The 14-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge

Day #2: How to Set Up Your Dashboard and Keep Your Advertising Costs Down

Brought to you by Bryan Cohen’s Author Ad School

Here’s What You’ll Learn on Day #2

• What steps you can take to keep your costs down with Amazon Advertising
• A general overview of where to look to find your ad stats, your sales, and more

Setting Up Your Stats for Success

There are many stats you can view in connection with your ad campaigns, but most of them are not relevant for author advertisers.

In your Ad Dashboard, click on “Columns” and then “Customize Columns,” and only put a check mark next to the most important stats. We suggest putting a check mark next to Impressions, Clicks, Ad Spend, KENP Reads, and Sales while leaving the rest unchecked before clicking “Apply.”

As we’ll go into later in the Challenge, you may even want to leave the Sales column unchecked as this column is notoriously unreliable.

If you ever notice that your columns do not display Impressions and Clicks (your most important stats), then you’ll want to refer back to the steps in this section to fix them.

A Budget-Friendly Step

With your columns campaign-ready, there’s another small step to take, and that’s to set up a portfolio.

A portfolio works like a folder for your ad campaigns and can help you to stay organized in the future when you create ads for multiple books.

First, you’ll want to click on “Portfolios” and then “Create Portfolio.” Name it for the one book you plan to advertise this Challenge, and then click “Create.”

Next, you’ll want to click on “Modify Portfolio” and set a Budget Cap for the month (i.e. $30 or whatever number you feel comfortable with) and set this as a recurring monthly budget.

When this is set up, you can add all existing campaigns for this book as well as all new campaigns (like Auto and Category Ads) to this portfolio to keep your dashboard feeling nice and tidy.

Where Do I Look for the Stats?

With your ad campaign set up, you’ll need to know how to check your stats when they begin to roll in (which may take 1-3 weeks).

First, you’ll want to click “Campaigns” and then the name of the campaign from your spreadsheet of ad campaigns.

Next, you’ll click on the Ad Group name to see your stats for that particular Auto, Category, or Keyword Ad. At the top of your screen, you’ll be able to see up to four different stats in graph form, with the ability to change those stats by clicking the little carat beside each of the four listed stats.

At the bottom of your screen, you can see your stats in spreadsheet form. You may need to scroll from left to right to see all of your stats (though nothing will show here on the first day of your ad because it hasn’t been seen yet).

Where Do I Look for the Sales?

To see how much our ads and other promotions are resulting in sales, we need to check our overall and individual book royalties.

Go to your KDP account (at kdp.amazon.com), and once you sign in, click on the “Reports” button. When you click on “View Royalties Estimator,” you can see your royalties for the month, and when you click on “Orders,” you can see how many unit sales you’ve had for the month.

These numbers (plus your Kindle Edition Normalized Pages if you’re in KDP Select) can help you to determine both Profit and Conversion Rate.

If you have books that aren’t published through KDP, you can’t get your royalties information at a glance, but you can use Author Central to determine your Sales Rank over time.

Keeping Your Ad Costs Reasonable

Many Amazon Ad Accounts are set to spend up to 100% of your unspent budget by the end of each month, but fortunately, this is a setting that can be changed.

Once you’ve created your first Auto Ad, you can click “Campaigns” and then “Settings” to get to a screen with two choices of spending 100% over your budget or just 25% over your budget. In most cases, when you’re just starting out, it makes more sense to select the 25% setting to avoid spending more than you expect right at the end of a month. Even if you’ve been running ads for a while, there may be some benefit to reducing this setting from 100% to 25%.

Once you’ve saved this setting, your ads are prepared to start spending (while still keeping within a reasonable budget).

How to Navigate KDP Reports

One of the most important pages on KDP Reports is your “Royalties Estimator,” which can show you all of your royalties from paperbacks, hardcovers, ebooks, and KU pages read in a single page.

The first time you go to this page, you’ll need to put in an estimate for how pages read should be calculated, and you can simply select “Last Month’s Rate.” You can also look at your total orders for a given time period by clicking on “Orders.” This will only show sales and free downloads, but it will not show KU borrows.

To find out more info about your KU pages read, you can click the “KENP” tab to see how many pages were read during a certain time period. The royalty amount you see on the “Royalties Estimator” on KDP Reports is the best comparison point for the Ad Spend you have over on your Ad Dashboard (as long as you compare apples to apples).

Royalties Vs. Ad Spend

One of the ways I’ve helped so many authors hit $1,000 a month in royalties is by teaching them to ignore most Ad Dashboard stats and focus entirely on Royalties compared to Ad Spend.

We do this by “splitting our screen” (or just checking one and then the other) to see our Ad Spend on the Ad Dashboard vs. our Royalties on the KDP Dashboard.

My team and I developed this method after dozens of authors came to us saying that “my ad said $0 in sales, but when I turned it off, my royalties dropped.”

When we taught authors to start ignoring these Ad Dashboard sales (we call them “tracked sales”) and to just see if they earned more than they spent, their royalties shot up.

If you’re earning $10 and you’ve only spent $5 on your ads, then perhaps that can become $100 in royalties and $50 in ad spend (or $1,000 in royalties and $500 in ad spend) and we love it when that profit number goes up.

How About a Tour of the Ad Dashboard?

Be sure to watch the screen share at MM:SS to follow along with the visual portion of this lesson!

Day #2 Homework

• Use the info in today’s video to set up a new Portfolio for the ads you’ll create during this Challenge
• After visiting the Portfolios tab, create a new Portfolio with the title of the book you’re running ads for
• Next, modify the Portfolio with a monthly recurring budget that you’re comfortable with
• Take a screenshot of your Portfolio and share it in the Facebook or Slack group with the hashtag #AdDay2 (and your own hashtag)
• Spread some happiness to 3 or more authors in the group by commenting on their posts

On the Next Day of the Challenge

We’ll discuss how to read the most important info on your ad dashboard.

We’ll also talk about how to adjust your book’s categories to improve ad performance.

Thank you for being a part of the Challenge, and we look forward to seeing you in the next video!

Sincerely,
Bryan & the Team