Once you set up your ad account, you’ll see that there are two options to choose from: Sponsored products and Lockscreen Ads. In this post, we’ll discuss sponsored products campaigns.
Select the corresponding ad type. You’ll be taken to a page to enter the details. Create a campaign name to help you keep track of different ads. It’s not information that is visible in the ad. It is for your organizational use only.
Then choose a start and end date for the ad campaign. If you don’t designate an end day, it will continue indefinitely. If you want to extend the ad campaign past the end date, you can change the end date anytime before the date you had originally chosen.
Decide on a daily budget. This is the amount you are willing to spend on ads during a 24-hour period.
Next, you’ll need to determine whether you want to go with automatic or manual keyword marketing. If you have no experience at this, you’d do best to let Amazon choose the keywords for your book. Once you have done a few ad campaigns, you can refine the keyword targeting to best reach your potential readers.
Campaign Bidding Strategy
Now you’ll need to decide how to create a range of bid prices. Remember, Amazon will always choose the highest bid within the category to display since it will make them the most money, so this step is important.
Dynamic bids change depending on the likelihood of a sale. So if someone has searched for books about holidays in Mexico and your book is about traveling in Mexico, it’s not a perfect keyword match. Amazon will determine how likely the person searching is to be interested in your book based on complicated algorithms.
If you choose Dynamic bids–down only and Amazon determines that the searcher isn’t likely to be interested in your book about traveling in Mexico, then they will charge you less if the person does click on the ad.
If you go with Dynamic bids–up and down, then Amazon will charge you more when it’s a perfect keyword match than if it’s only a partial match. Therefore, if the person is searching for books about traveling in Mexico, then Amazon will charge you the full price. If the person is looking for a book about holidays in Mexico, then they won’t, since it’s not a sure thing.
Fixed bids take the fluctuation out of the equation. You’ll be charged the same price no matter the likelihood of purchase according to the algorithms.
Adjust bid by placement will give you more opportunities to have your book prominently displayed either at the top of the page or on product pages. Remember, it’s a bidding process, so the higher your bid, the more likely Amazon will choose your ad to display over someone else’s ad. Of course, that means you’ll pay more for that privilege.
Ad Format
You can either use a standard ad format or a customized one. Custom text is only available on Amazon.com right now. However, if you are using that marketplace to run your ad campaign, you should use the opportunity to hook readers with creative commentary.
If you select the standard ad format you can create an ad group. This allows you to advertise similar books under the same bid parameters and keywords you’ve already chosen.
Products
If you have reached the ad campaign setup page by choosing Promote and Advertise from your KDP If you have reached the ad campaign setup page by choosing the Promote and Advertise option from your KDP bookshelf, then your product is already selected. If not, choose one from your product list.
Automatic Targeting
You can choose the default bid or set the bids by targeting groups. Amazon helpfully supplies a suggested bid for your book as well.
When you set bids by targeting groups, you can change your bid amount depending on if the keyword search is a close or loose match, a word substitute or a complimentary term.
So if your keyword is “holiday celebrations in Mexico” a close match would be “holidays” or “Mexico” whereas a loose match might be “Latin America” or “customs.” A word substitute would be “customs in Mexico” where the word “holiday” is used instead of the term “customs.” “Customs in Latin American” might be a complement keyword phrase. It isn’t exactly what the person was looking for, but your book falls into the general category.
Negative Keyword Targeting
Negative keywords allow you to define who sees your ad based on their search parameters. You can use it to make sure your ad isn’t shown for a particular term because it is irrelevant.
For example, if your book is about Mexico, a negative keyword you could set up is “New Mexico” because people looking for New Mexico are not your target readers, typically. Doing this saves you money since your ad won’t be displayed for New Mexico searches.
If this is your first ad, you might not know what terms to include as negative keywords. You can get a general idea from negative keyword generators online like WordStream. It isn’t absolutely required that you list negative keywords, so don’t sweat it too much.
Creative
Under Creative you’ll see a preview of your ad. You can insert custom text to hook the potential reader if you like.
Submit for Review
If you have already entered your credit card information for billing, you can submit your ad campaign for review. Amazon will then determine if your book meets the requirements and standards set out in the policy guide. If it is, you’ll be billed monthly for the total number of showings during that time period.
Assignment: Create an Amazon ad campaign.
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