The 7-Day Amazon Ads Reset: What to Fix, What to Ignore, When to Scale

Most authors don’t have an ad problem.
They have a patience problem.

If you’ve ever stared at your Amazon dashboard 48 hours after launch and declared your campaign a disaster, this episode is for you.

We’re breaking down the 7-Day Amazon Ads Sanity Check — a structured, data-driven framework that keeps you from sabotaging campaigns before the algorithm has time to work. You’ll learn what the learning phase actually means, which numbers matter in week one, and why obsessing over ACOS too early can send you in the wrong direction.

We walk through:

• What to confirm in the first 48 hours (and what not to touch)
• Why impressions without clicks are diagnostic, not disastrous
• When 1,000 impressions with zero clicks is a real signal
• How Amazon quietly penalizes low engagement
• Why automatic campaigns are a brutal but honest positioning test
• How your cover, category, and copy determine ad success before a single click happens

We also tackle one of the biggest myths in indie publishing: that ads can rescue a misaligned book. They can’t. Ads amplify what already exists. If your positioning is weak, ads simply expose it faster.

Instead of daily bid tinkering that resets learning, we outline a calm weekly review process, smart bid adjustments, portfolio caps that protect your budget, and the small one-percent improvements to your retail page that compound over time.

If you’re ready to replace dashboard doom-scrolling with disciplined strategy — and finally let your ads work 24/7 without emotional interference — this episode gives you the framework.

Subscribe for more author-first marketing strategies, share this with a writer who needs ad clarity, and leave a review telling us one takeaway you’ll apply this week.

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Transcript

Listener Feedback And Text Line

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Bookmarketing Tips and Author Success Podcast. This is Teddy Sansfair and Amy Cornell. And we so first off, welcome back. We love I just want to mention this again. We really, really love your feedback. Um we get so many messages from listeners via our new texting. Uh uh texting conversation. I don't really know. What do you call that? Yeah, we're just getting texts. Like it feels very new, right? Like I know it feels like we sound like I'm sure we sound like we're from the 1950s. I know a billion years old, like, ooh, text. We're getting text messages. Like I was saw this tweet the other day that said the majority of the reason I have so many text messages is because I have all these forgotten passwords, which is very which I felt very seen. Like that's very much me. Like, oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Yeah. Right. Right, exactly. But it is very cool because normally this seems like such a uh you know, one-way conversation, even though we have such great listeners and we see the downloads, so we know that you're there, but it's so cool to get a text with a come like with you guys giving it back to us, you know, commenting on a show, having an idea, saying, I've been dealing with this, or even just the support. You wouldn't believe how much we love getting the text where it's like, love the show, ladies. Thanks so much. It's like, oh, make my day.

Reviews That Help Other Authors

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Like, yes, we we we love the love guys. We really, really do. We get we get very, very excited about that. And also uh questions. So if you have, or if you have, you know, show ideas, um things like that. We really love that. You can text the word podcast to 888-402-8940. We also really love listener questions, and this is just another reminder that we also love reviews. So wherever you listen to podcasts, we would love it if you would leave us a review. We're not only we're not asking for five-star reviews because that starts to get very weird.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Um, no, but yeah, can I say real quick, Penny, whatever you can say to help other authors? I love those reviews, honestly.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Oh, that's a great, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

You know, as much as we love the love and you telling us how like great we are, how much we've helped you, please like keep that up. But at the same time, some of the reviews that I get the most excited about talk about how you're applying what you're listening to in the real world, because those kind of comments actually help other authors that are looking for resources because those mean a lot to them. Saying you love the show is awesome, but saying you love the show and this is why, or this is what I've done, or this is a recent show that I've you know actually put into application and it's working for me. That is helping your fellow authors, and that is gold.

Why Amazon Ads Spark Anxiety

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Yeah, I I completely agree with that. And Amy, this so we're talking about Amazon ads, which I feel like interestingly enough, we you know, the head, the header on our our show notes was or the title of the podcast. I don't know if this is gonna wind up in the feed because sometimes like we through different, we get different ideas, and they're like, oh, this is maybe a better idea. Stop, stop. Currently, it says stop overreacting to your Amazon ads, do this seven-day sanity check instead. I feel like that's a thing. Like overreacting to your Amazon ads. I work in Amazon ads all the time. I mean, but Amy, you actually you this idea really sparked on our on a Reddit string, right? Yes.

