@Marzena Krawczyk Well said!

@Laura Diaz Definitely switching between strategies very often is the worst option :) If you stick to one strategy and you know what you're doing, you'll be good! In my approach I'm NOT relying on auto ads primarily, but manual keywords. Auto ads serve as 'discovery ads' helping to uncover profitable targets (keywords and ASINS) to scale them. In the long term auto ads can be disabled and I keep the campaigns with profitable targets only. Or they may run in the long term if they generate good results.

@Igor O Low conversion rate like 5% can still be profitable, if we manage to find low-CPC keywords. It's a balance of these 3 factors: 1) Royalty per sale 2) CPC (cost per click) 3) CVR (conversion rate) e.g. Low royalty and high CPC requires great CVR but if we have moderate royalty and low CPC we can accept low CVR I created a spreadsheet to calculate different scenarios for any book. If anyone is interested it's available in my classroom: https://www.skool.com/publisher-sea-8078/classroom/5afb6478?md=1866cfa61f4b4e65b7fefa96a8a22a8a

@Igor O True. It can be either incorrect targeting (then it is ads problem) or book requires some improvements (cover, listing, social proof etc.)

@Robert Enochs Thanks for the comment. As we had a chance to speak already, I know you're sceptic about running auto ads for brand new books, until Amazon learns what your book is about. In my experience, auto ads can work pretty well in some cases, but they ALWAYS have to be monitored closely, even if the book has long sales history and is ranking high for multiple keywords. Simply because the nature of auto ads - they tend to advertise broadly to wide variety of audiences. I suggest looking ad search terms report, and on that basis assess how relevant are the books and keywords there. On this basis we can cut the spending (negative targeting, reducing bids), or expanding (extracting profitable targets to separate campaigns, raising bids). It doesn't hurt to run auto ads even for new books with low bids initially. Having said that, I rely heavily on broad targeting campaign with limited number of highly relevant keywords. And I totally agree with keeping raising the bids to the targets that generate low impressions (i call them 'untested' targets), until we have meaningfull data to make final decision. And it works even with 'down only' :) But utilising 'fixed' or 'up and down' can speed up that process if you're not afraid of higher spending. Thanks for your input!

@Robert Enochs Sounds good, it would be very interesting to see your results. With auto ads you would probably get huge list of search terms with 1-2 clicks. But if your bids will be really low, it doesn't hurt so much, because your conversion rate doesn't have to be that great. And auto ads can still discover profitable targets, and also let you know how well Amazon indexed your book already. Keep us informed on the results of this test.

@Thomas Juuls Nice, congratulations!

@Igor O You're not being inclusive by creating a coloring book that's not left-handed friendly! 😉

@Igor O