As I approach the final three days of the Unbroken Adwords campaign, I made a number of changes that will hopefully drive more sales and give me one last opportunity to make it on to the Amazon book page for Unbroken. While there’s little chance to make it on the regular book page, I might be able to get on the Kindle book page. The Kindle version of 35 Miles From Shore has been in the top one through three position for aviation titles for the past week.
Campaign changes and additions
In analyzing the data over the past several weeks, I noticed an increase in the number of searches for Louis Zamperini, the name of the person who the book Unbroken is written about. Since this is not a very common name, it’s likely that people who are searching for Louis Zamperini have already purchased and read the book. These are the exact people who I am looking to target.
Here is a screenshot showing all targeted keywords.
This report shows that Adwords is suggesting a bid of $1 a click to get on the first page of search results for most of the keywords in this list. I’m not willing to pay that much. I am, however, willing to accept fewer impressions in return for a lower cpc. Since Louis Zamperini is a keyword phrase that I want to target more heavily, I entered a keyword bid price of .75 cents a click. The resulting average cpc has been around .50 cents. That is a higher than I would normally accept, but with the campaign winding down I decided to try to capture as many clicks as I could from this keyword phrase.
I also created a new ad with Louis Zamperini in the title. Here’s the new ad:
This new ad is now the best performing ad in terms of click through rate (ctr) and clicks.
Promoted Video
Lastly, I decided to add a YouTube promoted video campaign. A promoted video on YouTube acts very much like a text ad on Google. When someone types in a search query on YouTube, a list of related videos is displayed. Appearing in this list are what’s called promoted videos. Here is an example for the search phrase “aircraft accidents.”
The promoted videos are shown on the right. They can also appear in the main section of search results. I am using the book trailer for 35 Miles From Shore as my promoted video. Had I done this search earlier in the day my video would have appeared in the promoted video list. It’s not there now because I’ve depleted my $5 a day budget.
Once I set up the campaign in YouTube, by adding keywords, selecting the video, and setting the budget and CPC, the campaign automatically appeared in my Adwords dashboard.
You can then manage the campaign from within Adwords. There are a couple of advantages to running promoted videos on YouTube. For one, you greatly increase the number of impressions your video will get. More importantly, promoted videos allow you to use overlay calls to action along with a link that will take visitors directly to your website. Another advantage is that you gather important data about which keywords and keyword phrases to target once the promoted videos campaign has ended.
The changes outlined above have increased my advertising spend. The first month of the campaign my total spend was under $100. This last month will be closer to $300. At that rate it’s hard to sell enough books to justify the advertising cost, though I still think I will come out ahead thanks to robust eBook sales.
There’s two ways to look at it. Most people will agree that you should only spend what you can realistically make back in sales. On the other hand, if your goal is to go after impressions and brand awareness, you can afford to spend more on a limited run campaign such as this.