The Seven-Day Learning Window

SPEAKER_01 3:32

And you know, it's kind of twofold. Obviously, a lot of our clients, we do ads for our clients, and I am always so proud of how much the majority of our clients are looking to learn and understand how this industry works, and they really want to support their brands being successful long term. And so they have questions. And Amazon ads is consistently probably one of the top three questions we get, just clarifying questions like, what is this? Is this working? How do I know if it's working? You know what I mean? Like, am I do I need to wait longer? And so we get it from clients. And so we've mentioned this before. We regularly go to Reddit as well, because there's quite a few threads that we follow on Reddit for self-publishing and authors and all of that kind of stuff, book marketing. And this was popular on Reddit as well. So it's it's not just in our little bubble. This is something that a lot of authors are dealing with, wondering, you know, are my ads broken? Do I just need to wait? Not really feeling sure of when to make changes versus when they need to just watch and see. And I think that would be an awesome, you know, we were like, this would be a great topic for a show, just to give off there's a little more confidence in how this whole process kind of works and then what to look for. Because I think that's a big one, Penny, is that a lot of people just don't know what to look for. And I don't get into ads, but every once in a while when I get on the back end to help a client with, you know, a login thing, it's there's so much going on back there. It's overwhelming.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

Yeah, exactly. And you know, the thing about it is though, too, and this is I get this, I get this question all the time when I talk to authors about their ads. So they'll say, Well, my ads aren't working. Well, why aren't they working? Well, I don't really know. And that's kind of where this conversation starts, right? It's like you, you, the ads aren't, and so that's what we hope to break down in this conversation today is if you're listening to this and you're like, my ads aren't working, hopefully we can figure out why they're not working. So the first piece of this that I think is worth mentioning is that Amazon really wants to be the Google ads of, well, Amazon, right? They want it, they want, they've they have mimicked, and I used to run Google Ads. I hated running Google Ads because it's a highly complex system. But Google, but the Amazon dashboard mirrors Google Ads in a lot of ways, except that it does not when Google, when you start to run an ad in Google, it'll the ad gets categorized as the quote unquote learning phase. And this is something that is really strategic that authors need to need to remember. Seven to 14 days of data accumulation is needed before your Amazon ads are going to start doing anything. And I know like you're like set 14 days, like in an age where everything is instantaneous, I get it. But there's a book published every eight seconds, and nine gazillion people are running ads, not just for books, but for all sorts of things on Amazon. And Amazon has to figure out where they belong. The majority of books don't take full the full full 14 days to like sort of shake out, right? But I see this seven-day window very consistently in terms of like if an ad an ad almost won't do anything for the first seven days. So if you're giving it a seven-day window to like do something or decide to punt it, you're really not giving it enough time.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Right. That makes a lot of sense. That kind of knee-jerk reaction that this isn't working. And you know, it's funny because that mirrors a lot of what we say about so many other marketing uh strategies as well, you know, right. Like making knee-jerk decisions about what's working and what's not without fully understanding the landscape of how it's supposed to work can potentially divert you from something that's really beneficial.

