Best Amazon KDP Ads Strategies for Q4 - How to DOMINATE The Holidays

If you want to learn the best Amazon KDP ads strategy to blow up your Q4 sales then make sure to watch this video Until the End because we're going to be sharing some Insider Secrets as well as we have a special bonus for you all right what's going on guys today we got a special guest on this channel we got Ivon who's the owner and The Mastermind behind addroid asid is a service where they run Amazon ads for you and Ivon Ashley is the one that handles all my ads for my KDP business as well

Ivon spends over $3.5 million per year in Amazon as across all his clients and today we'll be sharing the best Amazon as strategy for you to capitalize on this upcoming Q4 period so with that being said Ivon thanks for being here how are you doing all right thank you very much I'm doing very well and um excited to get stuck into some of the simplest Strategies and then something I think which will add a lot of value and hopefully a lot of profits for listeners and anybody in your call and anybody think any even if

you're just getting started you can use these strategies or if you're a little bit further along I'm sure you'll find some interesting tidbits in here as well yeah for sure just because like nobody really talks about Q4 strategies right a lot of videos on Amazon as so far I have some Amazon as tutorial videos on YouTube but no one really talks about specifically Q4 and what to do there so I think it's going to be interesting to go into this uh uh this video here but real quick for those beginners out out there Q4 is

essentially quarter 4 uh that's October November December and the reason why it's important is because there's just so much more customers going to Amazon shopping for things because it's the holiday season right they're trying to Buy something uh for themsel as well as as a gift for their family friends Etc and there're just way more customers way more sales typically you make so much more money than the rest of the year so uh it's great in that way but there's Al there's also your competitors you know that understand this and they're also running as heavier

so that you really have to kind of approach this from a strategic point of view because it's not as simple as oh let's try and you know Run and spend more ads during Q4 you you kind of want to have a a strategic approach here so uh that's what we're going to talk about here but with that being said you know where should we start Ivon what do you think is the the first thing that people should understand about Q4 I think you highlighted it and the reason for uh the thing to understand and the

main thing that's going to happen is increase in ad spend because There are more people it's an increase in demand more people are advertising they advertising more aggressively so you know we can talk about okay getting more clicks or having higher cpcs they do tend to increase as you go into closer and closer to Christmas and um the main thing to understand and to remember is to prepare early for it which is why we're having this conversation now and to budget your cash flow for those uh Months down the line so preparing for an increased

spend in October versus September and then further increase in November further increase the most significant increase in December and making sure that you don't run out of cash in you know week two of December which is usually when most of the purchases happen and you'll find this across many Industries not just Amazon where a lot of the the bulk of the purchases will happen just before the Deadline I guess people you know leave their shopping to the end and week two of December is when we normally see that massive Peak so make sure you uh

don't run out of cash at that point that's the most important period when do you think people should start scaling their ad spend scaling I would say like the the latter half of November I think if we look um perhaps we should take a one step back and look at you know what should we Doing in each month from now until uh we get to December and maybe even into January which may be relevant for some niches so you know September and we should be experimenting this is the time when you can switch um you

know the book you're prioritizing maybe test out some one type of AD some type of you know different bidding strategy Etc so now you can try and experiment try and find those profitable keywords try and you know improve the detail pages of your Books try and improve the conversion rate you can time for experiments time for changing and um by the end of September we should have probably identified like okay which books you want to focus on which which are your winners which are the ones that you want to allocate most of your budget to

and which keywords and which ad types Etc that you probably want to focus on so October is the transition period when you'll start to see a A little bit more um demand and a little bit higher cpcs and as people start to prepare for that main period so then you know you want to start to focus in more on your main winners and then November and definitely in December you only want to allocate your budget and you know to your main books let's say you know you have you know five books 10 books however many

apply the uh par principle which is 80/20 which means that most of your budget should go to like 20% of Your books 20% of your keywords 20% of your ad types so just focus in on those main ones and try and you know increase the budget increase the bids Etc and we can talk about specifically how much to do you know to increase each of those by um in more detail if you wish but um as we get closer and closer to Christmas we get more and more targeted and specific and hopefully we could increase

the throughput on those uh best books best keywords which will hopefully give you The most profits that makes sense so just to confirm or recap what you're saying September uh the the ad cost is still on the lower side so up till September you're still testing what works what books are picking up what campaigns within the books are doing good so you're still in the testing phase around October you start transitioning and by November uh you want to really hone in on you know which books are your 8020 so basically the 20% Of books that

are bringing in 80% of your income as well as within the campaign side which are the campaigns that are performing well with really good a cost or really good return because that's the one you want to increase the the budget and really focus in instead of just like still within you know the having like a bunch of campaigns and just uh allocating your budget evenly right you don't want to evenly allocate it you Want to kind of focus on the few that are doing well is that correct absolutely because we'll see increased demand and if

you're spreading yourself too thin across all let's say you have 10 books you're spreading yourself across all of those 10 books and you see an increase in demand let's say it's like a Forex increase in demand but I mean if you have a Forex in budget then maybe that's the right thing to do if you have excessive you know infinite Budget then yeah great advertise everything but most cases realistically speaking we'll have maybe you will be able to allocate a little bit more it be a 2X budget maybe a 3X in budget but it's not

going to be like a 10x or 20x availability so we're going to have to focus in and if you you know in some niches the very giftable ones the ones that make good sense as Christmas presence you may see 5x 10x um and I have seen you know 10x And even an excess of that in some cases of sales spend and sales that happen in December so um it really makes sense to focus on the few in this case yeah speaking of which right have you noticed or you know what are the types of books

that performs the best during Q4 uh let's say you know we we got a viewer that's doing fiction right there's another viewer that's doing non-fiction and another one doing giftable books low and medium content calling books gag Gift those kind of things right should everyone focus on Q4 equally or are there some niches that just does nothing doing Q4 I would hesitate to say there are nishas who do absolutely nothing because as you outlined at the beginning more people are on Amazon more people are just just generally shopping they're not specifically shopping for books they're

just generally shopping for presents but things for themselves things for you know as gifts all sorts And so they're just more likely to buy you know of course giftable books of course those you know types of you know would you rather books or the you know coloring books uh you know children's gifts Etc of course but also you know if they're having a some time off during Christmas maybe they'll buy a gift for themselves maybe it's you know a mystery or a thriller or something so I think most if not all niches will see an

