Amazon Advertising: The Machette Effect

Tags

Amazon Advertising, book advertising, book marketing, book promotion, Machete

In my recent post, Amazon Releases Amazon Advertising, I mentioned an app I use called Machete. I promised to expand on that in a future post (i.e. this one).

Machete is an Amazon Advertising (formerly Amazon Marketing Services or AMS) add-on. You install it on your browser and it transparently adds some extra features to your Amazon Dashboard. When I first used it, Machete was little more than a way to track your sales through time and edit multiple keywords at once. Not a game-changer, just some nifty little extras. At $25/month, it wasn’t worth it unless you were constantly tweaking your Ads, which is why I’ve never mentioned it before.

Recently, however, Machete has made two dramatic changes which have led me to this post. The first one was to introduce a great new feature called Bid Optimizer.

1. Bid Optimizer

This lets you optimize your keywords automatically for your Target ACoS (Average Cost of Sale, i.e. how much it costs you to make a sale) or for the desired number of sales per day.

You can optimize the keywords manually or automatically. The only catch is, the keywords need to have displayed enough times to generate data, so it’s best run on older campaigns.

2. Pricing Policy

The second change was an overhaul of their pricing policy. Machete is now free if your monthly sales are under $300, then increases to $10/month for sales up to $1,000. Also, the first month is free, which means you can safely try it out and see if it works for you.

In case you’re wondering, Machete counts monthly income by adding up all income across all AMS and Seller Central accounts that you have used with Machete in the current month. It only counts income from advertising as reported directly by Amazon. Other KDP or Amazon Seller income is not counted, nor is the estimated income from KNP which Machete calculates.

3. Keyword Analytics

Other features Machete offers include a nifty Keywords Analytics tab. This lets you see which keywords are over/underperforming and tweak them accordingly. Rolling the cursor over any of the circles gives you further details on that keyword. However, I’ve found that this feature is now practically obsolete, as auto-optimizing works just as well.

4. Campaign History

This is a feature sorely missing from Amazon Advertising: the ability to see how your tweaks have changed a campaign for better or for worse. For example, in the example below, there is a definite improvement when I implemented the auto-optimize and Bid+ options for that campaign:

5. The Machete/Bid+ Effect

It’s not just the above campaign that has benefited from the auto-optimize/Bid+ options I implemented on September 11th (Bid+ is a new setting offered by Amazon. If you’re unfamiliar with it, read more on Bid+ on my previous post on Amazon Advertising).

The updated campaigns have been running for two weeks now, with a clear effect on my overall sales. Compared to the previous period, you will see how book sales have improved after that date. A more detailed analysis showed that my daily sales have increased by 60% since then!

If you wish to try it out for yourself, just go to the Machete website and register. As I mentioned before, the first month is free, and there is no fee for anyone who makes under $300.

Important Note: The links above are affiliate ones. You pay the same, and I get a rebate for every person who later becomes a paying customer. As always, my recommendation is based solely on how helpful Machete has been for me and how decent their new pricing policy is (if I haven’t used a service I mention in my blog, I make it clear). If you’d rather use a non-referral link, please click here.