Metrics Shift By Genre

Why ACOS Misleads Authors

Impressions, CTR, And Benchmarks

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Yeah. Yeah. Right, exactly. The other thing that I think is worth mentioning, and I meant to mention this earlier, is that I'm gonna we're gonna cite some numbers in this podcast. These numbers often change. So, like for example, click-through rate, the number that you're looking to hit isn't always gonna stay the same, depending on because the Amazon system shifts and changes. So, even like my book that I wrote on Amazon ads, I gave it within the book, I gave it kind of a window of something to look for. So just know that sometimes these numbers change. And and sometimes they also change by by genre, right? So uh if you're looking at your click-through rate, for example, your number for uh genre fiction is gonna be decidedly different than somebody who wrote, let's say, a book on poetry or whatever, right? So your your numbers are gonna look very different. So we will cite some things, but just keep that in mind that it's it's a little bit different for everybody. I wish there were there was a hard and fast rule for Amazon. Like I wish it was like, okay, well, this is your benchmark, this is your thing across the board, no matter your genre, no matter how many books you have out, but that's that is not how Google Ad works, and that's not how Amazon works. The one thing that I do want to kick off by saying is that across the board, ACOS average cost of sale should be ignored. And I will, I'm telling you right now, I will, I know there's a lot of people that love that ACOS, I will die on this hill. And I'll tell you why. So the average cost of sale doesn't take into account that Amazon ads. So I like Amazon ads for a number of reasons. First off, you know, I like them better than social media ads because when you have somebody, when you're when you're advertising on social media, and we actually did a whole show on advertising, which is one of our highest ranking shows. It blows my mind. I don't understand it, but it we probably have strong feelings about all the things, and that's what people really like. I don't know, but um uh social media ads, when you're running them, it it's hard to get people to click from an ad over to your book over to Amazon. So you have to have a really good call to action, the whole all the things, and then even then, typically, statistically, you lose 20% of your market trying to get them to click. So I'm not a huge fan of social media ads. Some people do really, really well with them, and that's great, that's awesome. Amazon ads, I love them, not just because obviously they're advertising on Amazon, so you're not paying for visibility, meaning that every time Amazon shows your book, you're not paying for that. You're only paying when somebody clicks. That's the CTR, that's the click-through rate. But here's the thing. So let's say that we are working you're working with us and we're doing your Amazon optimization and we're doing all the Amazon things and we're running your Amazon ads. So hopefully, right, the goal of you know, strategic Amazon optimization is that your book shows up in more places on Amazon, right? But it's the power of seven. So seven impressions to your book messenger product before somebody decides to buy. So from that one placement through the optimization that we did for you, for example, your the reader may or may not click on your book. But then let's say, for example, they're back on Amazon and then your Amazon ad shows up and, like, oh, there's that book again, right? And then I they go on Amazon again, like, oh, now the optimization shows the book. Oh, there's that book again. So the Amazon ad combined with strategic optimization is the thing that is going to help you to get more visibility. You may end up getting a click because of how many times that your ad was shown to the reader, right? You may get a click and somebody will buy the book, but they didn't necessarily click through the ad. So your ad contributed to the sale. Your ad didn't necessarily and the ad pot potentially closed the sale, but they didn't click on the ad. So Amazon can't track it. I mean, I mean, did that make sense? Because I feel like I I feel like I'm the guy with all the strings on the on the board. Because I get super nerdy about this. But does that make sense to you?

SPEAKER_01 11:29

I love that meme. It absolutely did because that is the one thing. I know I've mentioned this already in the show. Of all the things that I kind of dip my hands into, Amazon ads, I do not. But that is the one thing that I do understand that I know really resonates with our clients when I explain it that way. You know, like that Amazon ads is great for exposure. It's great to initiate the discovery. It's like, you know, that the beginning of the conversation. But realistically, a lot of people don't buy a book the first time they come in contact with it. That's typically how book purchasing goes, which is, I realize what makes the publishing industry extra complex because it's not like other retail. You know, there are nuances to book discovery and book purchases that just don't they don't align with how people buy other products. But so yeah, you have to think of ads as like keeping that conversation going with new people and reintroducing your book. And that it's not exactly like you said, Penny. It's probably there's a good chance that's not going to be what they're doing right before they click buy. But without that ad, they wouldn't have seen your book in the first place. Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

Exactly. Exactly. And I think that if we're, if we're breaking this down into so just to kind of stay with like the seven-day, you know, quote unquote seven-day sanity check, the first thing that you want to do is that you want to make sure that you have right. So keyword alignment, and I want you to hear me very clearly on this keyword alignment matters more than bid aggression. So you you want to make sure that your keyword strings, not singular keywords, are actually fitting the market that you're serving. That's a big, big, big part of this. The other thing is please do not follow guidance that tells you to underbid, like I'm just gonna put an ad up for a penny. I gotta tell you, that's not gonna work. Amazon is too smart, they're absolutely not gonna work. So, you know, campaigns under, for example, like$10 a day almost always under deliver meaningful data. Right. That's the that's the other piece of it. So I think, you know, day one and two, find your keyword strings. Or if you're sitting on Amazon ads that haven't done anything, you may have to, you know, enhance those, burn those to the ground, burn or burn those to the ground and start over.

Budgets, Bids, And Data Generation

SPEAKER_01 13:52

And can I ask real quick? Yeah. Hopefully I'm not getting ahead, but this is something else that I mean, I know it exists. I don't want to get ahead in our conversation on this, though. That I do try to remind our clients that when you first get ads going, that's probably the most expensive they're ever going to be.

