The Best Amazon Kindle Advertising Strategy For Beginners!

If you are a beginner and want to know the best advertising strategy for amazon kdp books then keep reading…

Today I will share one of the most effective amazon kindle advertising strategies for beginners.

Before moving further, let’s talk a little about amazon ads for books. 

Amazon ads also known as kdp ads can be a game changer, however, you need to be very strategic about them.

Here are some key things you need to consider while running ads in your kindle books;

• You need to have additional money to spend on ads
• Not every ad you create will be profitable
• Amazon charges you every single month for ads
• However, amazon kdp pays you royalties after 60 days
• You will need to monitor ads regularly
• There is no perfect ad strategy, you need to test and tweak

With that said, let’s talk about kdp ads strategy for beginners.

Amazon Kindle Advertising Strategy For Beginners

One of my most effective KDP ad strategies is as follows;

Step # 1

• Create an auto ad for a single books
• Set a default bid a bit lower than Amazon’s suggested bid
• Set campaign bidding strategy ad “Dynamic Bids Down Only”
• Set a daily budget of $3 to $5
• Keep the ad running for a few days or weeks
• Closely monitor and keep removing keywords and products that get clicks but no sales
• If a keyword spends $1 or more with no sale add it to negative targeting
• If no sales at all after 10 or more clicks disable the ads set
• If you get sales, then keep noting keywords that bring in those sales

Step # 2:

• Create a new manual ad campaign
• Add keywords from the auto ad that generated sales
• Note down the CPC from the auto ad and use a max bid for the new campaign
• Monitor and remove keywords that don’t bring sales after $1 or $2 spend or 3 to 5 clicks
• Keep an eye on the ACOST, don’t spend more than the breakeven point.
• Run the campaign for a few weeks or months
• Lower the daily spend if the book starts to get organic sales

Step # 2:

• Monitor regularly
• Remove not working keywords
• Add winning keywords
• Repeat

Now you have an overview of my amazon kindle ads strategy for low-content and medium-content books. 

Let’s just discuss it in detail….

Step # 1 – Start with Auto Ads

Auto ads are your best friends as they give you helpful data for your future ad campaigns. You can see what keywords are bringing in sales and what not. 

I always start with auto ads and create one ad per book. I set a lower bid for a low content book and a bit higher bid for a medium content book. 

When it comes to bidding strategy, I always go with Dynamic Bids – Down Only. With this bidding strategy, Amazon lowers your bids in real-time when your ad is less likely to convert to a sale.

My daily budget is usually $3, sometimes I set $5/day as well. I let the ad run for a few days (sometimes weeks) to know what is working and what is not. 

I let each keyword or product targeting spend at least $1, sometimes I let it spend $2. If no sales I add this to the negative targeting.

Then look for keywords that brought a sale and let them run for as long as they are not spending more than your break even. 

If you don’t know you break even you can divide the royalties earned per sale by the list price of the book. 

Just use any kdp royalty calculator to see how much you are earning per copy sold. Here is one from kdp itself: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/royalty-calculator

As you can see in the screenshot above, the estimated royalty for an 8.5×11 inch book with 120 pages is $2.35

Now apply the formula for breakeven for Kindle ads;

Break Even ACost (%) = Royalty per sale / list price x 100

= 2.35 / 8.99 x 100

= 26.14%

In this example book priced at $8.99, your breakeven Advertising Cost (ACost) should be lower than 26%. Anything beyond this means you are losing money on ads.

Step # 2 – Setup Manual Targeting Ad Campaign

Once you have a handful of profitable keywords from your auto-ad campaign you can create a manual ad campaign.

First, opt for manual targeting and then select keyword targeting as shown below;

Next, select “Enter list” under the keyword targeting, set a Custom bid, set the match type to “Exact”  and paste your list of keywords in the box.

Now click on the Add keywords button.

Next set the campaign bidding strategy as Dynamic bid – down only, set a campaign name, set start and end date, and add a daily budget. 

Double check everything and click on the Launch Campaign button. That’s it, your manual ad will go through a quick review and will be up and running in the next few hours.

Step # 3 – Monitor & Tweak Regularly

Keep both ads running and monitor them on a daily basis. Remove the keywords that don’t bring in sales. Also, keep adding new winning keywords from the auto ad campaign.

Conclusion!

This is one of the best amazon kindle advertising strategies that I use for most of my newly published KDP books and it works for me.

Running auto ads to gather winning keywords is the first step. In the second step, I create manual ad campaigns using those keywords. And finally, I monitor them on a daily basis.

Let me know what you think about this kdp ads strategy!

Talk soon,

Subha