I wrote 1400 words today and finished my next book and got it shipped off to my editor. Good stuff.
LESSON LEARNED & EXECUTED
Alright, I finally hit 100 clicks on my short story collection ads. My official conversion rate is 1:25. For every 25 clicks, I sold a book. That, my friends is the definition of a bloodbath, but it’s not horrible.
If I’m going to make the collection profitable, I need to be around 1:10 clicks, which means I need to double my “sales” clicks.
How might I do that? Not right away. This is going to require some patience and small steps.
First, the facts. One of my category ads (“literary fiction”) is the main culprit for my unprofitability. The story collection IS literary fiction, however this category ad receives a lot of clicks for titles that are not relevant to my book. Literary fiction is a big genre. The category may not ultimately be a relevant one because it’s too broad, but here’s the problem: it’s the one that’s responsible for the trackable sales so far. If I cut this ad, I will probably choke off what little sales I have. For now, I view this one ad like that cousin from out of town you don’t want to play with at Thanksgiving: you don’t have to like each other but you have to figure out how to get a long. For now.
Also, my other category ads have a bit better targeting, but they don’t receive as many impressions or clicks.
My click rate is insane, probably the highest of any book I’ve ever advertised on Amazon Ads. By the time I wake up each day, I have at least a dozen clicks….and I wake up early….The weirder thing is that the category ads I created don’t have custom text so there’s no ad copy, just the book cover and the reviews.
So to lay it out:
- I have a category ad that gobbles up my clicks and targets irrelevant books, but it’s also driving the few sales I have.
- My other ads aren’t serving much, so it’s hard to know if they would perform better long-term.
- I have a high click rate which indicates that my cover must be effective.
It’s time to start taking action. I don’t know the right answer, so I’m going to find out the hard way.
The steps I’m taking:
- If my rogue category ad is gobbling up clicks, then it could be because I am overbidding. I’m going to reduce my average bid by 3-4 cents over the next two days to see if that impacts my clicks any. My suspicion is that it won’t, and if that’s true, it will at least reduce my ad spend while still letting Amazon do its job by serving the ad to as many different targets as possible.
- I added more keywords to the negative targeting to stop targeting the terms that are bleeding me money. I need to be relentless about telling Amazon which books NOT to target. I fear this is a never-ending battle that may not be worth fighting long-term, but we’ll see where it goes.
- Once the dust settles on the above changes, I’ll see how the daily metrics change. Then I’ll see if I need to do more of the same, or if it’s time to address my book description.
These might be the wrong decisions. If they are, I’ll know because my clicks will drop dramatically. I don’t want to eliminate them at this stage in the game. Clicks = life. First, I want to eliminate as many of the “bad clicks” as possible by honing in on the right targets and optimizing my cost per click. Then, ideally, I would INCREASE my budget so that I can increase my clicks on the relevant targets, if that makes sense.
AT THE END OF THE DAY
Wow, what a difference 12 hours made. The actions I took worked wonders.
By reducing my average bid by $0.02:
- I cut my number of impressions in half (which is scary, right? BUT—!)
- The number of clicks stay damn near the same. Exactly the same. Geez, talk about overpaying! #wipeseggoffface
- Reduced my ad spend by around 20%.
The actions I took didn’t even impact the ad. It kept gobbling up clicks unfazed. So now, I want to see how low I can go before I start impacting things negatively, then I can raise them a little if needed. I went ahead and lowered the average bid by another $0.02 before bed. I’ll give this change a full day to cycle so I won’t take any more action until tomorrow night just to make sure I’m not disturbing things too much.
Overall, today was still a bloodbath. Not good at all. The equivalent of getting punched in the face. But it was 20% less blood.
The best part about today is that it affirmed that I CAN fix this situation, and the way I fix it is by doing exactly what I did today: digging into the data and making small actions that move all my numbers in the right direction.
Don’t be scared of your ads. It’s OK to start messing around with stuff. That’s how you learn.
I have no idea how this will end, but it’s going to be interesting…
