Prime Day: Best practices for authors

Advertising creates opportunity during Prime Day

Every year for Prime Day, shoppers and brands look forward to participating in Amazon’s highly anticipated event.

For authors like you it is a great time to help new readers discover your book. As of July 13, 2023, the first day of Prime Day was the single largest sales day in Amazon’s history. Over the course of the two-day shopping event, Prime members purchased more than 375 million items worldwide and saved more than $2.5 billion on millions of deals across the Amazon store.¹

To help you make the most of this event, we’ve put together a guide that details everything you need to know to build your Prime Day advertising strategy. In this guide, you’ll find inspiration from Amazon Ads peers and explore topics like bidding, budgeting, targeting, and brand building.

Let’s get ready for the big event, together.

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Best practices for small business owners

¹ Amazon internal data, 2023

Here are the themes we cover in this guide

See advertising tips from your peers

Inspire your Prime Day strategy with these tips and words of advice from experienced authors and advertisers

CHAPTER 1

Valerie Thompkins

Valerie is a best selling children’s author of two career focused books, Girls Like Me and Boys Like Me. She is on a mission to empower individuals to dream big and grow into their best selves.

My favorite Amazon Ads strategy is running a Sponsored Products campaign to research and document the relevant keywords to my book. I collect the keywords that perform well and then use them to create manual ad campaigns. To be most aggressive during high-traffic shopping events, I see the most return when I run both an automatic and manual campaign at the same time.

Michael La Ronn

Michael La Ronn has published many science fiction & fantasy books and self-help books for writers. He built a writing career publishing 10-12 books per year while raising a family, working a full-time job, and even attending law school classes in the evenings, and you can find him at www.michaellaronn.com (fiction) and www.authorlevelup.com (books for writers).

I test dozens of new ads leading up to the event. Once I have ads with a proven track record, I increase my budgets during the event and continuously monitor my ad performance. I also like to experiment by creating brand new ads just to see how they perform. This year, I am looking forward to taking advantage of the new Sponsored Brands video ads, as I believe they will uniquely catch customers’ attention.

Bryan Cohen

Bryan Cohen has written over 40 books and he's the CEO of Best Page Forward, a copywriting and marketing education company for authors. He's sold over 150,000 books and his weekly podcast The Sell More Books Show has over 1,000,000 downloads.

One change to my advertising strategy is to be ready to keep my ad campaigns going after the event has ended. Many shopping events include discounts to readers for Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program. If you have books in KDP Select, then this means you’ll have a larger pool of readers to reach after the event has concluded. For my books in Kindle Unlimited, I make sure to keep my ad campaigns going after these events so that I can help connect with more readers interested in borrowing my book.

Get more first hand advice from your peers on advertising, branding, and more .

Develop a smart marketing strategy

CHAPTER 2

Prepare ahead of time

Use learnings from the results of previous campaigns, that have run over a 30-day period, prior to Prime Day.
If you don’t have any active campaigns, consider running test campaigns before Prime Day. This will help you understand what keywords work best for your books, as well as refine your targeting approach.
Create a plan focusing on four key elements: the books you’ll be advertising, your targeting strategy, the bid tactics, and your budget allocation.

Put your best books forward

Try advertising books you haven’t advertised yet, especially those you’re driving organic traffic to
Use deal ASINs and top-performing books in your campaigns to help drive traffic to your ads.
Explore ways to easily update and improve your product detail pages to increase your chance of making sales.

Make the most of your event budget

If you ran campaigns during Prime Day last year, use previous learnings to make budget decisions for this year.
If it’s your first time advertising during Prime Day, have a set budget in mind when it comes to advertising. Try allocating the bulk of the budget in the lead up to Prime Day, and at the event peak, to take advantage of incremental traffic during that time.
Reallocate and adjust your bids near the end of the event, and after the event, to continue engaging with shoppers, whilst remaining within your budget.

Targeting success

Part of a successful advertising strategy is reaching and engaging the relevant audiences for your books. Our targeting recommendations can help you achieve just that during this high-traffic event. If you’d like to learn more about targeting, head to our targeting help page.