SPEAKER_00 14:08

Without a great point of yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

You know, without without any sort of meaningful return or data that you can go off of to know that things are on the right track. Like, so a lot of times I think authors, when these get going, they start to stress out because of the money. And not that we don't fully respect that, everybody has a budget, you know, like work smarter, not harder. But in order to Penny's point saying, you know, you're not going to generate data with a really low budget. And without data, you can't improve them. So you really have to go into this knowing that the goal is to generate data, and that is going to cost you a bit more upfront. But if you're doing everything correctly or you're working with somebody like Penny that knows what they're doing, those your ads get more efficient, which means you're getting more traction without higher costs in theory, you know? Right, exactly.

Keyword Alignment Over Bid Aggression

SPEAKER_00 14:57

And a lot of times, you know, I taught when I teach this class, um, in fact, I just got asked to teach an Amazon mastermind. I think it's two hours for RWA, which I'm really looking forward to. And a lot of that is gonna be on Amazon ads. You know, you want to start with about 300 keywords. And if that makes you want to turn this podcast off, please don't, because I'm gonna re- I'm gonna ref I want to reframe this for you. A hundred keyword strings, and you can also use, you know, book titles where appropriate and author names, things like that, save to different match types. So broad phrase and exact match. So you, you know, you're getting 100 keywords. You want to really cast the net wide. So what Amy said, super relevant. I'm glad that she mentioned it. Your ad cost initially is gonna be higher than you're probably ever gonna spend during the entire life of your ads. And it should be that way. And here's why. During the quote unquote learning phase, Amazon is going to present your ad in places that may or may not really align with, you know, like you may not, you may get a lot of clicks, but you may not get buys because it needs to be tweaked. And your goal after you hit that, I would recommend wait till you pass that seven-day window, is you want to narrow, you want to narrow the highway, right? So if you envision like the Amazon ads are like this highway and it's sending all this traffic to you, you want to, you don't want an eight-lane highway because that's gonna cost you a lot of money. You want to keep narrowing, you want to keep pausing keywords that are, which I know we're gonna get to that in day three, four, five, or six or whatever, but you want to pause keywords that are costing you too much money and not necessarily selling, you know, selling your book. But the final piece of this, and and I think even before we talk about narrowing the highway, which I realize I already kind of dipped into, is cover category and copy, which is your conversion ecosystem. Ads cannot compensate for a mispositioned book. I will tell you, Amazon ads are such a clarifier. Like Amazon ads will tell me, and automatic, I know a lot of authors like to run automatic ads. They're easy. You don't have to do anything, you don't have to do any of the service. Like, I get it. Automatic ads can cost you a lot of money if you're not careful, right? But automatic ads in particular, they are a clarifier. Like they will show really show you if your book is misaligned. Uh, because you're basically relying on Amazon to understand your book. So you're not even feeding the system with keywords or anything like that. And if you're sitting there and you're thinking, oh my gosh, that's me, you your book is mispositioned in some way. And then we have shows on that that you should go back and listen to, right? Um, but your product page quality impacts the conversion rates way more than traffic volume alone. And this is why I let off by saying, you know, keyword alignment matters so much more than bid aggression. Just keep that in mind. I have seen ads do screamingly well with not unrealistic budget, so not like crazy, like not like$100 a day budgets or something that would send you, you know, into a into a tailspin that have done really well when the books are super well aligned. So I'm sorry, I know I kind of ran on with that, but I feel I have obviously I have super strong feelings about that.

Conversion Ecosystem: Cover, Category, Copy

SPEAKER_01 18:20

Um, this is really great because I I think a lot of the times why ads are so frustrating or make authors so nervous is because there's so much they don't understand about them. And when you add in the factor of you're actively spending money on something that you don't understand, like that's a that's a scary position to be in, you know? So I think that's why revisiting the Amazon ads topic and covering the bases is so important on this show because yeah, there's nothing worse than not understanding something that you're spending a bunch of money on, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Well, and the other thing, and then we want to get into days three, three, two, three through four. But the other thing though, too, is that remember we did a show, we've actually done a couple of shows on this in January where we talked about the 1% factor. So any changes that you make to your book that makes it 1% better than it was yesterday can help your ads in ways that you didn't even that you couldn't even fathom. So that's the that's the thing about you know making sure that your book isn't misaligned. Now, a book obviously that has a bad cover and yada yet, all the things, that's something that that's a that's a we've done a pod, we have a podcast for that, right? Right. Um that's a that's kind of a different story. But keep in mind that a lot of these changes that we're talking about, a lot of these things are really just small incremental 1% movements. So with that, um days three through four. Do you want to take that, Amy?

