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Amazon Ads for Indie Authors
Book Updates

Since my book was published in October 2021, there have been a number of updates and quirks introduced to the Amazon Ads experience. Here are a few and there are more on the way!  

 

  1. Ads Dashboard Update.
    We should expect them to make updates regularly. Unfortunately, it’s still one hell of a clunky dashboard that gives us inconsistent views and forces us to scroll excessively to see the data we need. 

  2. Quirky ASIN Picker.
    This is the tool where you select the book you want to advertise when creating a campaign. With the dashboard update and opening ads up to traditionally published authors (see #3 below), it’s now difficult to find your book if you need to search. It’s not very “smart” and requires the full title to find your book. Make note that it’s not you! Life will be easier if you just plug in the ASIN (or have a really small catalog). 

  3. Advertise your non-KDP ASINs!
    This is also known as “Authors with Trad published titles can be advertised in the US.” As of March 2022, authors with non-KDP published titles can now advertise eligible books on Amazon in the US. I specify non-KDP because this covers Ingram… which, by the way, was really the biggest use case for unlocking this feature. To begin advertising your title, you may need to “claim” it in your Author Central account first. I’m a fan of this, because I’m a fan of always having all formats in campaigns.    

  4. New Permissions – “View only” access. When you invite a new user to your account, you may now grant view only permission. This is great for security purposes. You can have someone look at your ads without running the risk of them making any changes or having access to your financial information.  

  5. Suggest products in campaign builder can now be sorted.
    Previously we just a had a list, which sometimes could be voluminous. Now Amazon allows you to sort based on highest chance of being clicked. I’ve yet to see a strong suggestion here, but it’s still worthy of continued exploration.  

  6. Continued improvements in ASIN Targeting.
    Amazon continues to make improvements in Product/ASIN targeting for Sponsored Products. I’m seeing more and more targets getting served, although the cost is still very high in most genres.  

    • Expanded ASIN targeting.

      ​This is an interesting one. If you decide to click the box on “expanded” for your product targeting campaigns, then you’ll get your ad shown on books that are closely related to your target ASIN.* The upside is that you get more opportunities for impressions; the downside is that you have no control (again!) thus this now lacks the much sought after precision with this type of targeting. 
      * This is just like the old Product Display Ads that were deprecated in 2018/19. 

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