How's My Amazon Ad Doing, You Ask?

I know I use this meme a lot, but it works in so many situations! Plus, I love Mad Men, so there's that.

My Amazon ad has gotten 54,278 impressions to date, which resulted in 27 clicks, and I've made exactly one sale. Does that even register as a percentage? If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that Amazon ads were my last untried promotion scheme. So, this about wraps things up.

I refuse to take any blame for its failure. I have a great, eye-catching book cover and the blurb (if anyone got that far) is fine. I didn't do my own creative because Amazon doesn't even offer that option, unlike Facebook ads. So, the ad consisted of my book cover; that's it. No ad copy. Bottom line, Amazon ads for books don't work. That could be due to over-saturation; it could be that people ignore ads. I know I do. It's possible that Amazon does no audience targeting. When I set up my ad, it did allow me to add negative keywords, but not positive ones, so who knows who my ad was presented to? Blind advertising is not something I would recommend. (A "sponsored ad", which everyone recommends for books, doesn't allow keyword targeting--great job!)

On the plus side, I have gotten 2,970 Kindle Unlimited page reads, but I don't credit Amazon with that. I wasn't advertising "free reads"; I was advertising a $4.99 ebook. Also, one of my negative keywords was "free".

Fortunately, my ad has cost me only $12.09 to date, and based on my stats, I'm not expecting any additional charges. At least Amazon tacitly acknowledges that their ads don't work, so they only charge per click. Otherwise, they'd have a mutiny on their hands. I set my campaign expenditure at $20.00 per day, and I'd be pretty pissed if they actually billed me twenty dollars for each day, in light of my stats.

It's tough embarking on an ad strategy when one doesn't understand the process. I'm no fan of Facebook, but its ad creation is much more intuitive than Amazon's. It's possible that I may have missed something in setup, although I doubt it. Obviously, I'll never know for sure, because I won't be doing another. 

Since Running From Herself was published on March 1, it's been one disappointment after another. But at this moment I'm feeling nothing. I've finally reached the acceptance stage! Yay for me!

Of course, that means that I'm going to need to come up with topics to blog about, but I have plenty of reading material I haven't gotten to yet, so something is bound to pop up.

Stay tuned.