Wrote 4700 words today which completed another section of Indie Author Confidential, Vol. 3. My goal is to be finished with it sometime this weekend so I can get it off to my editor.
I also recorded The Writer’s Journey today. You definitely don’t want to miss this one, as I go into my 2021 strategy and talk about it from a different dimension. It’ll go live tomorrow.
LESSON LEARNED
I continued retaking Bryan Cohen’s Amazon Ads School. I’m still soaking in the material, but I relearned the basics of the Sponsored Product Automatic Ads and how they work.
As I was looking through my AMS performance for last month, I had a revelation.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get lost in marketing data. You know how, sometimes, you walk into a room and forget why you walked in? And you spend several minutes trying to remember before you realize it was to get a glass of milk?
Yeah…sometimes that happens to me with spreadsheets. I go in with the best of intentions and then I get lost and forget what the hell I was looking for. I call it “spreadsheet-itis” because it’s painful. I’m getting much better about that now that I have a job where I’m basically inside spreadsheets all day. My comfort level with Excel is rising exponentially, and it’s paying off.
I created a “hypothesis log” for my Amazon Ads. Every day, as I’m looking at the data, I create a hypothesis about what I think the data is saying. Then, the next day, I go in and validate it. Eventually, I can create a body of hypotheses (and answers) that help me make better decisions. This way, when I go into a spreadsheet, I have a mission. And I’m in and out. I’ve set a goal to spend no more than five minutes in any spreadsheet I open. Probably a good goal for most to have, honestly.
AND…I’m still waiting on those new ads to turn on…It’s probably going to take a few more days before I see any action. So far I haven’t seen anything other than clicks.
LESSON EXECUTED
I detected an ad that went a little to click-happy. It was spending waaaaay too much money per day compared to the other ads I created. Well, turned out I forgot to set the bid from the default of $0.75…yikes. It’s not the first time I’ve made that mistake, but man it hurts every time I do. Good thing I caught it.
I’m still absorbing a lot of the Amazon Ad material, so I’ll have more to share once I’ve gathered my thoughts.
