With Amazon’s net sales rising 22% to $469.8 billion in 2021, the e-commerce giant continues to hold its crown as one of the largest online stores. In 2018, 'Amazon Advertising’ was launched, offering 'pay per click’ advertising for Amazon booksellers and authors to increase their visibility and get their products in front of their target audiences.
Essentially, 'pay per click’ means that sellers pay for each click their ads generate. Since its launch, Amazon Advertising has seen an immense amount of growth in revenue likely due to the range of ad opportunities and features it provides to sellers.
Although Amazon Advertising is relatively new in comparison to other advertising methods like Google’s search and shopping ads, the types of ads and features it offers provides authors and book vendors with many ways to generate sales and revenue.
This article aims to help you understand the many benefits of Amazon Advertising, the kind of budget you may need and the initial stages of preparation for setting up an Amazon advert for your books.
What are the benefits of Amazon Advertising?
The Amazon Advertising platform provides a wide array of potential benefits:
- Increases in sales, revenue and a strong ROI
- Increases in brand visibility and awareness
- Improvements to the organic rankings of your books and products on Amazon
- Wide range of Amazon advert types to suit your brand, products and audience
- Cuts down on the buyer journey by putting you in front of book shoppers already in a frame of mind to make a purchase
- Improvements to your book sales histories and product visibility
- Gain valuable insight into changing consumer habits
- Ability to highly customise and personalise campaign targeting to reach a more specific audience
- Tons of shopping journey data about who your customers are and how they shop
- Track the results of your book ads using detailed reports allowing you to make data-driven decisions
- Full control over your budget and the ability to scale your ad campaigns up or down
- Remarketing tools and opportunities to reach your audience on external websites
What budget do you need for Amazon ads?
When you start advertising, you set your own budget and bid level, allowing you to stay in complete control of how much you are spending. There are no hidden costs or fees that crop up throughout the process as with PPC ads, you only pay for the ads when someone clicks.
Despite only paying for an ad when it’s clicked on, the price of your ads can vary, depending on the ad type, how popular and specific your chosen target keyword is, the product category, and the number of bidders.
If you are new to utilising Amazon ads to promote your books, it is best to start small and set yourself a maximum budget per week or per month to give yourself the chance to test your success. Alternatively, you can work with an Amazon marketing agency that can offer advice or manage your advertising budget on your behalf to ensure you generate a strong ROI.
If you decide to manage your own book ads, it’s good to check in on your ad account on a daily basis or at least regularly to ensure you keep an eye on your spending. Then you can pause any ads accordingly to avoid going over budget.
What can you do to make the most of your book advertising spend?
There are various ways that you can make sure the money you put into your book advertising generates increased sales and revenue:
- Identify the goal(s) of your advertising campaigns before you start planning and creating them. Do you plan to increase sales or generally build awareness of your store or products over time?
- Choose the right books to advertise. It’s best to start with running ads for your most popular and successful Amazon products and ensure they fit well into their product category when it comes to aspects like price to ensure you can compete.
- Don’t neglect keyword research and targeting. Use exact-match and negative match keyword targeting to find those later on in their buying journey.
- Make sure your product listings are set up correctly, optimised effectively and look the part. Humans are visual creatures; if your product listing looks poor-quality, uses poor language and/or is unattractive, your ad won’t compete for clicks alongside your competitors.
- Choose the right type of ads for your products. Amazon Advertising offers various key types of ads to choose from, so make sure you do your research and find the best options for your products.
- Encourage book reviews. Amazon will always check in with buyers to ask for a review after a purchase, but you can also encourage these and welcome feedback yourself on social media.
- Keep your brand and author profiles up to date. If your author profiles aren’t updated for long periods of time or don’t appear active, your ads won’t be as successful.
- Use a mix of advertising and marketing channels. Amazon Advertising can be a fruitful means of generating sales, but you shouldn’t have it as your only marketing channel. Make sure to stay active on your social channels and prioritise other mediums like email and organic search too.
- Keep testing your ads. Don’t sit back and relax once your book adverts are running; make sure to keep tweaking them where needed and analyse their success long term.
Setting up an Amazon advertising campaign
The most popular and suitable Amazon advert type for booksellers and authors is their Sponsored Product ads. Here we’ll go through how to set one of these up for your book products.
What do you need to prepare for a typical Sponsored Product ad?
- 'Ad format’. You can select a 'standard ad’ to set up an Amazon ad more quickly as these ads don’t contain any customised copy, however, setting up 'custom text ads’ can be useful for book vendors and authors to provide buyers with some intriguing information on the book. Keep in mind that when creating custom ads, you will need to do your own keyword research and write optimised copy.
- Run dates. You choose the set time period and dates you want your ads to run.
- Budget. Set a realistic weekly or monthly budget for how much you can afford to invest in Amazon ads.
- Bidding. You can choose from three options for how you bid on ads including dynamic bids (down only, bids lowered by Amazon based on sales opportunity), dynamic bids (up and down, bids increased or decreased by Amazon based on sales opportunity) and fixed bids (set amount to spend).
Who can help me set up my Amazon Ads?
For those with smaller budgets who feel confident in creating, setting up and monitoring PPC ads, you can successfully manage your own Amazon advertising campaigns due to the quality of the platform and the user-friendly features available.
However, if you are looking to use Amazon ads to elevate your personal brand and see growth in revenue for your book sales long term, there are Amazon marketing agencies out there that can offer support and generate you an ROI consistently.
The SEO Works is one of the UK’s leading digital marketing agencies offering professional PPC services to businesses in a wide range of industries and niches. You can get in touch with the team for a free quote for consultancy or Amazon ad management services.
Useful advertising resources for booksellers and authors
Advertising Books on Amazon: a Guide for Authors
Advertising Books on Amazon: a Guide for Book Vendors
A Keyword Strategy Guide for Book Sales
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