about a hunchback Lebanese acrobat with Tourette’s, but if nobody types those search terms into Amazon, your book will be virtually invisible. If nobody sees the book, then nobody will buy it.
It’s that simple.
You need to target keywords people are looking for. Hunchback, Lebanese, and Tourette’s are probably not good fiction keywords. People plugging those into Amazon are not looking for fiction books. That last keyword is likely to turn up a bunch of self-help books.
Instead you need to figure out who will enjoy your book and use keywords they are likely to type into Amazon. If your Lebanese hunchback is engaged in a duel of wits with another circus performer and the story has supernatural overtones, then targeting the Night Circus and Erin Morgensternwould be better keywords. People who read The Night Circus are likely to enjoy your book also.
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choosing keywords that are too competitive
Remember you aren’t the only one advertising on Amazon and some keywords are more competitive than others. To put it another way, some keywords are wildly popular.
Let’s say you are writing vampire fiction (who isn’t?) and you are trying to target Twilight. Guess what; so is every other Twihard wannabe author on Amazon! Vampire novels are legion and every young adult indie author is plugging twilight into their AMS keywords. So you are competing against all the other indie authors for the same keyword.
But that’s the least of your problems. Because indie authors aren’t the only ones using AMS. Houghton Mifflin, Penguin Putnam, Thomas Mercer, and all the other big name publishers also use AMS ads. And they have a whole hell of a lot more money to spend on advertising than you.
AMS keywords effectively run on bids. If you are willing to pay .20c per click and I’m paying .30c per click, then my books will show up instead of yours. It’s a dog eat dog world. Imagine how much the big 5 publishers are paying for clicks. I’ll bet it’s a whole heck of a lot more than .30c. They charge more for their books and they can spend more on advertising.
Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t write a vampire book. (Actually I am. How many love sick vampires does the world need? Give it a rest already.) What I am saying is that you need to pick keywords which are less competitive and still have enough people searching for the term every month that you can make some dough.
This is true for any super popular YA troupe. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, oh my! It’s going to be hard to rank for any of those keywords. Generic keywords like thriller, mystery, and horror are going to cost you an arm and a leg. The same goes for super popular authors. Using James Patterson as a keyword is going to get you nowhere because all the big publishers are targeting him as well.
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Not having enough keywords
Many authors, when they are first getting started on AMS, choose only a handful of relevant keywords. An author whose book is about a detective based in Boston might target Boston, detective, mystery and a few other relevant keywords. On the surface that would appear to be smart advertising. But Amazon gives more impressions to ads which target LOTS of keywords.
When I say lots, I mean 200 is good, 500 is even better. Ads with 700 or more keywords tends to perform best.
Why you might ask? Who knows.
This one is frustrating, but so far as I know, there is no work around for it. If you want your ad to show up you need to use a minimum of 200 keywords. Otherwise you are wasting your time. I know. I’ve tried. Don’t bother beating your head against that wall.
So what’s the solution?
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Choose keywords people are searching for.
It’s pretty easy to figure out what keywords people are actually searching for in Amazon. You can use a browser in incognito mode and the amazon search bar to see what people type in regularly. If you’ve ever been on amazon and started to type in a search, you’ve seen this in action. A drop down menu will pop up with suggestions. Amazon keeps track of everything people search for and it stores the most relevant terms. This means anything that pops up in the autofill box is something people search for frequently enough that Amazon stored the results. You can take advantage of this to see what people look for most often when they go to amazon. I’ll list the steps for you in order:
- Open a web browser in incognito mode. I use Firefox. If you don’t know how to do this, Google it. It’s easy.
- Go to Amazon.com
- Type in a relative keyword followed by the letter ‘a’ and see what pops up in the autofill box. For example; I might type in thriller a. Amazon would automatically come up with thriller and suspense, thriller anthology, thriller action, thriller authors, thriller adventure, and thriller audible.