Increase of some sort but some will see significant increases like you know 5x 10x like the ones I'm mentioning just now coling books Etc yeah I agree I think most people will go and buy those giftable books so like the most you know increase in sales will happen in that Niche but that doesn't mean it's absolutely zero uh effect you know the Q4 effect on other niches like I was in a niche in non-fiction space where it didn't see much Q4 boost but I saw some Like a little bit right so I think a lot

of people would just buy non- giftable books you know during Christmas like there are some people out there so everybody should at least try and get their portion of Q4 boost I would say and so these strategies I think it would be important but do you think so within the Q4 space right uh what are some major events major holidays that people should focus on right so of course we've got um events like Black Friday Cyber Monday probably Black Friday more than Cyber Monday but again it's it's a like a little preview of what happens

at Christmas time where um and we saw this um fairly recently with prime day as well where it just more people are online they're doing their shopping and they're just more likely to say oh well we'll we'll pick that up as well where um you know some uh a um phenomena called you know price anchoring happens where people are more likely to buy um Cheaper items when they're um already buying more expensive items so normally I mean if they're on Amazon and they're buying something that's like $50 then a book that's you know $9.99 feels

a lot cheaper because they've just bought something that's already 50 like okay well we'll pick that up as well so it's just more likely to happen as opposed to them going on Amazon and thinking well which 9.99 book do I buy this one or that one or that One it's more of an Impulse buy just because they're on Amazon buying other products and of course you know you know times like Cyber Monday they're likely to be more expensive than books makes sense so Christmas is obviously the biggest but there are Black Friday Cyber Monday you

know other holidays that you can also see a boost there but going into Christmas right what are some big mistakes you see people making uh when when it comes to Like approaching you know especially Christmas Q4 in general uh that people should avoid mistakes I think it's you know doing more of the same that they did throughout the year without you know focusing in without optimizing their pages so if you are in a giftable niche and and your books make sense as you know one of the common keywords that's used is Stu stocking stuffers so

like are you actually using that keyword or Are you just relying on the keyword that's been running all throughout the year so there are certain you know gift related or Christmas related keywords that you should start to pursue and only pursue them during Christmas so make sure that you you know change the your targeting change the the way that you approach um your keyword selection and then also I see you know again just relying on what's worked for you throughout the rest of the year and you Know of course you should continue to do that

but also and focus more on um those keywords but also improving your uh book detail page where there's an opportunity and of course now with A+ content now with video ads as well this is one of the major things that I was um going to discuss is take the opportunity now as we have more access to um creatives to images to videos to be able to connect with the customer to present your book in light of either a Gift or you know uh connected to Christmas basically um and so if you're just keeping your existing

ads running without you know renewing your ad strategy specifically for CRI I think that would be the most crucial mistake and my biggest advice is use the sponsored brand images use the sponsor Brands video that we now have access to to portray your book as a good gift or just in some way psychologically connected to Christmas so just make it Like a Christmas themed video so so people will say okay well this a book might be a good Christmas present and then more much more likely to buy so and then as we mentioned running out

of cash of course you know this is the the main period you want to focus on so make sure that you can uh budget correctly for that yeah that's that's actually an interesting point that you brought up that I never thought of is the strategy of like using video ads uh and kind of Using a Christmas themed video you know around your book so that you can kind of tie your book into that Christmas like gift shopper mindset or people scrolling through Amazon and searching for that right so that's actually pretty cool um the the

reason why I asked obviously is the most common mistake that I see people make is they run out of budget before like the peak the best time to to run as or just Market which are like the last couple weeks of Before Christmas Right um is that correct whereas like the last two weeks or so is the the very very best um period like the biggest sale usually come from that period or do you see it's a different period yeah absolutely so um most purchases will happen right at the end so normally if um you've

ever seen you know like a a countdown timer on any website and just even outside of Amazon most purchases will happen just as the clock is sticking to to zero and on Amazon it Usually happens in the last few days before the delivery date changes to after Christmas so what you'll notice on uh on all pages is the delivery um on the right hand side so or if you're scrolling down on mobile there'll be a delivery message saying delivers before Christmas or in time for Christmas in Bow and green and then at some point it

will just switch into bold and red and says delivers after Christmas at which point you'll see a significant decrease In in everything because know Christmas shopping is finished so around week two of December to about the 20th of December is when we'll see the major Peak when you know ad spend increases everything actually acost usually drops so the efficiency of your ad the um net profitability is usually the best at that period when people are just much more likely to actually make the purchase as opposed to window shopping earlier on in you know November or

early December makes sense so basically from week two of December up to December 20th is the most profitable time where you want to save as much of your budget to allocate towards that period um yeah speaking of budget right what are some like points the biggest points you know regarding the budget category that people should understand what are some tips on that that you can share sure so I mean if you're looking at it on a yearly overview you Probably um better allocating the majority of your budget to Q4 so those three months and then

you know if we managing you know at the campaign level of course you can set the budget at for each campaign so I would advise increasing your budgets for your main campaigns that you've identified throughout September and October as your main profitable campaigns you increase them by 50 to 100% just to make sure you don't run out of budget at the campaign Level as opposed to you know your cash flow so um you know it's of course it'll happen at you know some random time in the day you might not be you know in your

Amazon ads console 247 so just in increase those ahead of time of course you can use rules as well so within the uh console you can set you know some rule to say okay well increase the budget by you know 50% 100% if the a cost is below you know 50% or something or 45% whatever your setting might be And so that you know it will um capitalize on the sales if your performance is good but then you know it won't increase the budget if the acost is high for some reason so there are some

fail saves so you can um benefit from those automations that are inbuilt into the Amazon ads console so essentially increase the budget by 50 to 100% uh or even more if you want to go ham with it uh especially towards the end of Q4 right in regards to adjusting The budget um do you still kind of follow the you know or adjusting the bidding right so like you know we we're always optimizing the bids increasing or decreasing the bids based on the a cost that we're getting do you still follow the same strategy of like

bidding little by little or do you go more drastic so that you can kind of adjust quicker you know for the Q4 like hectic period I think you can still stick to the same incremental changes if your Incremental changes are like you know 3 5 8 cents right so over the course of a few days if you're changing it you know 8 cents 8 cents 8 cents every day then the um you know those changes will build up but if we're talking about it you know take take one level you know zoom out slightly basically