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Yeah, so okay, early engagement. You want to watch for early engagement, look for impressions. Yep. Impressions are really important. Um, that's because and we say this with ads across the board. This is the same, not to get off topic, but for those of you that are interested in book bub ads or have heard about doing book bub ads, that's another one where impressions matter. That's how the conversation starts. So, to the point of, you know, click-throughs are great, but impressions matter just as much because shopping is very visual. And especially if you've done all your due diligence, you have a great cover, things like that, people will start to recognize. They'll start to recognize your author name, your title, your book cover. So those impressions are good things, you know, like that it it should not be discounted. You know, if you're, oh, I'm not getting clicks or I'm not getting sales, but if your impressions are doing well, you are doing some of the right things and you're getting in front of the right people. Exactly. You know, if you're not getting any impressions, then Penny is that typically a targeting problem, a bid problem, a little bit of both.

Early Signals: Impressions First

When High Impressions Don’t Click

SPEAKER_00 20:44

So if you're not getting any impressions, it means that Amazon is not showing your book. So the impressions means that it's showing up on the Amazon retail page. The clicks is when somebody actually clicks through. Um no impressions is a problem. No impressions means that um it's it's also, I mean, much like no clicks is market feedback, no impressions is market feedback, right? I rarely see books that have like no impressions. And even when I've done ad dashboard evaluations for authors who are doing them on their own, I rarely really see that. Where I see a problem is when you have really high impressions. So here's the thing Amazon wants to make money. That's not a breaking news. But if they continually show your ad basically for free, because you're not paying for those impressions, right? You're not paying for those, you know, your ad to show up in search, right? They are going to stop showing your book if you have like a hundred thousand impressions and I don't know, five clicks or something. And that's not the exact math, but you get the idea. So that's the thing though, too, is that you really want to watch, you wanna have, you know, So ideally, um, and Amy, I know we want to talk about click-through rate numbers, which again, just a caveat to this, is that they vary, like they can vary by genre also. But just to give you some, just to give you an idea of what the industry wide is in terms of on other portals, right? So Google search, um, average click-through rates are three to five percent on Google search, right? Google search is a very different animal than Amazon, okay? Display ads on social media a half a percent to one percent. So right, so if you're running display ads and you're like, oh my gosh, yeah, so it's it's really low. Amazon sponsored products, so just books, uh, is 0.2% to 0.6% the average click-through rate. So but and and again, that's just for that's you know, that's the it's also sometimes very genre dependent, too. And you know, like if you have something that's in the news, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Well, and if we're talking averages, you're also dealing with very well-established books and author brands, right, Penny, that have been there forever that people are actively looking for and recognize, right? Oh, yeah, for sure. And so they're also when you figure what what's happening in that space too, you know.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

Yeah, exactly. So you're gonna have, you know, so you're gonna have a um, you know, if you're competing with somebody who is just releasing their next, you know, like the next Will Trent thriller, right? And you are a brand new author, and that the the Will Trent, first off, they're probably very unlikely to be running ads for that because the series is so popular. But that click-through rate is gonna be way higher than the numbers that we even called out, just because of the because the nature of this author has written, you know, 9,000 books and their visibility is through the roof, right?

SPEAKER_01 24:04

Right. But it definitely skews the average. So when you're talking about, you know, a typical everyday author that is like, well, mine feel low, it's like, well, yeah, but you've got these people that are getting these outrageous click through rates, right? That are kind of pulling this up and making you feel like you're on the lower end, but you know, it's all relative at that point. Like the visibility is really the key one, like, especially early on. You know, we've already said this, like conversions and sales, if you're approaching the beginning of your ads for conversions and sales, you are skipping the points that Penny has already made and making sure those are really well established and you're setting yourself up for disappointment, you know. So you really want to do these in the right order and make sure you're paying attention to the right metrics, because that'll actually tell you what's working. Because it's very easy to get frustrated if your only goal for Amazon ads is sales on the ad dashboard in a vacuum.

