0:00 Now, Amazon ads are actually a really important part of Amazon KDP these days, but the big problem is so many people just don't know how to run them. So in this video, I'm gonna take you through everything you need to get started as a complete beginner. So here's what we're gonna cover in this video. Firstly, I'm gonna cover why you need to use Amazon ads. Secondly, we're gonna go through the different types of Amazon ads. And then finally, I'm actually gonna show you how to create and monitor your Amazon KDP ads. And all of these three provide the why, the what, and the how, which is really important when learning anything. So we're gonna start with the why and why should you use Amazon ads? Well, there's a couple of reasons. Firstly, they allow your books to be seen by more customers. And ultimately, more IEs means more sales. They also allow you to place your book crucially in
0:46 front of the right customers. You're not just showing it to more customers, you're able to choose and show it in front of exactly the customer that you want to see your book. And finally, and probably most importantly, they also allow you to increase your organic sales too. So a lot of people just think, Amazon ads are their own separate thing from the rest of KDP. It's all completely intertwined and it's really important to understand this idea of increasing organic sales too. So this graph explains it really well. So the more sales that you get on your Amazon KDP books, the more keywords you're gonna rank for, the more products you're gonna rank against, and crucially, the higher in the Amazon search results you're going to rank. Because ultimately, as you sell more of your units through your ads, Amazon will start to recognize that this is a good product and it's gonna push it itself organically. So at the start,
1:35 you might just be relying on ads for your sales, but as this book gains momentum, it gets familiar with the algorithm, Amazon start pushing it because they know people are enjoying it. you're gradually going to increase the number of organic sales you get as well as your ad sales. So here's a really good visualization of what this kind of looks like. So let's just say hypothetically in month one to three, a lot of your sales are probably going to be from your ads because your book hasn't been up there for long. Amazon doesn't really recognize it as a good product. So you're relatively dependent on your ads to start with. That's going to remain pretty consistent throughout the year because you're just going to keep these ads on and your ad sales are going to stay fairly flat. However, Your organic sales over time are only going to increase because the more sales you get through ads, the more Amazon
2:21 recognizes it's a good book, it starts pushing it more and more and more until the point where you're getting loads of organic sales because Amazon knows that this is a product that people want. And like I say, it's going to start pushing it to a lot more customers. At this point, when you're increasing a lot of your organic sales, it's entirely up to you. You can decide to cut off your ads and just go purely organic with your book. But I generally recommend always keeping ads on there because it's just going to keep up that momentum and allow you to sell even more books and just create this positive feedback look of more sales, more ranking, which means more sales, more ranking, so on and so forth. You can kind of see the impact that ads actually have on organic sales too. A lot of people think they're completely different. They are extremely linked and related to each other. And
3:07 here's another reason why Amazon ads are so important. The more people that sell on Amazon, the harder it is to rank. This shouldn't be rocket science. The more products you're competing against, the harder it is to rank against those products. And that is why Amazon ads are so important because as I've said, they A, allow you to get more sales. and B, allow you to improve your ranking. And ultimately, these two things are involved in a positive feedback loop. Because if you think the more sales you get, the more you improve your ranking, but then the more you improve your ranking, the more sales you get, which means you improve your ranking even further. So once you start getting into this positive feedback loop, that's when you really start making a lot of money on Amazon KDP. And this is why ads are just so important to a good Amazon KDP strategy. So now we know why ads are so
3:53 important. Here are the different types of Amazon ads. Now this is a video for beginners. So there are lots of different types of ads, but I'm gonna just show you the main two that you're probably gonna use as a beginner. And the first one is having your ads shown up against certain search results. So as you can see here, I've typed in dinosaur coloring book for kids. This first one here is an ad. You can see because it has the sponsored sign here. So you can basically have your book shown at the top of the search results for whatever keyword you want. through your ads. And you can also have your book showing up against loads of other books if you want to as well. So here is that exact book that we just showed here. I've just clicked into it and you can also have your book advertised against other relevant books. So as this is a dinosaur colouring book, it's no surprise that you've also got loads of other dinosaur related books advertised