so we should be looking at something like a 30 to 50% increase on your top performing keywords as compared to you know sort of in December As compared to September or October spending so you know if your bid is you know 70 cents in September or October then it should be probably over a dollar on your main keywords just to be able to compete just to make sure you don't lose out and um if you are able to secure the you know those top of search or you know top of sponsor Brands U placement which

is above the fold which is the first thing that people see then you know you'll be in the best position to Capitalize on those December sales okay so increase your bids by 30 to 50% on the top performing keywords uh the ones that are doing really really well what about like the the bidding strategy right there's the fix bids up and down down only you know do you do anything there that's different yeah absolutely so this is a good opportunity so if you do have a bit more room in your cash flow then use I

mean normally what I would say say is you know use Down only throughout the year if you're you know very sure or would like to go a little bit more aggressively on certain keywords then you can use fixed bits or if you're just starting out and launching there are you know times to use that in this case I would go for the up and down bid strategy on your main campaigns and uh what I would normally do is if we have some main keywords like stocking stuffers like you know your Christmas Themed keywords then for

those have a higher bid have your up and down uh bidding strategy certainly I would do so within um you know week two of December and onwards until the delivery days change on the campaigns that I'm really confident about that I definitely want to push or you know the keywords that I definitely want to rank high for because then it will increase the probability of actually getting those clicks and actually getting those Placements so you'll be using the up up and down bidding uh strategy which essentially you're allowing Amazon to spend more than the bid

that you said right I forgot how much more what was the number again it'll be 100% more 100% more um and that is basically ensuring that you know like you're letting Amazon to spend more if that means that uh your book will be shown like you're getting the Impressions hopefully it clicks correct exactly yeah Okay cool so you You'll be doing that for your top performing book top performing campaigns uh to really try and scale that do you have any other tip um in terms of like dispending you know the budget uh category that we're

talking about right now yeah so just planning forwards really um because as we mentioned we don't want to run out of budget in December so um the idea there is of course you know to understand okay how much did you Spend in August and September and then understand how much are you likely going to need for all of Q4 and possibly even January as well depending on your books um type where if you are in like a New Year's resolution Niche or you know sort of sort your finances out sort your you know lose weight

those types of you know quit smoking those types of niches actually um January may be a better time for you even than Christmas so January may be included in your you know quote Unquote Q4 um so you might need to include that in your projections so understand how much in total you have um to allocate to ads make sure that you Pace your spend in October and November not to overreach to then find yourself uh in a difficult position in December or January Yeah so basically pacing yourself uh not spending all your budget before the

peak December period which people I think understand but you know the question is like exactly how much Should they spend like how do they calculate you know how much they should spend in September then how much to increase in October then November and then exactly how much they should have on December right like the exact numbers or the calculation I think that's where most people get stuck and you know they're curious how to to kind of calculate that um do you have any tips on it yeah absolutely so I've um been asked This question a

number of times and looked at the data for the last three years of Q4 that I have access to so of course this you know anonymized client data and you know all the ads that we've run and have extracted the trends that we see in spend and sales from you know September into Q4 and into January and of course it does vary by book type so you know if you g if your book is a giftable book or a normal one um or like a regular book um so in order to provide A little bit

better guidance than just saying it's going to increase and so it's talk well by how much you know where when is it going to increase more or less um I've prepared a little calculator or an estimator that should help answer this question and of course this is an just an estimate if your um if your book is stronger you might see a um slightly higher increase these is of course you know average data but I think It's a good um you know rule of thumb to just budget using this estimator and if you have um

you know a good idea of how much you've spent in or going to spend in September or have already spent in August perhaps then you should be able to use this estimator to plot out and then to budget forwards make sure you don't uh run out in December or January Yeah so basically uh yvon created a uh calculator or estimator which is a website I'll leave A link below this video so you guys can or the viewers can go and check it out but essentially it's pretty self-explanatory I'm looking at it right now you can

uh select whether your book is regular book type or giftable book type you put your ad spent and your how much sales you're getting from the book uh for the current month or September and then it'll kind of spit out how much you should allocate for October November December how much you should expect uh In terms of sales obviously it's not like you know you can't follow that formula exactly but it's a it's a good way to plan it out right so I'll leave a link below this thank you for making this um I do

have a question though so you know yes people should expect a higher a cost for these Peak periods but like how much high of an AC cost should they expect I guess this calator that you created does show like a cost estimate so should people just go off of This or uh do you have a general rule for it right so this this will vary quite a bit depending on how um how much competition there is in your keyword for your book I mean how strong your book is um going into it so you know

if you're launching a new brand of course you should expect you know much higher acos than somebody who's been around for three years and you know has secured that top position so This um the the I think the same rules of thumb that you use throughout the year can apply with you know an added sort of relative 20 or 30% um like um margin on top of your normal allocation so let's say you know okay let's actually give some numbers so if you you know your break even acost is let's say 42% and let's say

that you allow up to you know 55 % and that's your um you know through through some Previous data including your organic sales of course you can't forget about those so you know you may be um in a slightly high competition Niche when you need to run at a slightly elevated a cost like more than your break even to get a better net profitability so this is one thing um that I often say not just in Q4 is not to get focused in on just one metric and AOS is of course the metric that most

people understand I gu it's very straightforward but also Attach like you know attach on to twoo strongly when it's the one metric that of tells them the whole story it doesn't it's just one piece of the puzzle you need to consider your organic sales your organic indexing um the time of the year when you know seasonality you know yes there's Christmas but there's also you know other Seasons throughout the year so the um you know considering all all of those things we have our 42% break even Um book we are normally happy to go up

to 55% and in this case you know adding a know 20 or 30% relative increase onto that okay you might bring that up to 65% if you're going into Christmas because you will see cpc's increase you will see you know increased demand you will see increased competition because people know that Christmas is coming and they need to get their books into a good position and of course you know if You're a little bit more aggressive before Christmas and you get that um top of search placement you get good indexing it becomes much more difficult to

then you dislodge that top listing quickly which is why you see some books that like no matter what you do will just always be in position one because they're sitting there you know with 8,000 reviews and they've been there for four years it's it's it's just not going to happen overnight so we want to try And uh create that sort of effect so you might accept the slightly higher as I said going from 55 threshold to a 65 threshold as the maximum that you would accept um for that small period because then in December you

will very likely see a significant drop and it all um comes back as increased net profits because if you go in too conservatively if you just apply the same rules or even just stick to your break even a cost then okay your eyes might might be more Efficient but you will just know be able to spend because many other people are bidding much higher and okay your book might sit there at the bottom of page one or even page two or three and just won't get the exposure yeah the last thing you want is like

