Amazon ads can be very confusing,
especially when it comes to interpreting the data.
You publish your KDP book on Amazon, you decide to run an ad campaign,
log into your dashboard and see data like this and terms like
CTR, CPC, ACOS. If you really want to go to town,
you've got other terms like DPV,
VCPM and KENP and what does it
all mean? Well,
in this video I'm going to give you a basic rundown on how to interpret
the data and give you the four main areas to look at and what action
to take upon interpreting that data. Now,
if you're not British Channel before then welcome.
My name's Paul Marles and I do videos on how to make it keep it and grow it,
and that's your money I'm talking about. If you do like videos like that,
then please do give it a thumbs up,
hit the subscribe button and smash that notification bell. Okay,
so let's go straight to our dashboard and these are the eight main columns.
You've got lots of different options if you hit the columns button,
then customize columns.
You'll see we've got all these other options for things we can look at.
So let's look at the first column, which is impressions.
This is the number of times that your ad has appeared when customers have done
their searches on Amazon. And in general, the higher the better.
It means your ad has been shown more times.
The main problem that people face is that this figure can be very low.
Now it can be basically due to the fact that you've not allowed
enough time to get enough data. So looking at this, 12 hours later,
after you've run your campaign and saying, my impressions are too low,
just means you've not really got enough data.
And I would suggest leaving it for a week or two to get a good idea. If after
that time the figure is still low,
it's usually due to one of two reasons. One,
you may be in a niche or you're bidding on keywords for which no customers are
searching, so nobody's looking for it. The ad is not being shown.
Now the second reason, and this is probably the most common reason,
is that you are not bidding enough on your ad. You see,
you are basically in competition with other advertisers and they're also
bidding certain amounts. Now, in general,
person with the highest bid gets the top spot on that page and those are the
prime spots because if your ad appears lower down on that first page or on the
second or third page,
you may not get as many impressions and also less chance of people clicking
on your ad as a result of that. So what can you do about it? Well,
I advise increasing your bid in small increments may be
sort of 5, 10 cents at a time. Now,
you may be in a niche that's very competitive,
where the high bidder may be bidding as much as $1, $1.50,
particularly if it's in a niche, like coloring books.
So you may just be in a niche where the bid amount is too high
for your book. Now the next two columns we look at are.
The clicks and the click through rate.
So your ad is being shown and then hopefully customers click on it and then this
is expressed as a percentage. In this case, it's 0.52%.
Now a click through rate of around 1% is considered good.
Most of my campaigns run at somewhere between no 0.5 to 1%.
Now the problem is, is if this is too low.
And too low means around that no 0.3,
no 0.35% mark. Now,
think about why a low clickthrough rate may be occurring.
So a customer does their search, your book appears in the ads.
Now, if no one is clicking on that book, it usually means one of two issues.
One is,
the book cover is not attractive enough to attract a customer's attention.
Or two, the price may be too high, maybe too low,
but usually it may be too high for that particular market. Now both
of those factors you can change after you've published your book.
So if you find you do have a very low click through rate,
0.3, 0.35 or less,
and start to think about experimenting with changing your book cover
or price. Okay?
The next thing that's important to look at are the orders.
And what we want to know is what percentage of our clicks are
getting orders.
So the number of orders divided by the number of clicks times a hundred will
give you your percentage, and in this case, it's around about 9%.
I normally aim to get around that 10% mark.
So for every 10 clicks I get one sale.
So the problem is, is if this is too low,
and probably if you are at around that sort of 5%
mark or lower,
you probably need to start thinking the reasons why and what to do about it.
So the way to think about the reasons why is this.
Someone's clicked on your book,
but they're not placing an order so they're not buying.
So it may be something that's putting the customer off after they've actually
clicked on your book.
So this could be because they've clicked on the look inside panel,
not liked what they've seen inside the book.
It could be something to do with the description or the title because at this
point they're going to look at the title probably a bit more closely.
So it could be things like grammatical errors, wrong capitalization,
spelling mistakes. That can often be a big killer in the description or title.
Also, the reviews.
If you've got lots of negative reviews that could put customers off buying.
So those are the factors to think about when it comes to looking at your
number of orders. And this is known as th conversion rate. So again.
Conversion rate, aim for about 10%. If it's lower than five,
start to think about doing something about it.
Now we come to the final column, which is this here, ACOS.
And this is the percentage of your sales that you spend on advertising.
So basically it's the spend divided by the sales times 100
gives you this ACOS percentage. And what does this mean? Well,
this is 54%,
which means I'm actually making a loss on this particular campaign,
but I'll come to this factor in a moment becasue it's not all that it seems.
So let's think about a book that's selling for $6.99.
You're making probably around the profit of $1.90 on each book.
So if you are spending $1.90 to get one sale and make
$1.90 in profit, it means you are breaking even.
So if we know what that percentage is,
we can determine what our break even ACOS number is. So
$1.90 divided by $6.99 times a hundred comes out
to around 27%.
So if this ACOS figure is 27%, it means our campaign is breaking even.
We're not making money and we're not losing money. If it's higher than that,
then it means we're losing money on this particular campaign.
If it's lower than that,
it means we're actually making a profit on the campaign.
Now I say it's not as straightforward as that because of this reason,
when you place an ad on a book, you hopefully get clicks,
you hopefully get sales,
and then what happens is your book will naturally start to
rank higher on the Amazon pages when a customer does a search,
and this is called the organic ranking. And as your book moves up,
the organic ranking gets onto that first page,
hopefully moves higher up on that first page. Not only will customers,
when they do their search, click on your ad,
but hopefully they'll also click on your normal listing,
your organic listing,
and you'll make sales via that process. So
although as you can see here, I'm making a loss on this campaign,
if I was to go to my KDP dashboard and look at the actual number of sales
I've also made organically,
I may find that overall I'm actually making money on this particular
campaign or I may be making a small loss. Now,
I don't mind making a loss on my campaigns because my aim
is to get my book to rank higher organically to make sales and therefore
get my book to have a sales history and also to get those all important
reviews.
All those combined means my book will naturally rank organically so that
when I come to eventually stopping my Amazon ads campaign,
my book will hopefully.
Stay in the rankings and I will start to continue to make sales
without having to run an ad campaign. Now, that doesn't always happen.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes I stop and ad campaign and the book will gradually fall in
the organic rankings and there's nothing I've found that can predict whether
this will occur.
So look at your ACOS figure that will tell you if the actual campaign is
running a to profit or a loss. So in general,
if it's higher than 27% a loss, if it's lower than that, it's a profit.
But also look at the organic sales you've made over that time period,
add it all up and see overall what's happening.
Now if you are new to Amazon ads,
then I do have this playlist here on Amazon ads.
It was done about two years ago, but most of it's still relevant.
But I am going to update that list very soon. Thank you very much for your time.
I hope you find that useful. And until next time, goodbye.