Book publisher Wiley sees increase in sales from Amazon Ads

Before Amazon Ads, we were marketing in the dark.
The change was like night and day.

– Wiley

“Each of us was managing thousands of products,” recalled one Wiley marketing executive, “so we needed a product that could market effectively at that scale.” When a reader searches for a book on Amazon, Amazon Ads can serve them one ad that contains several relevant titles, allowing publishers to promote a vast catalog within an affordable budget. Targeting, reporting, and keyword tools also allowed Wiley to take advantage of Amazon’s rich customer data to easily and efficiently scale promotions across its entire catalog. This increased Wiley’s breadth of discoverable titles and helped them to produce an ACOS (advertising cost of sales) of less than 8%.

“Through Amazon Ads, we’ve been testing a lot more. We can finally see what’s working and what isn’t.” While traditional ad models may only offer final campaign readouts, Amazon Ads provides publishers with ongoing visibility into the effectiveness of its ads. Wiley now has real-time insight into how different keywords or interests are performing, so it can adjust campaigns on the fly.

“Now we can give customers exactly what they’re looking for.” Portfolio promotions have always been a cornerstone of Wiley’s merchandising strategy, and through Amazon Ads, Wiley is able to curate landing pages that better showcase its diverse catalog. It also allows Wiley to organize titles into categories, and even subcategories, making it easier for readers to locate what they’re searching for.

By utilizing Amazon Ads data, Wiley gained valuable insight into what their desired audience was looking for. “Amazon Ads’ analytics quickly showed us which keywords were working, and which were underperforming. We realized that to be competitive, we had to add more qualifiers to our search terms.” This level of specificity not only gave Wiley a more efficient targeting strategy but also resulted in more efficient campaign costs, allowing the company to spend more on other ad types.

Amazon Ads let us fix the holes in our strategy that we didn’t know were there.

– Wiley

“Now we see how things are performing day by day. We can make immediate adjustments and optimize our campaigns.” Before using Amazon Ads, Wiley’s primary success metric was CTR (click-through rate), and it could only attempt to correlate CTR to sales after the campaign had concluded. But the Amazon Ads dashboard allowed Wiley to drill deeper into its results, isolate specific metrics, and track its performance for each campaign.

Wiley has taken full advantage of the flexibility that comes from the Amazon Ads budgeting model. “We may start out allocating a certain budget to a campaign. But later on, we’ll notice that it’s successfully reached most of its target audience. It’s easy to move that money to a different campaign—one that still has an opportunity for growth.” Wiley has also embraced the variability of Amazon Ads, running various campaigns that allow it to target a wide range of readers.

“It’s easy to get in there and test a campaign with just $100. That’s a risk worth taking.” Amazon Ads’ low cost marketing solutions and ease of entry make it an ideal resource for publishers, both large and small. For Wiley, it began as a small investment, but now the company sees it as an indispensable part of its overall marketing strategy: “It’s cost-effective, it’s easy to use, and very flexible in real time.”