a 20% a cost but you're only spending like a 100 bucks right yeah I think people so 30 uh 20 30% increase in a cost is something you want to expect but yeah the biggest thing is that People need to understand that you know you're making a lot more organic sales by running as so if you're not uh yeah making positive Roi directly from as you still you should be looking at a entire thing so not just from ads but how much organic sales you're getting by running ads and you know how much ads costs

depends on how many other people are bidding for the same keyword because it's an auction system so of course Q4 the bids are going to increase which Means the a cost most likely will increase however your organic sales should also increase as well so you should be seeing a positive return if you do everything right and that's like you want to see it from a big picture like that instead of oh my God my acost is a little higher let me tone back the the spend right so that totally makes sense um regarding the like

the best campaigns that people should run or the structure they should have you know what Do you recommend because there's so many different campaigns that you can set up right but we talked about earlier how we kind of want to focus on the 8020 you know have a lean approach um Zone in on the ones that are working so what kind of setup do you do you recommend in these things sure so normally I would recommend a lean structure where we have you know one campaign one ad group one as so it's just just a

linear 111 all The way down if you imagine it as like a hierarchy and then something like 15 keywords per campaign that you really focus on I mean maybe throughout the rest of the year you can have you know a few more keywords maybe up to 30 35 um but yeah we certainly don't want to be running with you know 300 keywords in a campaign and you know M and mixing everything like your Kindle and your paperback in the same campaign or you know having 10 different ad groups in One campaign because then it just

becomes much more difficult to control and for those keywords that you really want to focus on you have very highest priority key words would would recommend creating singles campaigns which uh that linear structure all the way down so one campaign one add group one ad so one as one um so not even one book one as and one keyword so there it might be something like you know you Christmas gift or um you know stock you know was It would you rather stocking stuffers or some real um you know High search volume keyword that you

definitely want to rank for okay create a specific campaign just for that keyword have a higher bid there you can control the placement as well uh specifically so if it's a keyword you might want to increase the um top of search placement multiplier again something like 50 to 100% which would then allow Amazon to bid higher uh at the top of search and you'll be able to Allocate a specific budget just for that keyword and in some cases and run um accounts with this where we'll see you know just one keyword spending you know hundreds

and hundreds of dollars per day literally with just one keyword one just like that that one target one campaign and it'll spend multiples of hundreds every day throughout the December that's crazy so you basically want to be hyperfocused right so you have a lot of people used To teach how in one campaign you want to Target like a thousand keywords um but that doesn't work anymore you want to be hyperfocused so in one campaign you just have one as so not not even putting ebook and the paperback of the same book in the same campaign

you even want to separate those so you want to have a campaign for just a paperback campaign for just ebook and and even the targeting you want to have Max 15 keywords that are hyper relevant to your Book um and if you want to even like scale that you're saying that you can even have a separate campaign targeting literally just one keyword that is literally about your book so like if you have a bedtime Christmas stories uh book and the keyw is like you know bedtime stories for bedtime Christmas stories you just have that one

keyword and that's your campaign and your whole goal is to just rank for that keyword and you know get as many sales and organic sales As uh as possible so um what are the daily budget that you recommend uh for these campaigns especially during for well we would have to look at you okay what's your overall budget is it you know a th000 or is it 10,000 or more Etc but I mean normally as a default figure I would set like a $100 per day as a minimum uh campaign Budget on even on those singles

because as I have seen um keywords that will spend multiples hundreds per day and um in most cases um You might be apprehensive about you know setting a huge budget like on on that campaign and let's say you've got 10 keywords which means you've got 10 of these singles campaigns which means you've got 100 time 10 to ,000 per day budget like very commonly Amazon won't spend the entire budget so it's um pretty safe to set a higher value and I have even done experiment where we would set like 99999 just just just to see

just to try and you know Force it to spend more on a particular keyword and um I mean this this is a technique that sometimes works sometimes doesn't it's a little bit of Hit and Miss but set setting a $100 budget is just to make sure that you don't run out and uh it's usually very safe to do so yeah Amazon doesn't always spend all your budget um $100 a day especially during Q4 it'll be nice to have if you're watching this and you don't have the budget obviously it can be lower It's just a

recommended number right so yeah um regarding the targeting and keywords like do you have any specific keywords just for the holiday season that people should Target or are they targeting basically the same keywords that they're targeting for the entire year you're just focusing on the ones that are converting more during Q4 yep so we've mentioned a few of them like stocking stuffers you know gifts Holiday present um and as you said of course anything to do with with you know specifically with Christmas specifically may you know religious books Etc um so any um keywords that

you think you know can be directly related to know Christmas gift giving winter reading and then of course we spoke about January New Year's resolutions um all of those would be my main recommendations in this case and of course you you have to Tailor them to your book to your Niche uh but you know just think you know how would a customer search for your book if they were searching for it as a gift for somebody else and of course you can use you know to pay tools out there helan 10 you know cerebro magnet

um a lot of the time I just end up using the Amazon suggestions bar and of course you can get you know keyword expanders um extensions for Chrome that give you even more keywords for those but uh a lot of The time their suggestions will give you the most relevant and current keywords that people are using as well so um just have you know spending 10 15 minutes pretending to be your own customer can yield some um you know interesting ideas and then you know you can use those keywords and you know the worst thing

that happens is nothing happens you try a keyword nothing happens okay then you know you just go back to the Drone board try again with a Different one yeah for sure it's all about testing right and obviously like if you start typing in the keyword in the Amazon search bar whatever that's suggested in the drop- down menu is are other books or other keywords people are typing in so those are good wants to Target because other customers are searching for those um you could also go back like a year back to your Q4 data and

see what kind of keywords converted last year so you can try to Target the Same uh for this year my question to you is since you're doing Adroid you're running ads for a lot of people you got a crap ton of data like like your does your client have special access to those data you know of what converted uh in previous Q4 that you apply to your clients you do absolutely yeah absolutely so the software we use internally becomes much more clever and useful the longer you remain a client and the more data it Gathers

because of the way that it makes decision on well first of all which keyword to allocate budget to and then how much data of to use of that particular keyword and in some cases it will go back many months even back to the previous Q4 to see what their performance was and what which keywords were working last year and of course if you've got you know access to that this search term level data if you've been exporting reports um if you don't have Access to a you know a specific software for it then um definitely