Automatic and manual targeting

There are two targeting tactics available for your Prime Day campaigns: automatic and manual. With automatic targeting¹, we’ll do the work for you by matching your ads to shopping queries and products. Manual targeting² gives you the control to select specific keywords or products and set bids accordingly.

Try automatic targeting for Prime Day campaigns if you want to get started quickly with Sponsored Products. This approach with also give you insight into what shopping terms Prime Day customers have used when shopping for books like yours. Running multiple manual campaigns at the same time, and using shopping queries you know are relevant to your books, can all help drive incremental sales.
Try manual targeting for Prime Day campaigns if you’re creating Sponsored Brands campaigns, or if you’ve run automatic targeting campaigns with Sponsored Products before, and have enough data from your reports. This way you can be more precise by adding high-performing search terms, those with high sales and click-through rates (CTR) to optimize for conversions.

Keyword targeting

In the weeks leading up to Prime Day, monitor your campaigns for high-performing keywords. Use your search term report to identify terms with high sales and CTR and include them as keywords in your Prime Day campaign. Be sure to add specific keywords from your category that define your product well. This helps ensure your ads are relevant for the customers shopping for books like yours.
Test new keywords in your Prime Day campaigns. It can help you reach larger audiences and gain extra visibility for your books.
Increase the number of keywords in your campaigns over Prime Day to help your ads appear in more shopping queries. These can be a combination of keywords you’ve chosen from past campaigns and those recommended in campaign builder.
Use a mix of match types to create a multi-goal strategy. Broad match can help increase your reach, while exact and phrase match allows you to target precisely on the keywords that convert well for you. Find out more about match types in this help page.
Be mindful of restricted keywords. Avoid including keywords that could result in an offensive, insensitive, or undesirable shopper experience, as your ads won’t run against them. Learn more about targeting restrictions in this help page.

Product targeting

Use product targeting for your Prime Day campaigns to widen your reach within a category, engage customers shopping for your brand, or target individual books or authors that are similar to you.
In the weeks leading up to Prime Day, monitor your campaigns to identify your successes. Use category and ASIN-level reporting to see your data, then create your Prime Day campaigns around books and categories that perform well in your campaigns.
Avoid restricted products. Don’t include any restricted products in your campaign targeting. You may be able to add them during campaign set up, but your ads won’t run against those targets. Find out more about restrictions.
Not sure what to target? Take advantage of our product targeting recommendations for Prime Day, which you’ll find under the Suggested tab in the Product targeting section, within the campaign manager.

Man wearing headphones holding a pen and smiling

Negative targeting

Prevent your ads from appearing on shopping results pages that don’t meet your Prime Day goals. Depending on whether you’re using automatic or manual campaigns, you can target negative keywords, products, or both.
Exclude low-performing and irrelevant shopping queries in your Prime Day campaigns. These should include any shopping queries with high spend, and no—or very low—sales.

Setting your bids and budgets

Increased traffic during Prime Day can result in your ads being seen more often, leading to more clicks. With an uplift in clicks, your campaigns may run out of budget quicker than usual.

Ad campaigns that use their full budget and stay live throughout the entire day have greater potential to reach readers and drive sales. So, it’s even more important to monitor your bids and budgets multiple times throughout Prime Day.

Here are four recommendations to help ensure your advertising spend is as efficient as possible, and your campaigns are optimized to reach, engage, and inspire customers to purchase:

