Wrote around 1000 words today.
I have a home improvement project going for the next couple of days so my productivity will definitely suffer. It’s all good—remember the law of averages.
Also, I'm looking at my third straight day of losses for my ads. I can no longer look at my Amazon Ad dashboard without a bucket of ice cream and a box of Kleenex. LOL
In all seriousness though, I'm going to hold out for a few more days before going ninja on my losses. I believe that will give me good data on what's working/what isn't so I can adjust.
LESSON LEARNED & LESSON EXECUTED
Yesterday I told you how I lost money on Amazon ads for the second day in a row…
Well, I did some digging into the data.
I noticed that the majority of my clicks are coming from Category ads. When Category ads turn on, they gobble up clicks very, very fast. In fact, you have to be careful with them because if you don’t watch them, they can waste your ad spend on irrelevant targets. This is why I’m very careful to only do Category ads on categories that I am POSITIVE are related to my book’s genre.
I asked the question, “what percentage of my ad sales come from my category ads?”
In other words, should I be concerned that I don’t have many sales yet? Is my strategy of “holding the line” supported by data?
I grabbed my historical ad data for the past 60 days or so (it’s all I have at the moment) and threw them into a quick pivot table in Excel. In about 2 minutes, I discovered the following:
SPK are keyword ads, SPC are category ads, and SPA are automatic ads.
As you can see here, Category ads account for 55% of my clicks (!!), 54% of my ad spend, and 55% of my (reported) Amazon-tracked sales.
Wow. Just wow. This is exactly the kind of stuff I am talking about when I talk about becoming a data-driven writer. The many, many nights of Excel training helped here. Literally took me two minutes to cobble together, though I suspect most authors would run away screaming at the very thought of trying to accomplish something like this.
A few caveats with this chart, for those who aren’t familiar with Amazon Ads.
First, Amazon doesn’t track ALL of your sales. In fact, it’s notoriously bad. This chart is really only a third of the sales at best. It’s possible that Amazon might have a bias and report more category ads than keyword ads, for example. No one knows. However, the underlying data set comprises around 400 ad campaigns and several thousand clicks, so while the sample size isn’t gigantic, it’s big enough.
Anyhoo, the data tells me that my suspicion was correct to do nothing. For all the clicks that Category ads gobble up, my data also tells me that they also bring in the lion’s share of revenue. Now, this is just based on 60 days of data. An entire year’s worth of data might tell a different story. But I have to use what I have.
What this data also tells me is that if there is any part of my strategy that can go wrong in a hurry, it’s also with category ads since they get the majority of the action. If the slew of category ads I created turn out to be unprofitable, that will wreak havoc on my monthly conversion rates and turn my regular monthly profit into a loss. See, that’s why you have to watch them closely. One or two rogue ads will eat away at your profit. I THINK I may have a rogue category in my midst for my short story collection, but I don't have enough data to support that feeling yet. Hence why I'm doing nothing.
I’m watching until around 100 clicks. If my conversion ratio is less than 10:1 for my poetry and/or short story collection for my category ads alone, then I’ll take action. (A 10:1 conversion rate means that I receive a sale for every 10 clicks. Ideally, you want it way lower than that. My best books perform around 2:1.)
And when I say “take action,” action doesn’t mean turning the ads off necessarily.
- I may consider lowering the bid to reduce my cost per click. Sometimes that can make a difference.
- I may look at my book description to see if it needs some help. I'm using the original book description on both my short story and poetry collection, and those aren't very good, mainly written in 2014 when I was innocent and clueless about writing blurbs. I can only improve.
- I could consider rearranging the order of my stories/poems to see if that makes a difference in conversion and the “Look Inside” sample.
- And lastly, I could turn off categories that aren’t leading to sales.
There are a lot of levers you can pull.
Anyhoo, I want to know something.
Have the posts I’ve been making in the last few days been a little too in the weeds, or do you find them interesting?
Let me know.