4:42 against this one. And again, you can spot it using the sponsored. So as a beginner, the two main places where you're going to advertise your book are in the search results, and also against other products. And for those of you that are completely new to Amazon ads, Amazon ads are what we call PPC or pay per click, which basically means you only pay once someone actually clicks on your ad. You're not paying for someone to just to see it in the search results like this. You would only actually pay once someone clicks into the ad itself. Now it's worth mentioning here I'm referencing Amazon ads in this video. It's exactly the same thing as Amazon KDP ads. They both run off the same platform but I'm just referring to them as Amazon ads in this video. And there are lots of videos about how to run Amazon ads on YouTube. The difference is the Amazon KDP generally has much smaller
5:30 margins. You're selling books, your royalties are maybe something like two pounds to five pounds. Whereas if you're selling really high value products, you have a lot higher margin to operate with. So the strategies you would use for kind of like Amazon FBA are going to be very different to Amazon KDP which is why I wanted to specifically make this video because this is just talking about Amazon KDP ads and the strategies that you can use for that. So now we know where your ad can potentially appear through Amazon KDP ads, what are the two main types of ads that you can use? Now the first one is auto ads and these are ads that you set up once and will automatically advertise your book against search terms or products based off your book's metadata. And like I say, because it's an auto ad, Amazon will do all of the targeting for you. So all you do, I'll show you later
6:18 on in this video in just a sec, how to actually create an auto ad. But all you do is set that auto ad up, put in how much you want to bid for this book. And what Amazon's basically gonna do, it's gonna read all of the metadata. So it will read your title, your description, the categories, and figure out where to place this book in its ads. So this one here is an example. It's a dinosaur character coloring book. Amazon will be able to see it's a dinosaur coloring book. So it will advertise it against loads of other dinosaur books. It says bold and easy design. So maybe when someone types in bold and easy coloring book for kids, Amazon might show it up for there. So it just uses the book's data to advertise everything for you. Now on the flip side, you also have manual ads and these are much more granular. So these are ads where you actually choose yourself. what search terms and products you want to have your book shown
7:06 against and for how much you want to spend. And with this, you are doing all of the targeting itself. So these are a lot more granular and really good when you're trying to really scale your KDP ads. But because this video is just for beginners, we're only going to be focusing on auto ads because I don't want to confuse you with loads of different information about manual ads. I do cover everything you need to know about auto ads, manual ads, optimization in my KDP ads mastery course, which I will leave linked down below. in the description for when you're ready to take your KDP ads to the next level. But like I say, for this video, we are just going to be focusing on auto ads because they're the most straightforward and they're the easiest to start as a beginner. So moving on now to how to create your ad, I'm going to jump over to the Amazon ads console and show you exactly how to create your first auto ad. So once you're in
7:54 your Amazon ads console, you want to press the create campaign button, which will be very, very easy to see. then you have the option of sponsored products or sponsored brands you will have some more options if you're advertising in the us i'm currently logged on to my uk console and it's just worth mentioning here as well you can launch uk us german whatever territory ads you want to you have access to all of those but you do have to create a separate campaign for one in the uk and if i wanted to do exactly the same campaign in the us I'd have to go onto my Amazon US ads and create exactly the same campaign there. So one campaign doesn't translate across all marketplaces. You have to do it per marketplace. So this one is just in the UK, but we're focusing here on sponsored products. So go ahead and then just press continue. And then because this is a
8:41 relatively simple auto ad, we're not gonna worry about the ad group name, we're just gonna leave that exactly as it is. And then you have to actually pick what book you're going to be advertising. So as you can see, I've blurred out my books, because for obvious reasons, I don't want people copying my books. But I'm just gonna go ahead and add this one here, which is just a pretty straightforward, kids activity book. Then once you scroll down you then start having some more of the details. So you then have your targeting option and this is what I mentioned not too long ago in this video, the difference between automatic targeting and manual targeting. Manual targeting as I said is a lot more granular and a lot more detail you can go into so we're not worried about that in this video as this is just for beginners. So we're just going to focus on automatic targeting and that basically says Amazon will target keywords and products that are similar to the product in your
