How Adwords Made Me Want To Visit Scotland

I used to hate Adwords. The first time I tried the service it was confusing, and it seemed expensive. But as an independent author I know from experience, on Amazon, once the sales of your titles dry up, the little visibility you may have enjoyed on the platform dries up as well. 

That's what happened to my full cast audio book THE AMERICAN FATHERS EPISODE 1. For two weeks, sales of the recording flat-lined at zero. Around that time I received a coupon in the mail from Google, offering me $100 if I spent $25 on Adwords. I struggled to get reviews of the audio book, but the ones I did receive were really good. It was clear to me there was an audience for this audio book, I just needed to find it. Desperate but hopeful, I called Adwords, and started the process of updating my account. 

It took two days of calling, but I finally talked to someone who informed me that setting my campaigns at a budget of $33 or more made me eligible for support that included a campaign specialist. That sounded great. I'm not a marketing expert, so the idea of someone else designing campaigns for me was reassuring. 

I have to admit, I found myself entertaining visions of my sales going through the roof. 

I should take a moment to explain what it means when sales of your Amazon titles flat-line. Your KDP titles are like pebbles that have been placed in a giant jar full of pebbles. When your title is first published, it starts off at the top of the jar, meaning it may be listed in the new releases section for its product category, or suggested to customers who enjoy buying books similar to yours. Amazon clearly provides support for some pebbles (titles), depending on their relationship with the publisher, but independent titles quickly sink to the bottom of the jar of pebbles if their sales drop to zero. 

The only way your title will ever see the light of day on the platform is if you drive traffic to its product page, and start generating sales once again. When you're in this situation, one way to do this is through the use of tools that exist outside of the Amazon ecosystem. 

This was the fate of the full cast audio book version of THE AMERICAN FATHERS EPISODE 1. My audio book was published through +AudibleACX - or Audiobook Creation Exchange. 

This was the first ad created by an Adwords campaign designer:

The American Fathers Ep 1Listen On Your Kindle Fire Or With The Free Audible AppDownload Now!

The visual version of the ad looked like this:

The campaign was set to display in the U.S., with keywords including: audio book, audio drama, full cast, romance, etc. 

You may have been wondering what all this has to do with Scotland. I belong to a virtual writing group on +Scribophile. One of the great things about being in a virtual writing group is that it allows me to collaborate with writers all over the world. One of the other writers in my virtual writing group lives in Scotland, and she has expressed particular interest in the political themes of my books. 

Now I'm a political junkie, so through my social media feeds, the Scottish independence referendum had attracted my attention, and I was not surprised when First Minister Nicola Sturgeon explained that Scotland was experiencing a political awakening of sorts, and that there was an increasing interest among the citizenry in politics.    


 The Daily Show



 PBS Newshour

 

Considering all this, I asked the Adwords campaign designer to duplicate the USA campaign, and set it to display in Scotland, and in England. This turned out to be a key decision, and it's the only reason I am still using Adwords today.

I was really disappointed with the results. After spending $25 of my own money, and $125 worth of clicks, I received over 1,000 clicks, and zero sales. 

One of the many frustrating things about ACX is the forty-eight hour lag in sales reporting. If you have an ACX account you may be wondering what I mean since the dashboard states "Total Units Sold * as of" the date you view the report. But on my title's publication day I urged everyone I knew, if they were planning to ever purchase the recording, to purchase a copy on that day, in an attempt to achieve a coveted one hundred or better Amazon Best Seller Ranking in a product category, and to stave off the downward pull to zero sales that occurs as the sales of other titles increase, causing them to rise to the top, pushing your title further and further to the bottom until it's all but impossible for readers and listeners to find it. 

My contacts assured me they did, in fact, buy copies on the release day, and were listening to the recording, but the sales dashboard did not register those purchases until three days later. This is why I am certain the sales dashboard of my ACX account is wrong when it states that it is reporting sales up to the day I am viewing the report. It simply is not. As one of ACX's support specialist "explained" in his response to my email inquiry. 

As you may know, the Sales Dashboard tab is meant for informational purposes only. The unit sales in the Sales Dashboard tab are typically updated once every few days. As you mentioned, the units from Thursday could show up on Sunday.

The one thousand clicks occurred on Thursday and Friday of the week, so I wouldn't know the sales results until Sunday at the earliest. When Sunday morning came around, my sales were unmoved, with no increase whatsoever.

It just so happens that I received a followup email from the Adwords campaign designer on Tuesday morning, two days after Sunday. Coincidentally, my sales had increased by one that morning, and I had to admit that, although pitiful, that one sale was most likely the result of the Adwords campaigns. 

Over the weekend I had shared my Adwords experience with a fellow writer, who also works as a social media specialist at a marketing firm, and she gave me some really useful feedback:

Is that the ad the AdWords team designed for you? If you're going to do it again, I would suggest a few tweaks...

1. The eye is automatically drawn to the "Get Your Copy At The Kindle Store," not the picture — possibly because the whole thing is black, and there's more contrast with the white text. So it's possible people don't even notice "The American Fathers" at first glance — I didn't. I would try to use the name of the audiobook or something describing the story in your ad copy — because you can get a shit ton of things at the Kindle store. You're not selling the Kindle store, you're selling the book. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking "Dynasty. Romance. Adventure. The American Fathers: Now at the Kindle Store." Or any other three punchy words you think are better.

2. I don't like "Shop Now" as a call to action, either: again, it's selling the Kindle Store, not the book. Maybe "Read Now" instead?

3. I would put the CTA button up, where the Amazon logo is, and move the logo down to the bottom, considerably smaller. No one gives a damn if they get your book on Amazon or somewhere else, they care what the book's about. And you need a little buffer space around the button to make it easier to see.

Not that you asked me to redesign your AdWords campaign or anything :) But I wouldn't feel too discouraged. For a first go, you're not so far out of the target engagement bracket. I hope this helps! 

(If you hadn't noticed, my friends are great.)

So I modified the ads created by the campaign designer. By the time he contacted me that Tuesday morning, they looked like this:

Full Cast . F F Romance . Audiobook

The Best Audio Drama In America!

The visual ad now looks like this:

Of that one thousand+ clicks, 116 of them were from Scotland. That meant, out of the $125 spent, the traffic from Scotland only cost $11.16. Adwords representatives say things like: 

"We ask that you let your ads run for at least two weeks so that we can gather enough data to determine what's working and what's not." 

TWO WEEKS!  THAT CAN COST OVER $1500!

My desperation was so great that one sale, and my friend's advice, helped calm me down. So I was thinking optimistically by the time I received that email Tuesday morning. 

I could afford to run the Scotland campaign only. It may produce fewer clicks per day, but more of those clicks are likely to produce sales, especially considering the modification I made to the ads. 

So I called the campaign specialist and, with his help, completed the modifications. We also duplicated the updated campaign, and created a separate campaign for London. If you're not familiar with the full cast audio book format, the experience is the same as listening to the audio dramas broadcast by +BBC Radio 4. Once that was done, I added $10 to my account. 

My new campaigns began running immediately. For $10 I received 78 clicks, 40 from Scotland, and 38 from London. The next day, my audio book's Amazon Best Sellers Rank improved from being #3500 in the category Books > Romance > Lesbian Romance, to #732 in that category. 

It may seem like an odd take away, but I would love to pitch my audio book in person. I wouldn't mind meeting my virtual writing buddy either. I'm sure there is a technical SEO explanation for the turnaround I'm seeing, but I'm not an SEO expert. It just feels like I've found my audience, and I wouldn't mind meeting them.