Amazon Ads for Books: The Complete Step-by-Step Guide 2024

About this video

Dale walks through setting up and managing Amazon Ads for books step by step, starting with access via the KDP dashboard’s Marketing section or, for non-KDP authors, via Author Central at author.amazon.com. After entering billing information (noting Amazon’s tiered billing that later becomes monthly), he recommends Sponsored Products with automated targeting for beginners over Sponsored Brands. He shows naming ad groups with book, ‘Auto’, date and version, separating ebook, paperback and hardcover into different ad groups, and choosing a standard ad over custom text. He explains the four automatic targeting groups — close match, loose match, substitutes and complements — starting bids around 35 to 60 cents, using negative keyword and negative product targeting (e.g. ‘free’ and his own author/book names) to avoid wasted spend, and bidding strategies, favouring dynamic bids down only or fixed bids, with a small top-of-search placement boost. He suggests about $10 per day to get meaningful data. He then covers reading the dashboard — impressions, clicks, spend, CPC, orders, sales and ACOS — using the search terms report (up to 65 days) to find converting terms, adding non-converters as negatives at campaign level, and harvesting 5 to 10 good keywords to build a manual campaign with broad, phrase and exact match. Finally he diagnoses problems: no impressions means raise bids, impressions without clicks points to the cover (sponsor MiblArt), and clicks without sales points to description and reviews.

Key takeaways

• Start with Sponsored Products automated targeting; Amazon sources data you can later harvest into manual campaigns
• Separate formats into different ad groups and name campaigns/ad groups with type, date and version for clarity
• Use negative keyword and product targeting for terms like ‘free’ and your own name/books so ads reach new buyers
• Monitor at least weekly: no impressions = raise bid, no clicks = fix cover, clicks but no sales = fix description and reviews
• Budget matters: Dale suggests about $10/day for significant results and only spend money you can afford to lose

Episode details: published October 8, 2024 · 37:38 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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