Click Quality And Product Page Fit

Don’t Run Ads On Naked Books

SPEAKER_00 24:59

Right. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And one of the things that I always recommend to authors is before you start your Amazon ads, take a look at, you know, if you have access, if you have access to a sales dashboard, whether it's through KDP or through your publisher, take a look at what those numbers are before you start running ads. And that is a much healthier comparison, right? It's a much healthier comparison than looking at ACOS, which, you know, that's the other piece of it though, too, is that the Amazon ad reporting, the reason not only does it take seven days for these ads to, you know, start because they're in the quote unquote learning phase, but the Amazon ad reporting, I'm sorry, if if they're asking my opinion on what needs to be fixed on the Amazon ad dashboard, that's the first thing. It's like you've got to get your ad data reporting more real time. Because I've had authors that say, oh, I've just seen like, you know, a ton of sales and maybe they weren't necessarily directly related to the ads, but the ad dashboard movement for sales reporting um is a lot of times very lagging. It's very weird. I don't understand, you know, if Amazon wants to take over the universe with their ads, why they're, you know, you know, I mean, seriously, why they're why they're why they're lagging so much in that. It's really, it's kind of crazy. The other thing that is worth mentioning, too, in regards to um impressions versus click-through rate. So if you, and this is where I go and I pause keyword. So if I see that a keyword has a really, you know, has has a lot of impressions, but is very low click-through rate. And I typically, and again, I'm gonna throw out these numbers, but just know that it's it's it may vary, it definitely varies by genre. So 0.3% click-through rate is considered healthy. I think it's reasonable, right? Um, but 0.2% and lower there's not a lot really, you know, going on. Um, but 0.4 to 0.6 is really, really, really good. And that's I think where you would see, you know, some you know, some of this movement. And your click-through rate's also gonna go up and down. So especially if you have a book that is more seasonally appropriate to write. But here's the thing though, if your impressions are high and your click-through rate is low, your ads are gonna start to cost you more money. And that's a little, that's a really that's an ugly secret that Amazon does not tell you. Because Amazon's like, well, look, Betty, if you if we're showing your book to all these people and you know, they're you know, nobody's clicking on your ad. Or, you know, worst case scenario, you're paying for all these clip-throughs and nobody's buying it, well, we're just gonna bump up the cost of your your the price of your keywords. And and I've seen them do this. It's awful. I know. That'd be bad. It's like adding insult to injury, right? Right. It's like, okay, so not only am I right, exactly. So not only am I, you know, my ads are not working, but now they're costing me twice as much money. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Oh, I'd love, let's talk. I'm excited about click quality. Click quality.

unknown 28:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

You want to do you want to talk about click quality? Yeah, only because this is something that I actually like, ooh, I can have my hands in this one. So evaluating click quality. And maybe that's not the proper header. Penny would actually could probably correct whether or not I titled my section properly. But what this comes down to though is making sure that what your ad is telling people is what they're getting once they click through. So, you know, making sure that there's an alignment between what your ad is promising and what their product page experience is.

unknown 28:44

Yes.

Portfolio Caps And Smart Bid Changes

SPEAKER_01 28:45

And this is this is something that we talk to clients about a lot. Like full disclosure for anybody listening, typically we always try to make sure that everything that you have going on on Amazon is nice and tidy and optimized in finesse. And there's a lot of nuances to how campaigns end up getting built for individual clients, that you know, there's budgets, goals, all those things. But I will say, for the most part, we always try to make sure that our clients are covered on Amazon because it really is that important. You know, so we're talking about your book description, what your cover looks like, you know, are you populating reviews, all that additional retail page content that you can do through Author Central, all of those things add to onto the pro like the shopper experience, your first impression. And so a lot of times what will happen is that, you know, if it works out that a client's like, no, I've got this covered, I'm working with this person, working with that person, and we're just running the ads, but we haven't had our hands on anything on the retail side of it in terms of the book page, there can be a disconnect. And that's where we start making recommendations. You know, like you can really improve your ads if we do X, Y, and Z on your retail page. It can really make a huge difference.

SPEAKER_00 29:57

Yeah, that's absolutely that's absolutely very true. And the other thing is, is don't run ads on naked books. I love that. And by that I mean, you know, if your book doesn't have any reviews, the ads are really gonna struggle. And and there isn't like a magic number of like, it's not like, okay, we have to have at least 50 reviews because then a lot of people would not run Amazon ads for a while because that's something because I know the review process can be a struggle. Right. But um you definitely want to have, you know, some reviews on your on your retail page. If you can have a handful, if you can have 10.

