No More Goodreads Ads
So you guys know most of the goodreads ads details if you’ve read my blog at all. Basically I put in $50, used $0.30 a click, and didn’t end up selling a lot. 524093 people saw one of my ads, and 125 of those people clicked on them. I’m fairly certain I sold 5-7 copies because of the ads, which means I made less than $50 for $50 of ads. I still have a few dollars in the account, so I’ll let it run until those run out, but I’m not going to be putting any more money into it.
I decided a few months ago to give amazon ads a shot, and here’s what happened there:
Amazon Ad Campaign
I decided to do sponsored ads first, because the system is similar to the goodreads one and you don’t have to pay anything up front: sponsored ads bill you by the click, up to a daily cap. One cool thing about sponsored ads is you can specify how much you want to spend per click based on which search keyword you’re using: you can choose to pay $0.30 for ‘fantasy’, let’s say, but only $0.10 for ‘urban fantasy’.
You have two options with sponsored ads: you can come up with your own keywords to use or let amazon generate the keywords for you.
I did a little research before, and people were saying that coming up with your own keywords works better than having amazon generate them. So I created two ads, one with over 200 (200!) of my own keywords, which is what was recommended, and one using keywords generated by Amazon.
The ad using keywords I came up with got: 44,049 impressions, 40 clicks, 2 books sold
The ad using automatically-generated keywords got: 3,362 impressions, 10 clicks, 1 book sold
Option 1 was barely cost-effective. Option 2 seemed to work better than the goodreads ads, but still.
I’m going to tweak my keywords a little bit and see if that helps.
I think I’m going to dish out $100 and give the other campaign type (product display ads) a try. I’ll let you guys know how it goes.
Nicole M Davis' Blog 