The above is the typical way most Amazon ads are seen on an Amazon book page.

We have been managing Amazon ads since 2015. The purpose of this post is to describe the steps we take when we manage the Amazon ads for an author.

Our goal is to create profitable ads to ensure all our authors increase their royalties and make a profit. Our ad management process has the following steps:

1. Assessing the book. Before we start an ad campaign we look at how the book is presented on Amazon. We assess the cover, description, reviews, subtitle, availability of a Kindle ebook, book categories and whether the author is in Author Central. We email each author, usually within 24hrs of them signing up, with suggestions for what areas need improvement and links to videos explaining how to make improvements. We do this not to be difficult, but because we know that small changes in these areas can make a huge difference to book sales. Please be open to making needed changes.

2. If you need honest reader reviews we provide a free one month on NetGalley.com – we are an official partner –  for your book and provide access to our two free review gathering groups on Facebook.

3. We assemble keyword lists for your book. We have multiple KDP Publisher keyword building tools as well as access to MerchantWords and Helium 10 keyword services to ensure we create the most effective keyword lists for targeting books on Amazon. When you suggest keywords – typically author names – we use the appropriate tool to create a list of keywords for each comp author name. Comp authors are authors who write similar books to you, not multiple genre authors, but authors whose books will be eagerly read by the same readers yours could be. These keyword lists are then used to create individual ads – campaigns on Amazon – for your book on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. We suggest you target 2nd tier authors, not the biggest names, as comp authors, not authors such as James Patterson, as the competition for clicks on books from those top authors can be very expensive. Better to target lesser-known, but still currently popular authors and to get clicks at a reasonable cost and make a profit on your ads campaigns.

5. We create three types of ads for our authors: auto ads, golden keyword ads, and ASIN ads. In auto ads, Amazon decides where and when to show your ads based on your description, categories, and backend keywords. Golden keywords ads include keywords that work well for the genre your book is in. We have a database of Golden Keywords we use to create highly effective ads for our author’s books. ASIN ads laser target books similar to yours. We also test different bidding strategies to create further ads based on these main ad types. We target our ads to ensure your budget generates book sales. We also use AI tools to generate appropriate keywords for your book, based on your text description on Amazon.

6. We usually do not start the ads for you until you have made some or all of the changes suggested to you for your description, subtitle etc. We wait to ensure the book has a good chance of selling when we pay people to click through to it. That is what you are doing with Amazon ads, paying Amazon every time someone clicks on your ad on their site. After they click they are taken to your book page on Amazon. This is why the ads are called CPC ads – Cost Per Click – ads. We pay per click. If we bid 60cents for a click we may pay only 40cents or 35cents for the click. The Amazon algorithm decides what you pay, based on the number of other people also bidding on that keyword at that second. This automated bidding system is how most ads online are now paid for.

7. We also send out a link to your book on Amazon to our email list of readers who buy books. This is to give a boost to your book ranking on Amazon and an early win so you see some results. Amazon ads can be slow to start, sometimes a few weeks, so this will provide some early campaign sales for your book.

8. Every day we monitor the overall spend of all your ads. We intervene to make sure the ads do not run away with your money. This daily monitoring is vital and one of the reasons authors do not want to do Amazon ads themselves. We have a team managing all the ads, with different people monitoring and adjusting in different ways beyond simple spend management. We adjust individual keyword bids both up and down, depending on how they are doing and we create negative keywords for your ads – keywords you do not want your ad to be shown beside – if a keyword is wasting your budget.

9. Getting your ACOS (Average Cost of Sales) down is our goal. What ACOS you can afford depends on whether your ebook is exclusive to Amazon – you are in Select – and whether you have a series of books. An ACOS under 70% may be required to make a profit if you are not in Select and have no other books your new readers can buy. But if you are in Select and have a series of books an ACOS of 250% may still make you a profit. You will lose on the initial ads, but because you will on average sell three or even more books to a reader, you will make a real profit over time.

10. Making a profit is the goal and then scaling up, making more profit.

11. You can email us new comp authors or the titles of two prerelease books or recent release books in your area likely to sell, so we can get new ads for you onto their books page before most of your competitors.

12. This Amazon ads laser targeting can help you position your book ad only on books that you expect the readers will be the same people who will like to read your book.

13. Where ads are slow to start we can raise the bids slowly, test new laser targeted ads and new comp authors. It can take time to get your ads working right. And then they need to be monitored, every day, as Amazon ads can stop working. In which case we have to make new ads for you.

14. Where can you see the ads we created for you on Amazon? Sometimes you will see your ad in the Sponsored Products strip of books in the middle of a book page for your comp author. This is not a reliable way to find your ads, as Amazon rotates your ad with the ads of thousand of other authors and never tells us where and when it appeared. What they do give us is a chart report of clicks we paid for and the sales generated. That report does not include page reads from Select and recent sales, so usually underestimates actual sales. It also does not show sales generated by other means, such as your own promotion. Sales can be verified in your KDP dashboard or from your publisher. Your #sales rank is an indicator for your sales and after a while you will know what your #sales rank number means for your daily sales.

15. You can request a screengrab of the dashboard chart of sales and spend and clicks for your book from us once every two weeks. We expect one click for every 1,000 impressions or the number of times your ad is shown on Amazon. If you get fewer clicks it usually means your cover and subtitle are not appealing enough.

16. We do not get an opportunity to put text in italics below your ad, as you will see with some ads on Amazon, but encourage you to use a descriptive ebook subtitle. Your ebook title and subtitle can be up to 199 characters in length. This will all appear in bold and allows your book to stand out from others with the less easily readable text in italics. For more on what you can and cannot put in your subtitle see this Amazon support page.

17. You can request a video call once a month on 24hrs notice to ask us to screen share our Amazon ads dashboard so you can see what your ads report looks like in person.

18. Scaling up your ads to spend more and make more royalties requires careful planning. Please make contact with BooksGoSocial to plan this.

These are the most important aspects of how we manage your Amazon ads. Please contact: admin@bgsadmin.com for more details on any aspect of the above. You can sign up for the Amazon ads program here.

Laurence O’Bryan, Founder of BooksGoSocial.