How to find the best keywords for Amazon (AMS) sponsored ads

Posted on May 14, 2022 (Subscribe to Blog)

In this post, I'll be showing you what kind of sales you can expect from using sponsored ads on Amazon Marketing Services, which you can access directly from your KDP Dashboard. I'll also be mentioning the fantastic tool known as Publisher Rocket, which generates thousands of keywords and phrases in a very short time.

(Here are some really simple tutorials in case you've never seen Publisher Rocket in action.)

With millions of new books being published every year, it's very difficult to get your work in front of eager readers. It's become a "pay to play" game, and there are only a few options when it comes to advertising your books on a pay-per-click platform. Facebook is one, and this works well for some authors. BookBub is a possibility; they have a sponsored ads program as well as their mammoth Featured Deals email newsletter.

But if you're published on Amazon, where readers are already trawling the categories trying to find their next favorite book or series, you really need to be using AMS (Amazon Marketing Services).

The great thing about AMS is that you're not likely to lose a ton of money by accident, unlike with Facebook. In fact, you'll probably end up wishing you could spend more. When you find the right set of keywords, and your book cover and book blurb are just right, you can definitely make sales and turn a good profit. I advertise in both the the US and UK, and you can see from this "lifetime" screenshot that it's kind of a no-brainer:

The importance of great keywords with AMS sponsored ads

You can see by the decline in the last few months that it's time for me to start using Publisher Rocket again! Just to clarify, the "sales" figure shown here is before Amazon has taken their share. If these were all ebook sales at 70%, the actual sales amount would be more like £16K. Since it's a mixture of print books and ebooks, the sales figure is less still.

However, I usually just ignore the sales figure. What's more important is the number of orders and what each order is worth. The majority of ad-generated sales are for Book 1 of my 15-book Island of Fog series, and that's where good old read-through comes in. If every person who bought Book 1 also bought the rest of the books in the series, that would (over time) earn me something like £45.00 ($55.00) from each reader. But that's generally not the case, because not everyone buys the rest of the books. Also, some people might read three or four books and stop. Who knows?

What I do know is that, going by the number of Book 1 sales and the total revenue earned on the entire series, each sale of Book 1 yields about £18.00 ($23.00) on average. So, that's the "value" I've attached to each Book 1 sale.

But wait. Let's be extra cautious here and say that each sale of Book 1 yields a "measly" £5.00 ($6.00), which might be true if you have, say, five or six books in your series. Going by the numbers in the screenshot above, 3,272 orders x £5.00 per reader still equals about £16,360 ($19,632) in revenue. And that's double what I paid on ads!

I always heard that "1 sale in every 20 clicks" is what you should be aiming for, or perhaps "1 sale in every 30 clicks" if you're in KU. The above screenshot works out at about 1 sale in every 14 clicks. The UK in particular has been great for me, albeit driven in part by Covid's lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.

By the way, my books are in KU. Those figures are not shown above. You'll just have to imagine how many more people click on the ads and read via Kindle Unlimited vs. an outright sale. That's extra income not really included in this quick analysis.

Also, the above sales are only those generated directly from Amazon ads. There are plenty of other sales that are more indirect. For instance, if my ads keep showing up, a reader somewhere might eventually search for my book without actually clicking on an ad. And just the fact that ads are boosting sales means that my books are higher in the charts, which in turn leads to organic sales:

Ranked #1 in Greek and Roman

But you can't just throw up an ad without research. You'll probably waste money that way, or not spend any at all. Here's the thing...

With AMS, it's all about keywords!

Strong sales on AMS are only possible with a lot of great-performing keywords (as well as a strong book cover and blurb, of course). You may think you can simply write a list of keywords and phrases and cover all the possibilities, but let me tell you, every person in the world who goes on Amazon to search for a particular type of book, or their favorite genre, or books that are similar to ones they've read, are going to come up with search terms you never would have thought of. And if you don't include those search terms in your keyword list, then you're missing out on potential sales.

You can gather keywords in a variety of ways, such as by studying other books in a similar genre:

Look at the "also boughts" on your Amazon book page. You don't always see these, but if you do, it's a hint as to what other books readers buy in addition to your own. If someone likes your book and also likes this and that book, make a list of those books and their authors, as they're usually a good target audience.
Also look at authors and books that are in the same categories as you. If readers chance across those books first, you should make sure your own books show up somewhere nearby, like on that other book's page. Maybe your cover is better and grabs their attention. If so, you've just snatched a sale!
Drill down into each of the above lists until you've found as many similar authors as you can. If your book is about goblins, your book ad absolutely needs to show up on product pages of other books about goblins.
Think outside the box. Readers who like goblins probably like centaurs as well. Look for books heavily related to yours in any feasible way.

When it comes to actual keywords, there are the "obvious" lists and the "not-so-obvious" lists. An obvious list for middle-grade fantasy readers would include the following:

fantasy book 9 12 age
fantasy for kids
kids books about fantasy
ebook fantasy for girls
fantasy series boys age 11

...and so on.

Compiling this list will likely drive you nuts, because there are endless variations to include. The majority won't even get impressions, let alone clicks, but you don't know what will work until you try various ads with hundreds or even thousands of keywords and phrases.

Whatever you come up with, the AMS platform has a section that lists actual customer search terms that generated impressions, clicks, and sometimes sales, such as:

biggles kindle books
book harry potter
books for 10+ year old boys
books for harry potter fans
books girls age 8
books with a magical element
1950s childrens fiction

Some might belong on the "obvious" list, but I never would have thought to include "biggles" or the specific phrase "with a magical element" or "1950s childrens fiction." Still, somehow these search terms brought my books to the readers' attention, so it's best to study and possibly include these kinds of phrases in your curated lists. (Note that you can't use "kindle" and similar brand names in your lists.)

Believe me when I say that making keyword lists is like walking into a labyrinth. I think it's why so many authors I talk to have either failed at AMS sponsored ads (because they didn't take the time to generate lists) or why they never got started in the first place.

If the idea of generating thousands of keywords threatens to overwhelm you, don't worry -- there's an amazing tool designed exactly for this task:

Read About Publisher Rocket

I'm sure you've seen this app before, but for good reason -- it's brilliant. You can gather long lists of actual Amazon search terms in minutes rather than hours. I thoroughly recommend it. I own a copy of the software and have used it extensively.

I find it's most useful for initial wide-net trawls, literally spreading your net far and wide to see what little fishes you end up with... Well, you get the idea. Then you can fine-tune your lists from there. But here's what seems to be the four key areas:

Best Keywords for your book
Who your Competitors are (so you can learn from them)
Best Categories for your book
Best Keywords for your AMS ads

As reviewers have said, "With this tool, I stopped guessing what keywords I should be using for my books, and instead was able to find keywords that were actually typed into Amazon’s search bar by real shoppers."

Some more blurb that I find true:

One of Publisher Rocket’s most powerful features is its Competition Analyzer that lists the books that rank on the first page of Amazon for a particular keyword. This feature also allows you to see how well any of your competitors' books are performing and in what categories their books are currently enrolled in.

Publisher Rocket also lists all of Amazon’s 11,200+ categories and subcategories, along with how many books you would need to sell in order to be the #1 bestseller. So instead of sifting through all those categories ourselves, this tool does all this for us.

Anyway, that's that. Sales pitch over. The software costs $97.00, a one-off fee that includes all future updates. You get a 30-day money back guarantee. If you're about to try Amazon Sponsored Ads, or even if you've been doing it a while, I would just suggest you try Publisher Rocket and see what you think. I get a referral fee if you click one of the links on this page, and I only recommend the software because I believe in it.

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