have a look at what keywords uh converted well last Q4 you got access to that otherwise it's you know the brainstorming helps but of course yes you within our service then of course if we uh had the client you know for more than 12 months from now then we will have a good amount of data from last Q4 and we'll just go back and say okay this work that that didn't work and of course we can save a lot of time And money on testing and just uh in a lot of cases we'll create Christmas

specific campaigns which we can then just turn back on and um you know profit again as we did last year well hopefully even more yeah that's cool I was just curious because as a client like if you if you did that that be like a you're getting data that you know you're spending 3.5 million a year uh as your advantage right you kind of have that um so uh very very cool and by the way like Ivon is glitching but he's not AI just to mention right because uh we did another interview like this like

a year ago and somebody in the comment said Ivan is AI like no way he's standing for two hours straight not answering these questions or something uh but he's a real guy here so just thought it was funny okay we're got to we we got to think of some recent news item then yeah yeah um so moving on to like the types of ads that you should run and that Works well for Q4 do you have anything specifically like you know sponsored products work well sponsored Brands work well or like how do you approach that

absolutely so you sponsored product I mean normally what we'll see is sponsored products is like 80% of the account most of Brands is the remaining 20 that's the two main categories that we have access to really as KDP iers and so the uh main push I think that most people should start thinking about now And start working on is the sponsor Brands videos because well okay we had sponsor Brands product collections all the time the only difference now going into this Q4 than previous is okay you have to you know upload some images and um

okay as we said make your books more christmy make those images christmy as you going into and you can you know change the creative then you can change it back later if you wish after Christmas finishes and um so you can Keep the same campaigns as if you've already got some sponsored brand product collection campaigns going and you can do same the same thing for videos so the I mean videos have been around now U specifically for KDP for what easily over half a year so you're starting to see more and more of them but

I'm not sure how many people will take the time to recreate their videos as you know Christmas themed or even maybe they don't have to have you know sort of you Know Santa Claus is trying you know all over their videos but you know an image of a person giving a book as a gift to another person just connecting the you know the act of gift giving with their book in a video format because I think normally people will create videos to try to showcase the content of their book as opposed to how the book

might be used or or useful to the person so just have you think about that you don't have to make it super you Know Christmas themed although that might work for for some books especially the more more the kids books but just connect them more with uh the uh idea of giving so you know more specifically when you go to create your videos I would recommend keeping the length to like 15 maybe 30 seconds Amazon actually recommends uh keeping the to 15 seconds so making them very Snappy because people are just scrolling through the page

they're not going to Stop for five minutes watch your video I think you'd probably be lucky if they stopped for 30 seconds to watch it to the end so make sure that the key message is delivered within like the first like even like three maybe five seconds is that's normally how long you have to like capture the attention and hopefully they'll watch at least 15 seconds maybe 20 seconds so you of course focus on the customer pain points demonstrating the value that the book Will give them and can connect psychologically with them and and um

the thing that we see is sponsor Brands and videos you know sub um type of sponsored brands are normally a bit more expensive cpcs you know each click is more expensive than sponsored products so what we would do is identify and do the testing on sponsored products because it's cheaper get the profitable keywords and then apply them to sponsored Brands and In those you know more specific more interesting campaigns let's say but the more creative campaigns because we don't want to do the testing in sponsored Brands as that will just cost us more it just

take longer as well so ideally what we want to have is use a mix of um campaign types a mix of AD ad types so that you can have your book I know at the top of search or sorry above the top of search as a sponsored brand product collection with a Christmas related Image customer Scrolls down or looks down slightly they see your sponsored product ad then they see your organic listing then they scroll down slightly in the video usually the first video appears about halfway down the page they should see your book once

again and then occasionally it they might see it twice so that Amazon does um sometimes have the same video twice and then one sort of like ninja trick here is to create um so this this this somewhat flies in the Face of advice that you would get for sponsored products where normally it's like well it becomes difficult to analyze if you split your campaigns and have the same keyword in multiple campaign is not a good idea for sponsored product yes I agree with that however on this uh in this scenario for sponsored brand video you

should create the same um keywords use the same keywords across multiple campaigns but just have a different video in them so For one you can ab test or get as close to a proper AB test is possible on Amazon and because Unfortunately they don't have a proper a testing fun feature but the way that Amazon selects which products or which uh campaigns to put forwards then gives you just one extra chance to get onto page one so they'll see one video halfway down the page then from one campaign and scroll down they see another video

for the same book for the Same keyword just with a different video from a different campaign and you know hopefully it's it's not too much of a uh you know news for people watching the more touch points you can have with the customer the more times they see your brand they see your book they see your logo they see your you know how how your uh covers look across the whole brand the more touch points you have the more Likely they are to buy to actually click through and to consider purchasing so if we can

get all of those touch points then that's it you've won that keyword for sure that's very interesting we touched on a lot of things uh you're basically saying you're you recommend targeting the same keyword in a bunch of different campaigns sponsored products sponsor uh Brands video ads so like when people search for that keyword you could literally have like three of your ads Plus a organic listing so like four spots on page one uh basically your book uh being shown so have more touch points there you also touched on uh video ads and targeting the

same keyword but in multiple different video ads testing out different video types which is also interesting and just running video ads in general because like I think a lot of people don't even know that they can run video ads uh we got an email saying yeah you can start running video ads like six Months ago and not a lot of people have been talking about it since then I think people think it's still not a lot right so um video ads is something that's super interesting especially with your strategy of making the video kind of

about the like the the holiday or whatever that's happening so like during Christmas you're going to have you're promoting the same book but you're going to have like more of a christmy Vive like kind of portraying that it's you Can give give it to somebody as a gift and then New Years come and you can literally promote the same book but in a motivational tone of a video so it's like a you know New Year's resolution kind of thing which is super interesting uh that's a really really good tip there um so moving forward uh

let's talk about like how do you measure performance if the campaign is going well if it's not going well adjusting the campaign you know what are some tips And things that people should kind of keep in mind here sure so I would recommend monitoring more frequently so if you're normally checking your campaigns like you know maybe once a week or once every you know 10 days or whatever setting you use like come in instead of you know once a week maybe three times a week maybe even daily especially as we get into the key period