9:29 ad. So the book you've just selected above, it's going to automatically target against products that are similar to that because ultimately they're going to have the same audience. Now, the next thing here is a default bid. Now, for those of you that don't understand why there is a bidding system here, basically what Amazon KDP ads work off is this bidding system. So as you can imagine, there are so many people who are trying to advertise their products on Amazon. not everyone can all advertise at the same time which is why they have this bidding system so you can basically bid how much you're prepared to spend for your book to be shown at a certain point so that's where your default bid is let's just say you wanted to bid i don't know 50 pence for your advertising space let's say i made two pound 50 royalties every single time i sold a book If I have a default bid
10:15 of 50p, this basically means I'm going to spend 50p for my book to be shown somewhere on Amazon because this is an automatic targeting. I'm not specifically choosing where. I'm just basically saying to Amazon, I'm happy to pay 50p every single time someone clicks on my book against a relevant keyword or a relevant keyword. product. So although it's a bidding system, it sounds quite complicated. It is actually very straightforward. But if you do have any questions about this bidding system, then please just let me know down in the comment section below of this video. And same with anything else I'm covering here. Because if you do have any questions, I understand it can be a little bit confusing for some people. So please just let me know down in the comments. What Amazon will do with their default bid is they will suggest you a default bid. Now the reason why this is quite high is actually because this book
11:00 is in a very competitive niche. And as you can imagine, the more people who are trying to bid for the advertising space, the higher the bid is going to be. So for niches where there's a little bit less competition, you can get away with a lower bid. So let's just say for the example of this, we're gonna select a default bid of 50p. So this basically means we're happy to pay 50p for our book to be shown to potential customers against certain phrases or certain products. That's the price we're happy to have it shown at. Remember, we only actually pay that 50p if the person clicks on our ad, not just if they see it. You then have negative keyword targeting, and this basically means you can add in any keywords that you don't want your product to be shown against. So let's just say you had a dinosaur word search for kids. Amazon might see that and show it
11:48 against loads of other activity books, things like coloring books as well, because it's kind of within that same niche, but because yours is a word search book and not necessarily a coloring book, you might wanna put in here dinosaur coloring, book and this basically means you're telling amazon you don't want your book to be paid to show up when someone types in this phrase because your book isn't a coloring book anyone who's looking for a dinosaur coloring book is not going to be interested generally in your dinosaur word search book so that's what these negative keyword targets basically mean any specific words you don't want your book to be shown up against you can include here but generally speaking when you're first launching an auto ad just leave this blank and then when you go to optimize it, that's when you start adding in the
12:33 negative keyword targets. So just as a bit of advice, I would generally leave this blank unless there are some really obvious ones you don't want your product to be shown against. And then it's exactly the same with the product targeting any specific products you don't want your book to be shown against. You can add them there as negative products. But again, I would generally leave both of these blank when you're first launching your ad campaign. then move on to the campaign bidding strategy and this is actually a really important part because this basically dictates how this default bid here behaves so at the moment we bid 50p for our book to be shown and potentially clicked on by someone on amazon you then have something called dynamic bids up and down so this basically says we will raise your bids by a maximum of
13:20 100 in real time when your ad may be more likely to convert to a sale and lower your bids when it's less likely to convert to a sale. So what this basically means is we have our default bid of 50p. If we select dynamic bids up and down, this basically means Amazon are prepared to increase this by 100%, i.e. up to one pound, when it thinks it's going to convert into a sale based off that customer's behavior. or it's gonna make it a little bit lower if it's less likely to convert into a sale. You then have dynamic bids down only and this says Amazon will lower your bids in real time when your ad may be less likely to convert into a sale. So just the second half of this one. And this basically means if we set our default bid of 50p, we will never ever spend more than 50p per click because we're only saying take this
