Organic vs Ad Sales
What is it?
% of your sales which are driven by ads vs organic sales (e.g. search results).
Why does this matter?
It's a health check for your account and books, providing troubleshooting cues and giving you the signal to slow down, or speed up with your ad spend.
A high % of Amazon ad driven sales suggests there maybe problems with your book (which can be fixed). If this figure is too low, you maybe missing out on sales.
What do I do with this information?
Unfortunately, there are no benchmarks for books, but AdBadger suggests 30%-40% of sales coming from ads is the average on Amazon. The best gauge is your own stats over time.
Ideally, when your first publish a book, sales will be driven by ads (a high ad sales %), which should come down as your book ranks organically.
If your ad sales % is <20%, you may be missing out on sales. Consider increasing your ad spend (this doesn't mean increasing bids on all keywords).
- Find new keywords
- Use the search term report to find converting term and convert them into exact
- Do further keyword research and use low bids to identify new converting terms
- Increase bids on keywords which are converting. Increasing bids will increase your acos, but should also boost organic sales.
If your ad sales % is above >50-60%, you maybe spending too much on ads.
- This is likely a problem with your SEO.
- Review the keywords you are ranked for. Are they the ones you want? If not, consider targeting new ones via PPC.
- Is your listing 'optimised for search':
- Are you in the correct categories
- Title and description include the correct keywords
- Back end keywords are relevant
- Is your book 'good enough'?
- Does the cover make people want click and buy the book?
- Does the description covert?
- Are the reviews good?
How is the metric calculated?
For ebooks and paperbacks, BookBot calculates the % units generated by Amazon Ads against total units in the KDP sales dashboard. This % is used against the total royalties (not KENP) from your sales dashboard.
For KENP, it is much simpler. Total KENP $ - KENP$ from the Ad dashboard.
Example
- Amazon Ads dashboard shows 10 units sold of Book X.
- KDP Sales Report shows 100 units sold in total.
- 10% (10/100) of units are attributed to ads
- Total royalties were $1,000. Using the 10%, $100 of royalties are attributed to Amazon Ads
- Total KENP$ = $200, Amazon Ads KENP$ = $50.
- To calculate the total.
- Total royalties = $1,000 (from units) + $200 (KENP$) = $1,200.
- Total Ad Sales = $100 (from units) + $50 (KENP$) = $150
- $150 / $1,200 = 12.5% of sale attributed to Amazon Ads
What are the limitations of this metric?
Unless Amazon provides the actual data, this number will not be 100% accurate, but it is a very good estimate. The limitations are:
- Long time frame give more accurate results. Delays in Amazon's reporting (e.g. 14 days for sales to be recorded) means individual days or weeks can give inaccurate results. We suggest reviewing this on a monthly time frame.
- KENP $ calculations can be slightly out due to how it is calculated. At the moment, BookBot uses a single per page value (this is the average of the last few months per country). We know this number changes each month, so the % might be out by a few digits.
- Note we are moving towards a variable rate in the future.