of of December week two that you know the last sort of 10 days before the Shipping changes come in every day like add negatives you know change your bids double check everything and you know you you'll be able to then uh have much better control and hopefully get better results so recommend um I mean very commonly you'll see last 30 days as the date range that people will use in a campaign just analyze you know every day or every every week or something that'll come in okay let's just look at the last 30 days make

your decisions based on That out recommend shortening that period because of course you'll see a more of an increase in CPC more variation between like the middle of November and the middle of December because let's say you're coming in on the you 10th of December and starting your review and the data is from the 10th of November like those two periods are very different in in the environment that Amazon is experiencing so your decisions are going to be a little bit Off so shorten that period maybe even you know looking at the last sort of

you know one to three days because you can sort of adjust bits you can adjust them back later so instead of focusing on last 30 days take like the last 10 days maybe even the last seven days and then you know spend the extra time look at various periods to see what you know what is happening more recently with your keyword and I think that will give you a better insight into what to do With it so of course you know using your a cost bit increases bit bit decreases metrics as we um have discussed

already and um you know just keeping your finger on the pulse a little bit more during that period because it does things do happen quicker and um yeah yeah yeah that makes sense um it makes sense that you shouldn't be looking at the past 30 days AC cost which is standard uh for the rest of the Year but it makes sense that during Q4 you know you shouldn't do that because the activity that's happening on Amazon right like the consumer activities during November and during December is completely different so like if you're in mid nove

uh mid December and then you do the past 30 days so you're like factoring in the data from mid November or end of November it's going to kind of skew what's actually happening right now for that specific week because the last Two weeks of or not the last two weeks but from you know the last two weeks leading up to December 20th uh the activity on Amazon is just going to be completely different right so you want to be looking at the past seven days like you said which makes sense and you want to kind

of bid things change quick during that period so you want to come in every single day and you know adjust the biz and uh make sure everything's working well and whatnot so um good tip There in terms of like expectations uh what are some expectations people should have in terms of like how much should the biz or you know uh like how much should the biz increase and also like you know would the conversion rate increase or decrease how does that work right so there will be a gradual increase in cpcs and we've seen this

you know from basically every year for the last and a half I mean the data that I have access to and the data That I've reviewed from other companies that publish this type of data normally will see an increase in cpcs and something like you know 30 to 40% uh increase from you know before the Christmas period so in sort of September October versus December 40% increase in cpcas and so there you can think about well if the CPC is going to be higher that means you'll need to bid higher to be able to compete

for Amazon to even let you in the auction as you mentioned Of course it's an auction system and okay if you're bidding higher you need to have e you know either a higher price or a higher conversion rate so this is um something that you might want to you know if you're maybe a little a bit more comfortable with the numbers a bit more advanced with your ads and look at the conversion rate look at your price and think well maybe um it does make sense to increase it slightly just to improve your overall profitability

And of course if you know people especially during that um period of of you know week two of December and depending on your Niche so if you're in like you know coloring books where the expectation is for prices to be on the cheaper end maybe even $9.99 or so there's always that threshold when you get get to go from 9 to 10 uh maybe it's not so easy to do but for other niches where they're a little bit less price sensitive then increasing your price Increasing your bids um will then put you in a much

better more competitive position but still keep you um you know in a good level of profitability because people will be probably less price sensitive as they just need to make the purchase especially as we get very close to Christmas so and a strategy is you as we get very very close so like 15th to the 20th those last like 5 days when people are just more likely to make an Impulse Buy when they just need to buy something and just you know get their Christmas shopping done increase your price because they're likely to be much

less uh price sensitive then yeah cool trick there so basically increasing your price on the last five days or so because there are more impulse buys happening in general though do you recommend decreasing the price to kind of have this you know angle that hey I I got a good product and it's Cheaper than everybody else or increasing the price so that you look like a premium product right because people automatically assume that hey you know it's it's pricier than everybody else so it must be better right and also you have higher profit margin which

approach do you recommend in general it sounds like more in the the pricing it higher approach I think it's is to do with timing so earlier we were talking about increasing the price but at the End of December as we get very close to you know those impulse buy period periods and earlier than this I think it's probably better to be price competitive again it depends on your Niche but the real answer and what I would actually do is test it right now I mean we are still early enough before Q4 okay see how well

you can do at a you know a regular price then try and go up a dollar two up $2 and just see how your book performs see what how the Conversion rate changes and of course you know testing your price extensively for you know three or four months might not be um feasible might not be even be a good idea because you're comparing like let's say you know prummer to posts summer um it's a different environment so maybe not um really a valid test but doing a few price changes you know a week at this

price another week at this price another week at a third price and seeing how the conversion rate changes Will give you a um a better picture and of course you have to think about your net profitability and not just focus on AOS and not just look at the one metric but look at it as a whole thing so a lot of the time people say um use the word tacos so the total aost right where you'll consider not only the ads portion but also the organic portion so your ad spend generates ad sales but also

generates organic sales so you have to think about the whole picture and it's a Little bit confusing sometimes how to calculate that total l cost so what I normally recommend is just look at the net profits that's easy you've got your royalties you've got your ad spend take one from the away from the other you have your net profits I mean of course yes you have other costs in the business Etc but that's like the easier way to think about tacos so do your price testing look at your net profits in those periods and you

know that will be The easiest way to identify which price works best for you yeah yeah really simple it's just how much you're making overall minus how much you're spending on as the net profit if if you're seeing net profit um as are most likely worth it as long as the a cost is like not insanely high right if it's like slightly you know breaking even or losing it it's it's okay and obviously you can test it out you can turn off your ads completely and see if like how Much revenue drops you know organic

sales drops and then see if like you were actually doing something with ads most likely you are right that's why we recommend you know um running ads even if you're just breaking even or something on the ad side acost side uh because of the organic sales but um think for that one before we move off I think the the is the difficulty with that is your it will give you an indication but I think if you've been running ads for you know months before that then you turn them off for like a week to see

okay what portion of my uh overall royalties were coming as a result of ads I think a lot of it is just built up velocity so because you've been running ad for a long time you've got a good organic uh indexing and of course you know as you get ad sales on certain keywords that will spill over into organic indexing organic sales so the Way I imagine it is like you've been sort of you know uh traveling at you know 100 miles an hour and and speeding up using your ads you turn off the engine

your car is still going 100 Mil hour and it start to slow down slowly and your organic indexing will start to decrease but it's not like a you know zero to 100 or um it's more um you would need to run that test for like a month or something to really check how and then see what the numbers are like at The end of that month versus a month before when you were running ads or just before like the week before you turned your ads off and then a month later and see how that compares

that would be a more of a fair test yeah I should have clarified as well because I completely agree you really should not be turning off as it's just more so for those who really don't believe as are doing anything or they think they're losing money you know because the the a cost is High like if they really want to do it yeah like maybe turn it off and see the difference but you probably shouldn't if you if you want to maximize the results um yeah probably do that type of experiment outside of Q4 yeah