14:09 default bid and then bid down only so the max we're going to pay is 50p so this is a good one i recommend for beginners who don't want to spend too much money and they just want to figure out how amazon ads work set your default bid or the max you're prepared to spend and then go for the down only option up and down it can definitely be a little bit more efficient because you're basically saying here's my default bid if you think it's going to convert better i'll allow you a little bit more freedom to increase that bid but then you can also end up spending a little bit of more money when you do that. So as a beginner, I would generally recommend down only, or you can just use fixed bids, which I personally never actually use. And this would just basically mean you'll bid 50p every single time, regardless of who it is. If there are
14:55 really high potential converting customers, because you're only bidding 50p, you're not going to have your book shown to them. So the more you potentially bid, the more chance you have of your ad converting. But then of course, you've spent more money, so you have less room for profitability. So it's all about finding this balance. But generally speaking, as a beginner, I would stick to the dynamic bids down only strategy. And again, if any of this is a little bit confusing, then do just let me know any questions that you have down in the comments section below. And then finally, have your campaign name. So I would generally try and keep this as organized as possible because when you have loads of different campaigns, it can get very confusing. Trust me, you think it's not gonna make a huge difference, but it will make a massive
15:40 difference when you start having all of these campaigns. So how I kind of structure my campaigns is I go for the type of ad. So this is an auto ad. I then have the names, let's just say this is a dinosaur word search. So every time I go into the ads console, I know what the ad is, what the book is, then I also go for the bidding strategy. So I go for 50p down only, DO stands for down only. So I know straight away when I land on my ads console, this is my auto ad for my dinosaur word search and I'm bidding 50p with the down only bidding strategy. It sounds like overkill, trust me, but it's so, so important. You then have your portfolio, so you can add specific portfolios for your books depending on how you want to organize them.
16:25 But again, this is a little bit more important once you start creating a lot more of those campaigns. You then have your start and end date. I always just leave these as they are because ideally, you want to start your campaign as soon as you possibly can. If you want to start it at a certain date, then you can go ahead and choose that. And then you have to set your daily budget. Now, again, this completely depends on the person how much budget are you prepared to spend per day on your ad i say as beginners it's a general idea to go for 10 pounds this really doesn't mean you're going to spend 10 pounds or 10 dollars every single day because how much you spend is entirely dictated by this default bid your bidding strategy and also how many people are potentially searching for search terms that your ad is going to be showing up for with a bid
17:12 of something like 50p you're very unlikely to spend 10 pound a day but i would just make sure you have that budget and just choose something that fits the amount that you're prepared to spend every day on your ad campaign and then simply just go ahead and press launch campaign and a really big benefit of amazon ads is that you don't need to do any kind of creative you haven't got to shoot any videos for your ads because they just get displayed within amazon itself amazon do everything for you you don't have to worry about that which is why Anybody can start advertising on Amazon as long as you know about all this kind of stuff, which hopefully, having watched this video, you now do. Go ahead, press launch campaign. Amazon will take maybe 24, 48 hours to review it, moderate it, and then that ad will be live. So now you've set up and created your first Amazon KDP
17:59 ad. The next question you probably got is what do you do once you've launched it? And the answer to that is you have to monitor your ad and see how it's performing. And this is exactly how you do it. So within your Amazon Ads Console, what you're gonna have basically, ignore this for just a second, and we're gonna be looking at these columns. So all of these different metrics basically show you how your ad is performing and you can have complete control of everything that's happened. So the metrics that I recommend you select, if you just go to this columns bit here, click into this and then customize columns, and then just make sure these metrics are selected. So I'll run through each of these now and what they mean. So as you can see, I've actually blanked out this campaign because it gives away the name of my book. But you can see here the first metric that we have is impressions. Impressions are basically how many times your ad was seen by somebody.
