What are AMS ads and why you should use them to promote your books on Amazon and get sales

What are AMS ads

Amazon Marketing Service (AMS) ads are native to Amazon. They are displayed when people browse Amazon.

Amazon wants you to succeed. And AMS ads is one of the tools that they made for publishers to boost sales.

Here are the key benefits on AMS ads

• They convert into sales directly. You pay Amazon to advertise your book. Therefore Amazon will do its best to target the right people that are most likely to buy your book. Inside AMS you will see statistics how many $ you spent and how many $ you earned. With this data comes great opportunities for optimization. You know exactly what is selling well and what is not.
• They are scalable. You can bump your budget with a single click. Once you break even or even get profitable you can scale those results. Of course, with bigger budgets the ad efficiency starts to drop. But with experience you will know how to find that balance. When you spend big enough budget and still stay profitable.
• They are predictable. You can estimate how many sales you will get this month based on the previous month. You can even take into account statistics for the previous year for the same quarter.

Key indicators in AMS

Inside AMS you can see the following indicators:

• Spend — how many $ you spent
• Sales — how many $ you earned
• ACoS — Advertising Cost of Sales — Spend / Sales ratio
• Impressions — how many eye-balls saw your ad
• Orders — how many orders were made

The bolded first three are the most important numbers. I use them to analyze how my ads are performing.

What is ACoS and how to analyze it to break-even and get to profitable advertising

I often look at ACoS first. ACoS is a Spend / Sales % ratio. It means if you spend $1 and earn $3 in sales you have 33% ACOS.

Why ACOS is so important ?

It gives you the understanding wether you earn or lose money with your ads.

Let’s say you have a Kindle book priced at $3. With every sale Amazon takes 30%, so $3–30% = $2.1 or 70% — that’s how many profit margin you have on every sale.

What does it mean ? It means that you break even when ACoS is 70%. The lower the ACoS the more you profit with every sale you have.

As a homework exercise, please calculate break-even ACoS for your paperback $9 book. And write your answer in the comments below.

That’s why it’s so important to keep ACoS low.

How many sales you can get with AMS ads ?

My books have somewhere between 100 and 500 sales in a month. But it depends on time of the year and category. And the most beautiful thing is that they run on autopilot every month.

Here is a screenshot example:

Where to go from here

Sign up for AMS at official website https://advertising.amazon.com/

What is your experience ? Did you use AMS ads for your books ? And what are the results ?

I’m looking forward to your answers.

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