Amazon Ads for KDP: Step-by-Step Tutorial for Beginners

About this video

Guest expert Rick Wong of Seller Metrics walks through setting up a Sponsored Products campaign for a KDP book. He advises staying away from lock screen ads, which he says gave him over 400% ACOS in testing, reserving Sponsored Brands for authors with a solid niche catalog, and focusing beginners on Sponsored Products. He recommends advertising the paperback over the eBook where possible because its higher order value gives better ROI, and structuring one campaign per title so keywords map clearly to one product. He compares automatic targeting (Amazon finds traffic from your listing) with manual keyword and product targeting, describing auto campaigns as the ‘hunter’ for discovering keywords and manual campaigns as the ‘farmer’ for harvesting known winners, and suggests using both together. For keywords he prefers quality over quantity — around 50 per campaign, favouring long-tail terms of three words or more — sourced via Helium 10’s Cerebro reverse-ASIN tool, free alternatives like Sonar, Amazon’s suggested tab, or auto campaigns. On bids, he says KDP cost per click should be around 30 cents, at most about 40 cents, to raise bids by about 15% increments after reviewing at least 30 days of data, and to use negative keywords/products as the key weekly optimisation. He also covers custom text, bidding strategies (fixed, dynamic down-only, dynamic up-and-down), placement adjustments, and a starting budget of $10 a day, $5 minimum.

Key takeaways

• Start with Sponsored Products, one campaign per title, and advertise the higher-priced format — usually the paperback — for better ROI
• Use auto campaigns as the hunter to discover converting keywords and manual campaigns as the farmer to harvest them, running both together
• Target around 50 well-vetted, mostly long-tail keywords per campaign rather than loading the maximum targets and spreading budget too thin
• Keep bids conservative for KDP: Rick Wong says aim for about 30 cents cost per click, increase by about 15% at a time, and judge performance over 30+ days
• Add negative keywords and products regularly — Rick calls this the lowest-hanging-fruit weekly optimisation — and start with about a $10 daily budget

Episode details: published July 2, 2023 · 40:16 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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