Continue this process with a,b,c… etc. Note all of those potential keywords in a spreadsheet or word document. All of those will make better keywords than simply thriller. First, thriller is too broad. Lots of other authors will be targeting the keyword thriller. Second, those are what we call long tail keywords, meaning keywords with more than one word. The longer the tail, the better your results. Which brings us to…
- Continue to drill down on those keywords. From the root word thriller, I would enter ‘thriller novel a’ and see what comes up. Thriller novel b, thriller novel c, so on and so forth. Then thriller book a. Then thriller and suspense a. You get the picture.
This method takes time but it should result in well over 100 keywords if you are patient and persistent.
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Don’t choose keywords that are going to be too competitive.
This one boils down to common sense. If you wrote a book about a boy with a scar on his cheek who goes to school for magic and you target Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling, you’ll get outbid by the big NY publishers. No one will see your book because you can’t possibly spend more on advertising than Random House. Ditto mega successful authors like James Patterson, Stephanie Meyers, and that silly Hunger Games crap.
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Load up on keywords like it’s Black Friday baby!
Using the method I outlined above, store as many keywords as possible into a spreadsheet or word document. I try to make sure that all of my advertisements have a bare minimum of 200 keywords. I usually strive for more than 500. Make sure that the bulk of your keywords are longtail. For instance, thriller and suspense novels action. I’m much more likely to score a win on that because it pertains to my genre and it has a long tail.
Pro tip: this should go without saying, but make sure your keywords are related to your novel. You can find a bunch of low competition keywords, but if they have nothing to do with your book then you will get lots of impressions and no sales. For an example of this type Men’s Adventure into Amazon. You’ll find a bunch of romance books.
I don’t know who these authors are trying to fool. People searching for men’s adventure are looking for Conan and Mike Hammer novels, not erotica. These authors might be getting impressions, but they are probably not getting sales from that search, and they are fouling up the market place for all the honest authors out there. If you are one of the romance authors shoehorning your book into every category on Amazon, would you stop? I’m tired of seeing naked men with dog tags every time I type Special Forces action adventure into Amazon.
William,
Since I started using your methods three weeks ago, my page reads have exploded. Sales numbers may not be quite where I had hoped, but I keep experimenting with all the above and I’m sure that will change. The page reads are truly stunning, though–and ever-increasing day by day.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience!
John
P.S.
Ugarte (to Rick): “You despise me, don’t you?”
Rick: “If I gave you any thought, I probably would.”
That is awesome news! A lot of my income strategy is focused on page reads. Most months I make more from page reads than sales. They really add up fast and once you have a few books in a series, they pay off in dividends. It makes me think I should do a blog post on the subject, but lately I’ve been asking myself serious questions about quality v quantity.
William
Yvonne: Where were you last night?
Rick: That’s so long ago I don’t remember.
Yvonne: Will I see you tonight?
Rick: I never make plans that far ahead.
What are your serious questions about quantity vs quality? If you mean about the writing process, I struggle with that. I could have had a crappier version of Book 2 done in May, but I postponed release because I am a stickler for getting things right and taking the time necessary to do so. Personally, I believe… and I suspect you do as well based on our conversations… that taking the time to write a superior work (and by superior I do not mean “literary”… I only mean well-written and edited) even if it misses your ideal publication schedule is better in the long run because superior works just attract a whole hell of a lot of readers who write good reviews. I’d rather have a book I’m proud of out there rather than a crappy one just because I had an arbitrary goal of three or four novels a year. Some may say I’m losing money by doing so, but I believe that money is made up in the long run because superior works have a longer shelf life. That’s why Travis McGee still sells fifty years later.
Renault: “Rick, we are to have an important guest tonight, Major Strasser of the Third Reich, no less. We want him to be here when we make the arrest. A little demonstration of the efficiency of my administration.”
Rick: “I see. And what’s Strasser doing here? He certainly didn’t come all the way to Casablanca to witness a demonstration of your efficiency.”