I'd be very scared to do that right now yeah yeah all right cool so we talked about a lot of things we talked about um how you want to concentrate on you know bestselling books keyword uh creating separate Campaigns really focusing on the 8020 right instead of testing a bunch at least outside of September right now is the time to test and know if you're in September watching this uh but from October November December you want to focus on the ones that are working you o want to monitor uh closely you know the data closely

uh and you want to kind of check on your ads a lot more frequently um and also couple other things right like you know when so this Is a good question for you when should you chill out and you know dial back the ads so you're going hard leading up to December or leading up to to Christmas when exactly is a point where sales slows down and how much do you drop like what's the strategy there yeah absolutely so you might recall ear I was talking about the the green text turning into red text when

your delivery changes for to after Christmas so you can check it I mean Okay so unless you live you know somewhere that's extremely remote um you can normally set your uh location to be like okay just just set it to New York or something and if you're looking at amazon.com right just set your location to New York any where and then see the delivery dates on your products on your books once it changes to red and the deliveries after Christmas that's when you'll see everything plummet the like all of the spend all all of the

demand I Me because of course you know people are doing most of the shopping specifically for Christmas and I don't know I mean of course you know people have different um like rhythms but normally at Christmas time once I finished my Christmas shopping I'm probably not really interested in in doing any more you know shopping on Amazon I'm just more sort of you know celebrating Christmas with family I'm you know doing something else at that time so I'm very unlikely to Just continue um and think about okay you know things I need to buy for

after Christmas so the as soon as it turns to you know red text delivers after Christmas you can drop the bids you can drop the budget significantly for you know basically your entire account I don't recommend setting you know shutting everything off completely which I know is you know some advice that goes around where okay you know Christmas is finished just turn your whole account Off stop advertising completely and you know wait for the new year or maybe even you know past the new year maybe week one of or week two of New Year or

something normally what I would do is yes you can decrease the budget but I mean normally if you drop the bid significantly by like 50% or even even more 70% or something very very low uh then you're still running some ads it it's sort of easier to keep everything afloat and then um because you've Dropped your bids very low you don't need to come in and monitor that often of course your spend is going to go down and you know the activity in the account is going to go down that means there's fewer things happening

there's you know less for you to manage at that time so you can set the bits very low set the budget low just let it Coast until the new year and of course as we mentioned before if your uh book is relevant for New Year's resolutions or then all of Those sort of you know sort your life out style um books you know whether it be money management or losing weight or um quitting smoking or alcohol or something like that um then for those books I would then be become a lot more aggressive a little

bit earlier just before you get into the new year and nor normally what we'll see and from the data that I've seen is 2nd of January for those books is that that's like Christmas for those books because you You'll see you know 10x um in some accounts just on that one day uh in terms of sales I guess it might be to do with the time that Amazon prints and ships the book because that's when they attribute their sale um so I'm not not sure if many people are aware of that when they add no

they'll attribute the click straight away so you'll see the click but if there's for some reason like a delay in printing and shipping you won't See the sale even if it's actually a sale so once the book is printed and shipped by Amazon then you'll see the the sale in your ads dashboard so um this is why it's worthwhile coming in more often and managing more during these busy periods because you you might see you know quite a shift in sales if there is a printing delay for some reason yeah so I've just covered like

three or four different topics there but uh hopefully it's somewhat useful It's all good um I think you mentioned some cool tips number one change your location to something like New York so you can see like the delivery uh I guess like if Amazon's showing you know is it going to be delivered by Christmas or is it going to be delivered after Christmas if your books are starting to show up as delivered after Christmas it's probably going to convert a lot left so you can Dial Dial back your as uh for those ones and you

recommend like 5050 70% dialing Back uh but not completely turning it off right which which makes sense as well because like a lot of books people transition into just buying for the New Year's resolution you know as long as it's not like Christmas specific books um so yeah and even if it's like Christmas specific books specific books people could buy after Christmas there are some Maniacs out there right I had some Christmas books that are sold after Christmas you know believe it or not so You never want to you never want to off essentially uh

but going into January New Year's resolution you said something interesting where you said January 2nd is the the peak so you said sales drop off after but that's when the biggest sales happen so like leading up to January 2nd uh for those books uh you said the sales will go up okay cool yeah it's um a lot of let me let me clarify one thing let me clarify one thing so um let's look at like okay week two December into J and like the month there so into middle of January so middle of December to

middle of January so we'll see across the board we'll see an increase in sales everything conversion rates um increase some you know very significantly in some cases even up to like 3x conversion rates increases um in into Christmas then so the the delivery date changes then everything drops then for that little period after Christmas like so maybe like around the 23rd of December to about the let's say like the 30th maybe 29th will be a very low period for almost all niches and then for most books that are not are not relevant for um January

New Year's resolutions then they'll start to pick up slowly then into as we get into the new year into January then you can start sort of head back to your normal um out side of queue for more conservative advertising approach like normal advertising but for books that are Relevant um for you know January New Year resolutions for those you should start to advertise much more aggressively before like on the 29th or 30th so that you can get good positioning on the first and second and then like the first week of January because that's when most

of your sales are going to happen so the the lull happens for everybody like the dip the drop happens across the board but then New Year's resolutions books advertise More aggressively a little bit earlier okay hopefully that's clear Yeah so basically a week around the week after December 25th you should still kind of allocate some budget if you got some new year's resolution type of books precisely y right okay cool um are there anything else you want to cover you know uh before we end this in terms of any tips strategies uh regarding what we

talked about Today yeah I think the thing to remember is you know the we've touched on it a number of times throughout this conversation is the interplay between ads and organic sales and your indexing and of course there will be some keywords that are specifically the Christmas that you will be index for that won't really be beneficial down the road like okay nobody's really searching for stocking stuffers you know in end of January uh in February but throughout That period of um like largely increased sales and increased activity of December you will also get extra

