Business Post: Amazon Marketing Services and Musings on Category Ads (Patreon)

Been thinking about Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) and how to make it work better. One of the things that a recent seminar made me think about was the way the ads in AMS have different roles to play in the sales funnel.

Specifically, how category ads aren't really about sales, but actually about generating awareness. You're not trying to sell someone on your book when you're bidding on category ads (or not only that) but to generate awareness. So the point isn't to get sales, but to get awareness.

So I figured I'd play with it a little, with one of my older series (the Eternal Night one) that doesn't get much love.

Here's a graph of the AMS category advertising for the Eternal Night shorts. Note our 4 month spend - $0.10.

Now, the graph below is sales. Obviously, we don't earn a lot and the December bump is from the r/fantasy giant sale (and me selling them at $0.99). So obviously, discount that. But the interesting thing to note for me is the minor bump in sales (September had even less sales, like $1.97 or something like that). Not enough, obviously to call it a success, but still interesting to me.

Not enough data from this test to really tell if it works. It's possible that what you need is both the category ad AND the ASIN ad, pushing people from just awareness to purchase behavior.

Anyway, just an interesting test. I'm going to do more, will eventually report on it but it'll be months before anything conclusive comes of it. Somehting to talk about in the future.