SPEAKER_01 30:34

Right. And we've talked about that before too, Pendy, is that there is a um, you know, there's this assumption about a book's age and reviews as well that shoppers, whether we like it or not, you know, shoppers go by that. So if your book has been out for six months, they might be interested. But if it's been out for six months and they get to your book page and no one's reviewed it yet, or maybe only one or two people, like just because of what they are conditioned to look for when they are shopping for books, that is going to stand out to them as not typical.

unknown 31:02

Yeah.

Pruning Keywords After Day Eight

SPEAKER_01 31:02

If your book's brand new and it doesn't have reviews yet, but everything else that your cover's great, your description's intriguing, you've got all your other ducks in a row, then I think you're in a better position. But the reality is for those of you, if your book has been out a little bit longer and your review numbers are lagging, that is going to stand out to shoppers more than if your book is brand new and doesn't have a bunch of reviews yet. Yeah. Yeah. So for what it's worth, keep that in mind as well. So if you're running ads on books that have been out for a while and you're kind of beating your head against the wall with ads, but you've been neglecting to work on building your review numbers, those go hand in hand. You know, you really can't sacrifice one strategy because you're head down in another. You know, they all really support each other.

Automatic Ads As Alignment Test

SPEAKER_00 31:43

And um the other piece of it though, too, is that if we're, you know, we're talking about budgets and I get that like it's kind of making your head spin. I can fully appreciate that. But put a if you're really uncomfortable with Amazon ads in terms of budgets, right? You don't want it like Amazon overnight to just spend like a thousand dollars or something, put a budget cap. Just put a budget cap, create a portfolio. That's what we do when we manage our authors' ads. Create a portfolio, put a budget cap on there so that you can, you know, rest your head. What? So you can sleep at night? Yeah. You can sleep at night. You can rest your head knowing that Amazon is not going to overspend like crazy. And find something that you're comfortable with. I mean, here's the thing though, too, is that while you don't necessarily want to, like I said, you know, under having, you know, low budgets on keywords and things like that is not necessarily going to like trying to underbid Amazon's recommendations is not going to win you any prizes. And there's a theory out there, like, I'm just going to spend one cent on this keyword and make it for you are literally not going to go anywhere. Amazon's just going to laugh at that because there's no way to trip the system. I hate to say that because we all wish that there was a way. You know, like, and and all of the Amazon people, myself included, like we all like to love talk about strategy and like, here's how to beat the Amazon system and blah, blah, blah. But the thing about it is, though, is that you can't don't do these tricky things about like the this one cent ad or 10 cents ad or try to underbid Amazon or something. So make sure that you're doing smart bid adjustments. But by smart, I also mean, so yes, you want to listen to Amazon's recommendations, but do not listen to Amazon's recommendation if they're telling you to spend$30 a click. And I've seen that, and I'm like, there's literally no ROI in that. Full stock. Criminal. It's criminal. And it's it's also, I gotta tell you, I think it's a little bit of a glitch in the system. I mean, it's a little weird. I I don't know. But make smart bit adjustments. So, you know, day seven, you know, if your keyword has a lot of impressions and not a lot of clicks. I mean, I think once you hit the thousand mark, thousand impression mark, and you don't have any clicks, it could bounce. And again, ignore the seven-day window, first off, first and foremost. So when you hit day eight, like to start to kind of keep track of this, statistically, it it there's a good chance that it's going to be irrelevant. I have seen books bounce back, so just keep an eye on that. Keep keep an eye on that and you know, the the impressions. Um, and again, if your ads are not if if you're if you know you've been running ads and you feel like I'm just not doing anything, make sure that your keywords are aligned, make sure that there's no mismatch, because Amy and I, we've done a ton of shows on your Amazon retail page and why it has to be tightened up. And you we don't have to go down that rabbit hole necessarily for this podcast, we've done a ton of shows on that, but it make it'll make or break your Amazon ads for sure, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:44

