WTF Amazon?!

I’m going to start this with the caveat that math and I are not the best of friends. That said, even my puny abilities to work the kinks out of math problems find this beyond screwy.

While I can say the last ad did a lot for me in some intangible ways, I didn’t make a profit off it. The purpose of attempting this finer tuned version was to try and bring back some of those intangible results with the hopes of trying to balance out the profit end of the last ad. When you are talking about the low margin you get with each book sale, you have very little wiggle room when it comes to number of clicks and cost per click before you are dropping quickly into the red for the cost of the ad overall.

Last month’s test ad generated, on average across the span of the ad, an ad associated sale for about every 5.3 clicks. This did fluctuate over time, but I still had what seemed to be regular sales. You can’t see the metrics for how many of those clicks convert to KU reads, but I also had some very regular page reads throughout the entire add. For the purposes of this comparison, I’m not even going to go into the cost of those clicks, because it is that turn over ratio that is blowing my mind at the moment.

My current ad? I’ve now had 27 clicks register so far and I haven’t gotten a single sale. I’ve also only had a single, partial KU read. That’s it. I honestly haven’t a frickin’ clue what is going on, but something definitely isn’t right. It makes it all the more odd in that my click through rate is about the same for both ads.

Anyone that is familiar with statistics can look at the numbers and probably tell you way more than my brief assumptions here, but this isn’t giving me warm feelings towards spending my precious advertising dollars with Amazon. I’ve yet to see how the math works between the two different ads and why I would be seeing such drastic differences when the set up is essentially the same. The only difference is that I focused on the single genre I was getting results in and I am not allowing up bidding, every single other aspect is the same.

I get that there are millions of tiny factors that can play into these statistics, but I cannot manage to twist them enough in my head to make my current numbers make sense. I’m really kind of ticked off and extremely frustrated at the moment.

It also has me really wondering if there is a saturation point that books reach when it comes to sales and readers. Obviously there are only so many readers on the planet, so that seems logical. Are these numbers telling me that I’ve reached my saturation point? If that is the case, then why am I still even getting clicks? That part doesn’t seem to make sense, either. The whole thing is just making my brain hurt.

For all my posts about my ads so far:

Amazon Ad: Round 2
Amazon Book Ad Progress
Indie Author: Thoughts on Kindle Unlimited