I’ve been running them for a little over three months now. The one thing I can tell you is they work. More importantly, Amazon Ads work the way all book promo sites should—you pay for results.
To date, I’ve spent $394 on Amazon Ads. Amazon says those ads resulted in $1714 in sales.
Not bad!
If you figure I made a 70 percent profit on each sale. That’s a gross profit of $1200. Deduct the cost of the Amazon ads, and I made $806. Try to make that profit from a KDP free run or a Kindle Countdown Deal.
You can’t.
You can’t.
One of the terms you’re going to hear when you talk about Amazon Ads is your ACOS—short for Amazon Cost of Sales. To find the ACOS, you divide your sales ($1714) by the ad cost ($394). That number is your ACOS.
So, in this case, my Amazon Cost of Sales was 23 percent. Or, to put it in simpler terms, for every quarter I spend, I make a dollar.
It’s like playing the slots. Only you’re a guaranteed winner. I like those odds.
In theory, if I want to be a 5-figure author, I would need to run $2,500 in ads every month. That would give me $10,500 in sales with a $7,619 gross profit.
It sounds good, doesn’t it?
The thing is, it’s hard to get Amazon to spend your money. I can tell it to spend $25 a day, and it spends $1.25.
WTF!
Mark Dawson is an expert on Amazon ads, and he says the same thing. To get the spend thru he wants and needs, Mark, runs over 200 ads at a time. 200 ads are not going to happen.
I run ten ads, and to me, it’s a lot of work.
If you haven’t tried Amazon Ads yet, here’s how to get started.