The 14-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge

Day 5 : How to Optimize Your 7 KDP Keywords and Monitor Tracked Sales

Brought to you by Bryan Cohen’s Author Ad School

Here’s What You’ll Learn Today

• Why paying attention to Sales vs. Tracked Sales is extremely important
• What makes a strong keyword that readers may search for when looking for a book like yours

Sales Vs. Tracked Sales

One of the reasons we brought up the KDP Reports dashboard in an earlier Challenge video is because it’s the first place we look for sales that come from our ads. When you see a sale on your KDP Reports dashboard for a book that you’re advertising, you can credit that sale to the ad whether or not it shows up on the Amazon Ad dashboard.

Almost every author who we’ve seen have their first $100 royalty month from the Challenge or Author Ad School has taken this philosophy to heart and seen the results.

When a sale is tracked on the Ad Dashboard (a.k.a. a tracked sale), this is even better as it’s starting to feed your Amazon Ad account the essential data it needs to find relevant readers.

The Split Screen Method

Since tracked sales can be in short supply when you’re first running ads, how can you get an initial understanding of the health of your ads (and the health of the book that you’re advertising)?

We recommend using The Split Screen method, where you have one tab or window open with your Amazon Ad dashboard and one tab or window open with your KDP Reports dashboard.

Next, you make sure both dashboards are set to the same exact date range. From there, you can compare the ad spend for one particular book or series to the royalties for that same series. We recommend including all Book 2 and beyond royalties if you’re advertising a Book 1.

Many authors who remain stuck where they are year after year ignore this method, while many authors who reach $100+ or more per month use this method to hit those numbers and go beyond.

The Right and Relevant Words

Since we want a maximum of one Auto Ad per edition of our book and a maximum of 3-5 (relevant) Category Ads per edition of our book, our path to regularly creating more ads per month lies in seeking out the best keywords to put into our ads. A keyword (which can be a phrase, not just a word) can really be anything that a reader may search for when trying to find books like ours, such as a book title, an author name, or a genre-related search term (i.e. paranormal romance).

Our mission, if we choose to accept it, is to find 100-150 keyword phrases to put into one Keyword Ad on a regular basis, but we want to make sure these words are relevant (similar) to our books.

Today, we’ll brainstorm relevant search terms to help our book’s all-important metadata, which will allow our Auto and Category Ads to work better too (there is a method to the madness!)

What’s a Keyword Phrase?

Amazon is a powerful search engine that readers use on a regular basis to find books for them to buy or borrow in Kindle Unlimited, and keywords are the way these buyers discover new books.

These readers may type in book titles, author names, or search terms (today, we’ll focus on search terms). Search terms are the one or more words that a reader will type into the top search bar on Amazon to find their next read like “superhero novels,” “coming of age fantasy,” “books on getting out of debt,” and “new cozy mystery releases.”

We can brainstorm the search terms that are relevant for our own book by putting ourselves in our reader’s shoes, looking through reviews of books similar to ours, and generally just knowing the tropes and story types that our readers are looking for. A Trope is an element of fiction that is common in your genre. For example, “small town” as a setting is common in the cozy mystery genre.

Ask yourself questions like, “What would a reader love about my story?” “What do readers of my genre enjoy about these kinds of books?” “What elements of my story are similar to the bestsellers in my genre?” Thinking in this direction can help you to generate your own brainstormed list of search term keywords.

Metadata #2: 7 KDP Keywords

When you publish your book through Kindle Direct Publishing, you select 7 keyword phrases that are meant to describe your book so it shows up to the right readers. Even though there are great pieces of software for this task (like Publisher Rocket), it’s up to you to put in the phrases that Amazon will deem as relevant to your book.

The first instinct for most authors is to go extremely broad with words like “romance” or “fantasy” and the second instinct is to stuff as many words into a box as possible like “cozy mystery paranormal witches with a cat familiar.” Unfortunately, much like trying to put your book into an irrelevant category just to hit the #1 ranking, neither the broad nor the keyword stuffing approach appear to help books show up in more searches or help ads get more impressions and low-cost clicks.

The best approach seems to be finding the relevant keyword phrases that readers actually search for and making sure the result of that search yields books that would fit on the same shelf with yours.

Picking Better Keywords

1. Brainstorm all of the phrases that make up your book, paying close attention to the tropes of your subgenre, for instance “small town” and “enemies to lovers”
2. Create specific variations on each of these phrase ideas, for example “coming of age” could become “coming of age new adult” and “enemies to lovers” can become “contemporary clean enemies to lovers”
3. Open an Incognito browser window by clicking “File” and “New Incognito Window” and bring up Amazon.com with Kindle Store selected from the drop-down menu
4. Search your specific keyword phrase ideas one at a time and put a star next to the ones that yield search results that would belong on the same shelf as your own
5. No matter how many great keywords you come up with, we recommend changing no more than 2-4 of your keywords at a time and test to see if you have an improvement of ad impressions and/or clicks after making these changes

Want to See How to Find Some Keywords and Improve Your Book?

Be sure to watch the screen share at 10:13 to follow along with the visual portion of this lesson!

Day #5 Homework

• Thinking of tropes that make up your book, brainstorm as many search term keywords as possible for your book
• Visit Amazon and look through some of the bestsellers that are relevant to your title, and check out book subtitles and customer reviews for ideas
• Try to generate a list of at least 50 keyword phrases (with 100-150 being the ideal) that could go into one of your ad campaigns
• Do you think any of the keywords you’ve discovered might be a good fit for your 7 KDP keywords too? Try to plug them into a search on an Incognito browser and see if the search results are relevant to your book
• You can list the keywords you’ve found and your answer to the question in a new post in the Facebook or Slack group with the #AdDay5 (and please comment on two other posts to spread some love!)

On the Next Day of the Challenge

We’ll talk about why relevancy is so important to your book’s marketing health.

We’ll also walk through how to set up a Sponsored Product Keyword Ad.

It’s now your wonderful opportunity to go off and do that homework.

You’re doing an awesome job! Thank you for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video!

Sincerely,
Bryan & the Team