Don’t give it an end date. Amazon says, “Choosing no end date means your campaign will run longer, and a longer time frame can give you better insights on search terms and keyword performance to further optimize your campaign.” So just leave it open, and you can pause it later.

I can’t tell you how much to make your budget for. I know that when you do the lockscreen ads, there is a minimum order of $100. If you’re like me, you need these ads to do well, to make money for that. Lol. I suggest a budget under $10 a day and a bid under $0.50.

Choose “manual targeting” to be able to customize your keywords. Then scroll down to the Campaign Bidding section. I chose Dynamic bids up and down because I set aside a little money just for this and I know that I can afford some wiggle room. But, if you are just setting out and need the ROI to run the ads, click “Down only” which means if it is to your advantage to bid lower, Amazon will do that for you. You will never go over your daily budget. However, if you choose up and down like I did, Amazon will not only lower your bid, but they will raise it up to 100% of the original bid, but no more.

Edit 4/19/20: Choose the “Dynamic bids-down only.” There’s no reason to spend more for your ads than you are expecting to.

Click “custom ad text” to be able to write your own engaging ad copy, using keywords that will put the ad in front of the right people.

You don’t need to do anything about the “Product” if you only have one book because it will select the book for you, but if you have more than one, click the book you want to advertise, or enter your ASIN to search for it, and select it from the choices.

Next, click on Keyword Targeting. That’s what we want today, if you want to base results on keywords that are great matches for your books. If you select “Product Targeting” you can enter search categories that you want to appear under.

Under “Keyword Targeting” there are three headings. 1. Related 2. Enter List 3. Upload file. For the first one, Amazon suggests using the words that they think match your book, check them out. If they are applicable, click the button that says, “add keywords.”

**Then click “enter list” and use your KDP Rocket tool to easily find the keywords you want. Do not just use your targeted KDP keywords. Do the research, because to be effective, you need about 200-300 keyword phrases. You can export lists from Rocket and paste into an Excel sheet to fill it in.

**I’ll show you how to do this below.

Next up are “negative” keywords. What’s that? A negative keyword is one that you ABSOLUTELY do not want your book to show up under. If you are political, you may want to stay away from opponents’ pages, or if you are a wholesome romance writer who doesn’t want to come up under hot and steamy, you’d want to add those.

Another author said that you should add the words “free,” “free ebook,” or any other “free” phrases. Because the people who are searching for a “free read” may see my cover come up in their fantasy search and click on it, but my book is not free so they wouldn’t buy. And I would have paid for the click. Make sense? You only want to pay for clicks that turn into sales, though it generally takes 10-20 clicks to equal 1 sale.

The last thing is designing the “Creative” ad copy. Then you’re done. Too simple? It sounds too easy? You’re right. Any monkey can fill out the sheet, but how do you get those clicks to turn into sales?

Ads provide exposure. YOU are the one who has to make sure that once the reader arrives at your page, they will buy. How is this done? It’s the same things I preach every week it seems like. Make sure your cover is dynamic, attractive, professional looking, tells the genre and age group by the picture and/or cover design. Then, make your sales copy sparkle. Don’t make it a book report. People can read the sample for that. Other readers want to know: will I like this book? Is it worth the money? What specific type of romance is it? Does it sound exciting? Does it sound interesting enough for a stranger to think, “Ooh, I want to check that out”??

So what is going to drive people to your page? Categories and keywords. I hear you. Really? You have a right to be skeptical. Lots of people put in keywords and fail. First of all, did they have the right keywords? And did they have enough of them? Your book is going to appear when people type in those keywords (if your bid is right) and a minute difference can be very lucrative or disappointing. I would NOT recommend you do any of these ads without the KDP Rocket tool (And this is my affiliate link so I will get credit if you purchase through my blog). But that’s not why I love it. I love it because it takes work that would cost me HOURS of time, and reports it to me seconds. It’s worth the cost of $97 for lifetime access. You’ll be writing other books, right? I would jump in now because soon, it will go up to a higher price and a monthly subscription.

So tell us, Jenn. We got the Rocket thingy and we’ve got an ad page. What do we do now?

First, get out a piece of paper and jot down a few categories that pertain to your book. You can have the themes inside your book, like magic and mystery. You can talk about the book, saying it’s a must-read, fast-paced, or a page turner. And you can talk about the type of trope it is, like friends-to-lovers, or a bad boy romance, maybe a love triangle, strong female lead, as well as the genre. I used a few variations of my genre, putting down: YA fantasy romance, Young adult fiction, dystopian, romantic suspense for teens. You’ve got the idea.

Now, take that list and get your dash board up on KDP Rocket. Looks like this:

Once you’ve got them all in Excel, go to the “Data” tab and click on the option “Remove Duplicates.” Go through each list to make sure it is relevant to your book, and there’s nothing objectionable to you or your book. My book is titled The Key of F, however it is not about music, nor is it non-fiction about key repair, it’s a fantasy about a key that’s her destiny.

When you’ve weeded out the ones you don’t want, I found I had to put all the lists into one column if I wanted to delete the duplicates. So I did and I had well over 2000 keywords so I copied and pasted my list and when it hit 1,000 it stopped. You can only use 1,000 keywords per campaign. Which totally bums me out because now I want to make sure it included the most important ones and nothing superfluous. But you can make as many ads as you want, so keep your bids low and make another ad with different keywords to see which ad converts better.

Also you will find, that when you make a bid, sometimes the minimum bid for a word is over what your bid is. You will NOT have to change it. You can also use Amazon’s suggested bid for you, but you’ll most likely being paying too much.

[Update 7/27/20: change both the custom bid, AND the default bid to $0.35 or lower before adding your list to make sure you pay low for your clicks.]

Now you are ready to write your ad copy. You only get 150 characters, so you have to make them count. I couldn’t find much teaching on ad copy so I gathered a few notes together. The first thing you want to do is appeal to the reader’s emotions. Either how they feel about your book, how they WILL feel after reading your book, how it will help them, and feed into their sense of entitlement, that feeling that they deserve what you’re offering. Like, “You deserve a new book today–where you fly to new worlds of adventure and romance, to be your own strong female heroine.”

If you can, use their words back at them. Like, “Want to escape to another world of adventure? Read this ya fantasy romance for your journey.” If your book is non-fiction, include as many numbers and statistics that will catch a reader’s eye. Target those relevant keywords and comp books, too, like: “If the Hunger Games and A Wrinkle in Time had a baby.”

This is what mine looked like:

That may not seem like a lot, but I did it in real time (you can see the time on my screenshots) and those keywords took me several hours to get right. If you want your ad to be effective, if you want it to bring you sales, you have got to get these things right: good cover, and great ad copy. They will get you the click, that’s when you pay. But if you are showing up in the wrong places, the reader will trust that Amazon brought them something relevant to their search, and they’ll click [that costs you money], but when they realize it isn’t what they were searching for, it doesn’t matter how good your ad copy is, you won’t make that sale.

Conversely, If your cover is eye-catching, your ad copy intriguing, and you show up in front of your target audience, you will get the click. Then, it’s the job of your Amazon description and your price to seal the deal. If you can tick off all those boxes with confidence, you will do great. I’m excited to show you “how it worked” next week.

I hope this was informative and took some of the scary unknown element out of it. Anyone can do it. Choose to do it right, and the ads will pay off. We will be checking these ads now and then. I will run an ad campaign for the third book during the week of its launch.

We’ll discuss more next week! Keep writing!