Prepare for a potential uplift in traffic. Increasing your daily budget, particularly for campaigns with high clicks or sales, can help ensure you don’t run out of budget and miss potential sales before, during, and after Prime Day. Setting budget rules to automatically increase your budget during Prime Day is an easy way to help avoid your campaigns going out of budget. We suggest using Amazon Ads recommended budget increase percentage, which is based on historical Prime Day shopping activity.³
Move your budget to your most effective campaigns. Consider reallocating all, or a portion, of your budget from lower-pacing campaigns to high-performing campaigns. This can make your advertising spend more efficient, and help you achieve your advertising goals for Prime Day, without exceeding your budget.
Adjust your bids using insights from recent campaigns. Learnings from relevant campaigns that have been active over the past 30 days can help set you up for success. Decreasing or pausing bids for keywords that underperformed over the last 30 days, and, in turn, increasing bids for keywords that generated sales can help drive additional traffic to your ads. If you’re setting up new campaigns, we recommend using bid suggestions for Prime Day, available via the advertising console.
Use dynamic bidding to increase your chance of driving sales. Dynamic bidding can help save you time and optimize your campaign performance throughout Prime Day, by allowing Amazon Ads to automatically adjust your bids in real time. Dynamic bidding (up and down) will increase your bids when your ads may be more likely to drive sales, and decrease your bids when they’re less likely to do so.

¹ Available with Sponsored Products only
²Available with Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands
³Products and features may not be available in all marketplaces.

Advertise internationally

This Prime Day, increase visibility of your books, build brand awareness, and boost sales by connecting with readers in multiple marketplaces.

CHAPTER 3

Which countries can I advertise in?

Sponsored ads for authors is available in these countries and regions:

North America: Canada^*, United States
Europe: Germany, Spain, France, Italy, United Kingdom
Asia Pacific: Australia^*

^* Sponsored Products only

Upcoming shopping events around the world

Take advantage of advertising internationally by making the most of regional key events.

Tools and features to advertise internationally

Our ad console offers tools and features to help make it easy for you to take your ads to multiple marketplaces.

To run ads:

Campaign management: Manage your sponsored ads campaigns for all countries in one place. You can sign in to your ad console and navigate between countries to view and manage accounts in your preferred language.
Multi-country campaign creation and copy: Create Sponsored Products auto-targeted campaigns in multiple countries at once, or copy existing campaigns to additional countries, without spending time setting up and translating campaigns for each country where you want to advertise.¹
Automatic targeting: Automatic targeting for Sponsored Products is a targeting option that lets Amazon Ads automatically match your ads to keywords and books, and is an easy way to create campaigns anywhere.

For keyword selection:

Keyword localization: Enter your keywords in your preferred language and translate them into the local language of your campaign.
Suggested keywords localization: See translations for suggested keywords or your own keyword lists in your language of preference with Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns during campaign setup, and create global manual keyword targeting campaigns in minutes.
Custom keyword ranking: Make an informed decision about which keywords to add to your campaign by sorting your suggested keywords by estimated engagement or sales volume within the campaign builder.

Tip: If you’re selling and advertising in Europe, you’ll want to know about VAT and regulatory fees. Visit our resource guide for more information on EU regulations all in one place.

¹ Features not available in all countries

Check off your Prime Day to-do list

Here are some of the top tips we’ve covered in this guide.

CHAPTER 4

Smart strategies and best practices

Targeting

In the weeks leading up to Prime Day, monitor your campaigns for high-performing keywords and books.
Consider using Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands together.
Put your best books forward and avoid restricted products.
Make the most of your event budget.
Try automatic targeting if you want to get started quickly with Sponsored Products.
Try manual targeting if you’re creating Sponsored Brands campaigns, or if you’ve run automatic targeting campaigns with Sponsored Products, and have enough data from your reports.
Test new keywords, and increase the number of keywords in your campaigns. Be mindful of restricted keywords.
Use a mix of match types to create a multi-goal strategy.
Make use of different targeting tactics such as keyword targeting, product targeting, and negative targeting.

Bids and budget

Prepare for a potential uplift in traffic.
Move your budget to your most effective campaigns.
Adjust your bids using insights from recent campaigns.
Use dynamic bidding to increase your chance of driving sales.

Advertising internationally

Consider advertising in a country where you’re already selling or will be selling during Prime Day.
Check out regional events to capitalize on overlapping key events.
Familiarize yourself with all the tools that can help you advertise across countries.

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Prime Day: Best practices for authors