Amazonian Advertising Practices · 6:36pm Apr 13th, 2018
It's all here!
So, for the last month, I’ve been experimenting with Amazons Marketing Services. Or, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, what amounts to paying Amazon in exchange for Amazon running ads for your product based on keywords and the like. So if someone searches for, say, The Expanseon Amazon right now in the books section, Colonycomes up, because the two are similar Science-Fiction.
After a month, I’m starting to see a few of the things I’ve been told about AMS confirmed. One of the reasons I’d avoided it until now was because my research into other authors trying it out came to the conclusion that it was basically a way to get advertising for your books … but to in turn make almost no money off of them, if not none. This because of the strange way Amazon runs its ads, and the system by which they do it.
See, how it works is you set a book to be advertised, followed by a per-keyword ad cost and a daily limit to how much you want to spend. So the keyword may be “action adventure.” You set a cost of 25 cents, and then a daily limit (say, a dollar).
Now what happens is that whenever someone searches for books with the keyword “action adventure” Amazon performs a “bid” for the highest paying ads for that keyword. The ones paying the most go up, and then if the viewer clicks them, it pays one cent more than what that bid beat—so, for instance if the 25 cent bid beat out a 22 cent bid, then it would pay Amazon 23 cents—and the viewer looks at the book, and that 23 cents is counted towards the daily limit.
A little convoluted, but not bad, right? Well … there’s a catch. There’s obviouslya catch. See, as was pointed out to me long before I ever tried Amazon Ads, and one of the big criticisms leveled against them is that Amazon has more data on who buys what than the Ad service uses. It simply acts off of keywords, rather than Amazon’s own “We know you’ll like this” system. And so you may end up with clicks that lead to nothing at all quite frequently, because the person who search “Science Fiction” reads Foundation and Hyperion, not Colony.Amazon knows this, but they let the clicks go through anyway.
I don't see me as having disposable income anytime soon, so it looks like this is something I'll be avoiding in the foreseeable future.
That does sound pretty shit. You'd think Amazon could afford to not literally pinch pennies.
Huh. That is certainly wacky and counterintuitive. Here's hoping they fix that so that everyone wins, rather than it staying a zero-sum game.
...And this right here is why I think Amazon actually wants to help suppress the indy book market by pretending to be their friend and then stabbing them in the back. They could make more money by using their full advertising toolkit to drive up sales across the indy market, but instead they pull this bullshit.