Right. Yeah, absolutely. I would say before you spend a bunch of money and get super frustrated because you've going been going at the ads for so long, and especially if you're using the recommendations we've included in this episode, it's definitely worth seeing, you know, what could be on the other end of this that is one, usually free to fix, you know? Yeah unless it's covered, that might cost you a little bit, but it's worth it. But there are other things, you know. Again, everything works together. You know, there's no, unfortunately, and we would not keep that secret, but there really is no secret one thing to make a book successful, you know, like it's really a compilation of doing a lot of the right things, and then then it starts to come together for you. Yeah, it absolutely does. You're not gonna do it all with ads, you're not anywhere, you know, whether it's Amazon or anywhere else, but it can make a huge difference. And I love reminding clients because again, a lot of times it's like we have our heads in this all the time, and it's easy to forget how much most authors really don't know about the Amazon ad space. And in one very human, you know, reminder I like to give them is that it's quite literally one of the only marketing strategies that can work for you 24-7.

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Yeah.

Weekly Optimizing, Not Daily Panic

SPEAKER_01 36:02

You know, like, and so that's why we are so we're not getting any portion of any ad sales. So we're not pushing this because it benefits us in any way, other than the fact that it really does, if done correctly and monitored and watched, even if you do have a smaller budget, it really is the only way you can have you can get your bookmark exposure 24-7, 365, when everything else that you do, while it matters, takes your time, takes your energy, takes, you know what I mean, all those other things you have going on, they're important. But this one thing can work for you all the time. So it's worth trying to get it right.

SPEAKER_00 36:37

Yeah, it absolutely is worth trying to get it right. And, you know, it is a um, if you're listening to this and you're just like, oh my gosh, I don't know about the keywords, I don't know, I don't know anything. I don't know, you know, I don't really have the time. Start with automatic ads. Just like I said, put a budget cap on there, be mindful that they can't sometimes overspend. Your automatic ads will, at a bare minimum, show you if your book is aligned or misaligned on Amazon. And automatic ads tell there's really no hiding from automatic ads because it they can either figure it out with the clues that you have given them, or it can totally fall flat. And that's a really good indicator of whether or not your book is as buttoned up as it needs to be, just for, you know, as somebody who has run more Amazon ads than I care to admit without a cocktail. Uh if you're gonna be at RWA, you can buy me a drink and we'll talk about Amazon ads and how many I, you know, some of the some of the crazy stuff that I've seen when you get in there. But yeah, I I would say, you know, if if you're coming away from this, you're just like, I still don't really understand. Start with the automatic ads, just be mindful of the spend, put a bunch of cap on it so that you're again, you know, some it's not overspending you, and see what it does. And in some cases, we had actually like we'll run uh we'll run um keywords, we'll run category ads, we'll run keyword ads, and we'll run um automatic ads for a client. And sometimes, you know, and it there's no hard and fast rules. Sometimes the keyword ads outperform everything else, and other times it's the the automatic ads. We just, you know, it really depends on the genre. It's very, very specific. So um, Amy, did we cover everything? Did I miss anything? Because I feel like I'm just like running off at the mouth. Sorry.

SPEAKER_01 38:22

No, I think this was really excellent. I really do get excited when we do shows that I know are a pain point for authors. We do plenty of shows where we're like, you guys have to know this, whether you know it exists or not. You know what I mean? We're gonna tell you about it. But it there is like an added bonus to doing to covering topics that we know are actively driving y'all nuts. So yeah, exactly. Hopefully, this is helpful.

Closing And Text-In CTA

SPEAKER_00 38:45

And one final thing that I forgot to mention: do not change your bids daily. And part of the reason, so a lot of times like the knee-jerk reaction is my ads aren't the oil, I'm gonna change my bids. Don't change your bids daily. I I only get into ads dashboards like once a week, unless for some reason like the book is just going crazy, which is the high quality problem to have. When you change your bids daily, it prevents the algorithm from learning the book, especially in that first seven to 14 day window. So just be mindful of that. You don't, you there's no reason in the world to get into your dash ad dashboard daily unless your book is just a rocketing bestseller, in which case, awesome. But um, that just, you know, a lot of times authors panic. Like they panic and check their ads. And that's not the that's not the way to work with Amazon ads. So we love your show ideas, we love your show feedback. So text the word podcast to 888-402-894. We'd love to hear from you and your questions. We did a couple of questions on a few shows back. We love it. Send us your questions. Hopefully, you'll have a lot of questions about the answer. We'd love to answer. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll see you next week. Bye.