18:49 Not clicked, not purchased, just seen or appeared on the Amazon search results. So you can see for this campaign here, my ad was seen 25,846 times. And then you have clicks. So of these 25,000 people that saw my ad, 375 people clicked my ad. So you can start to see here of all these people, how many of them ignored it and how many of them actually clicked it from here. You can then see how much you spent on the ad. So from these 375 clicks, it cost me just over 140 pounds with a CPC or a cost per click of 37 pence. So if you've got 375 clicks and I spent 140 pounds, the average amount I paid per click
19:35 was 37 pence. So if we go back to that example of me showing you how to set up that auto ad, this could potentially be what that ad looks like because my default bid was 50p. I said down only, which basically means only bid 50p or less for my ad to be shown. And this has clearly come out under that 50p at 37p and that's my cost per click. So this is where you can start to see where your default bid lies. Just going into a little bit more detail now, If your CPC was right towards the top of that default bid, let's just say that CPC was 50 pence and I've actually selected 50 pence down only as my bidding strategy. This basically tells me that I'm only winning bids when I absolutely max out my bidding strategy which tells me that i should probably increase that to start winning more bids and having my book shown to more
20:23 customers but if the cost per click is quite a bit lower than your default bid so in this example here my default bid being 50p and cost per click being 37p these are actually quite cheap clicks i'm happy with how that is going now the next metric is orders so pretty straightforward how many orders came off the back of this ad so 114 orders came from this ad campaign alone which generated 817 pounds worth of sales. Now it's worth remembering this is your sales number, this is not the royalties number that you actually make. So if your book is listed for say £6.99 and you get a certain number of orders, that's that sales number that you're going to see here. This is not the amount that you physically take home as a royalty so it's worth remembering that. And you might think that's
21:09 a little bit annoying because it's great having the sales number, but it doesn't actually tell you how much you've made because you spent 140 pounds, how much have you actually made back? Because you don't keep all of this 817 pounds because this is your sales number. And that is where ACOS comes in and why ACOS is so, so important. And this basically says what percentage of your sales number was spent on that ad. So as you can see here, 17.12% of 817 pounds is my 140 pound spend. So this basically tells me of the 817 pounds worth of sales that I got, 17.12% of that, was spent on the ad itself. Now this is where ACOS becomes really important because it's a great way of seeing just how profitable your actual ad is because as we've just mentioned, it's very
21:57 difficult to see how much money you're physically taking home because this is just a sales number and not a royalties number. So you therefore need to calculate your break even ACOS. So this break even ACOS will basically just tell me if the ACOS is above or below that will indicate if the ad is profitable. So that might be a bit confusing so I'm going to break it down here. To calculate your break-even ACOS you just need to divide the royalties you would get from a single unit sold, divide that by the sale price. So let's just say I sold a book here for £6.99, only £2 of that is what I take back. So therefore £2 divided by £6.99 gives me a break-even ACOS of 28.6% and this basically means that If this number here is 28.6% or less, this means
22:45 that this ad is profitable. Anytime this ACOS is higher than 28.6%, it is therefore unprofitable. So calculating your breakeven ACOS gives you an idea of how profitable your ad is. All you need to do is not even worry about the sales and the spend number, just quickly glance at this ACOS number, and if it's lower than your breakeven ACOS, then you know straight away that this ad is profitable, If it's higher than your breakeven ACOS, then you know it's unprofitable. So that is a really important tip that I wanna get across to you as beginners using KDP ads. It all depends on where your breakeven ACOS is compared to your actual ad ACOS. And then ultimately, if your ACOS is really high above your breakeven ACOS, that's when you need to go in and start optimizing your ads, which as I mentioned, is an
23:32 extremely detailed process, but I cover all of exactly how to do that in my KDP ads mastery course, which as I've said, I will leave linked at the top of the description. So that is essentially a step-by-step guide to KDP ads for beginners. As I've mentioned, you can go into a lot more detail and really start scaling your ads when you go into a bit more depth about how to monitor, how to optimize and really start scaling your ads. But for now, as beginners, these are the key things that you need to remember. Firstly, Amazon KDP ads allow your books to be seen by more customers. Not only do they increase sales, but they also improve your book's organic ranking and leads to more organic sales and just more sales overall. Amazon ads are also PPC or pay per click. So you only actually pay
24:18 once someone clicks on your ad. You choose how much they pay with your bid and your bidding strategy. And you can either use manual ads or auto ads auto ads as you've mentioned are much better for beginners as amazon will do most of the work for you as you've seen in this video and then finally understanding the amazon ad metrics will allow you to optimize your ad so as you can see these metrics here that we've just discussed that is ultimately how you gain full control of your ad then you can start optimizing it based on your acos and if it's actually above or below your breakeven acos