indexing on just more keywords overall so Amazon I imagine as like like like a mind map where one keyword is connected to another 10 keywords like like a little spider web as you know one as you get more sales on one keyword then Amazon starts to associate your book with more related keywords and so it's like the you know tide raising All Ships um idea Where if you're getting more sales throughout December you're likely to get more long-term benefits from organic sales into the rest of the year like into q1 as well so this is

you know an added benefit of going a little bit more aggressive in Q4 that most people Overlook or just don't know about so um remember that ongoing and a KnockOn effect of your organic sales and of course if you've got you know a bit of time after Q4 finishes then just take You know maybe I don't know how long it'll take maybe it take an hour or two just download all of your search to reports from the entire fq4 and just spend some time in Excel looking at which keywords worked which ke didn't work and

you know what what your strategy was and how you might want to plan for the next Q4 because as we were talking about earlier where we use this data from last Q4 for the current Q4 for our clients you can do the same Thing looking to next year if you've just spent you know however many thousands on your ads over these few months Gathering data doing experiments and seeing whether you know these stocking stuffer keywords work for you and if they do great you don't need to do that research again you'll just be able to

copy and paste that performance to next year sort of you know put that file away somewhere to open around the same time next year yeah makes sense Every year you know so basically like once you do the research for this year next year uh during the Q4 you've already done the research this year so you can just use a data obviously you want to kind of refresh the research but you know a lot of it is done and you can use it for next year and the following year typically people are using the same keywords

same kind of book sell right there's nothing new most of the time so it it it makes sense um most of my Students in my course that are extremely successful doing four five six figures a month they all went through like learning ads you know if you're a beginner watching this could be overwhelming right but it's one of the most important skills to understand understanding marketing buyer psychology uh and yeah like going through this obviously it's it's extremely important I think learn these kind of skills and then once you learn It you can decide whether

you want to Outsource like for me you know like I understand as I know the basics but I choose not to do it I prefer prer not to do it and that's why I I work with you so you can handle everything right so you know if you're watching this once again you know the videos are here to for you to learn but if you prefer not to do it if you're watching this you're like ah this is too much I don't even want to deal with it you could Outsource It to a service like

as Droid if people want to work with you where can they go and what's the process like like do you take everybody or do they have to have a call with you how does that work sure so thank you for that and um yeah of course we've been working together for quite a while now and um if people do want to reach out to first of all just understand whether or not this is a right fit for them this is the right decision for them um go to adsd Droid.com so very straightforward uh at the

bottom of the page there's a little application form of course you know read through all of our information look through the testimonials Etc and um have a look at all of the you know terms and conditions Etc everything is explained there fill out the application form which will give us a little bit of an idea as to where you are so you know what your books are like we'll take a look at them And what your you know history and spent has been like so there is a little bit of an application process we will

reach out to any we'll reply and um connect with everyone who reaches out to us and in some cases we'll set up a call and you know give some feedback and if it's the right fit we'll go and work uh with some people and then if it's possibly too early for you we do have some you know other options which may be a better fit if you're not quite ready for the Fully done for you service where we'll you know do all the keyword research do all the campaign creation and you know use our in-house

proprietary software on your account you know assign a human account manager so we'll just do everything and a little bit more um we'll do a little bit of coaching Etc as well um throughout the process so if that maybe is a little bit too early for you then we do have some you know simpler steps and in some cases where it May not you know none of those options are right it will actually just be a strategy call with me personally where we'll look at the account we can look at the books you can ask

you know any questions you want to get more familiar either with Q4 or you know outside or wherever it might be and we'll strategize um as how to best approach your account so that three months later 6 months later at some point you might be in a position where you'll work with Us full-time or you know sort of um or one of the other options that we offer so have a look at the page uh there should be a link somewhere below the video and um if you want to work with us or just want

to explore what options are't there for you and you know what the best steps might be best for your specific account then uh it be fantastic to hear from you yeah sounds good I will you know of course leave a link uh in the description below so people can go And check it out and then talk to you from there I will also leave a link to the calculator that you made specifically for this video which is pretty cool um where people can calculate the budget uh for Q4 um and do you have any final

thoughts you want to share before we end this let's see I think we we've covered a lot here let's see a lot of the times and and I do get the question of you know just tell me that like the one thing the top three Things or something so out of everything that we've discussed if we were to distill the like the key takeaways is use video ads like let's say let's let's try and list like like top three things let's see for one use video ads and make them Christmas specific make them gifting specific

because this is still a fairly new ad type and normally with ad type new ad types new platforms they are tend to be cheaper and convert better because they're just new people Are just not used to seeing that so use video app ads definitely um look out for your cash flow like use the calculator it is a Rough Guide of course but it should give you an idea of your progression and you are very likely to spend more as you go into Q4 so use the calculator and then um optimize the customer Journey so we

haven't really touched it and like looked at it from this point of view but if you're looking for a Christmas gift and you see a Christmy sort of looking ad for a book and you click in and there's no mention of Christmas whatsoever it it's a little disconnect so optimize your description your A+ content your images there to make it relevant so if you've updated your videos and everything is great you can use some of those same imagery in your A+ content and just make it like a continuous Journey so that the customer feels like

okay I know I'm in the right place and they just basically the more Sure they are the more comfortable and sort of like safe they feel the more like they are to buy and the more familiar they're with you so cash flow video ads optimizing your entire book detail page and the whole customer Journey for Christmas and you can always then change it back in January those are great tips especially the one where you want to follow through with the product listing having like the christmy vibe A+ content if the video as Is also christmy

which makes sense um so glad we covered this but overall I think we covered a lot of new tips and strategies people never knew so uh that was really cool I appreciate everything you do as always you know thanks for doing these videos a lot of uh my students love you you know they work with you obviously I just did an interview with uh another student Dave uh which I'll be releasing soon as for the success A Student Success case study Interview series that we do and Dave works with you and he's he's at like

16k net profit on track to do like 20 and trying to get to 100K uh Revenue in in December so yeah really so the calculator that I've prepared for this is basically the same calculator that we've used for his account and what we've been using throughout and so we're using that that's the plan is you know if he has his goals with ly gos I think the you Know the progress that we've seen it is doable so it's exactly the same strategy that we're using for him um you you can have access to and try

and the plan for your ad spend going forwards nice awesome well uh once again yeah thanks for doing this I hope everybody enjoyed this video all the links and resources will be under in the description below and uh thank you for watching I'll see you guys in the next video