During January I signed up to a free Amazon Ad School run by indie author Bryan Cohen. It was excellent. I learned so much.
For starters, I had only been running one type of ad. I was running 7 of them, but just one type. I was updating them weekly and adding new keywords, but they’d stagnated. For a while I was selling about 5 e-books a month, but that had dwindled over the past 6 months. In November I sold 1, and in Decemeber 0. Nada. Nothing. Zilch.
So, discovering this Ad school was very timely. I had nothing to lose. Unfortunately, I only joined up after it had already been running for a week, so I had a bit of catching up to do. Bryan had 5 videos of about 45mins long, taking you through how to set up various types of ads, and also how to analyse the data to see where you were making profit.
I have learned:
- about 3 other types of ads I can run
- about a Royalties Calculator part of Amazon that I hadn’t previously known existed
- about a website that you can generate keywords from for free (although it then takes a bit of mucking around in Excel to format the dataset)
- How to identify the categories that my book/s should be linked to
- a bunch of other little tips and tricks
During the ad school I created 15 new ads over 4 days. And according to my kdp sales dashboard, I’ve made 2 new sales. They haven’t shown up on my Amazon Ad dashboard yet, so I don’t know which ads generated the sales. The Ad dashboard says that all those new ads generated around 2,000 impressions, but only 1 click. Hmm.
Today I set up 12 new ads and updated 3 others. Hopefully the Ad dashboard catches up so I can figure out what’s working and what’s not. Fingers crossed!
By the way, this is a link to Bryan Cohen’s open FB group for authors. It’s not for promoting our books, it’s for learning off each other. https://www.facebook.com/groups/509197505915958/
