4. Does Amazon Use a Relevance Score?
Here’s a thought. Facebook ads have a relevance score. They even tell you what it is, and break it down into granular metrics (quality ranking, engagement rate ranking and conversion rate ranking). Google ads have a relevance score as well. They call it a quality score. Likewise, they tell you what it is.
In both cases, the worse your relevance score the less those PPC platforms show your ad. They do this to provide a better experience for their customers. The better your score, the more they show your ad and the cheaper they make it to deliver the ad. For instance, the cost per click on Google for a highly relevant ad can be discounted as much as 50%.
On both platforms, bid price and relevance score are used in conjunction to determine ad placement. It’s not possible to bid your way to the top.
Amazon has never said they have a relevance score. Are they incompetent? Do they fail to meet industry best practice? Do they care less about their customers than the other major platforms?
All these things are possible. But the evidence suggests it’s none of them. Amazon is at least as competent as the others, and care as much (if not more) about their customers.
What is it then? Is it just secrecy? It probably is. Amazon is renowned for secrecy. They’re a black box. They tell nobody anything. And probably for good reason. The difference between them and the others is that Amazon is a retail store. Thousands of buy/sell transactions occur every minute, and that attracts scammers. They follow the money. Each tiny bit of information Amazon lets slip about how they operate (including their PPC platform) is an opportunity for scammers to figure out ways to scam better.
But Amazon, while not broadcasting they use a relevancy score as such, do have things to say about the subject. This is from their help pages.
The less relevant or related your book is to your targeting, the less likely it is your ad will perform. Make sure your targeting is relevant to your title, because once the auction market has enough competition, better-performing ads will push out less relevant ones. The more customers click on an ad, the more relevant it becomes.
If your Amazon guru of choice isn’t preaching relevance to you, think about getting a new one. They’re trying to teach you Salute the Sun, but they don’t even know how to do downward dog. Not that it stops them from taking your hard-earned cash.
I don’t mean me. I mean for you to be your own guru. All through this series, I’ve been showing you how standard practice isn’t good enough and that sometimes “experts” are clueless. Or worse, clueless but still hoovering up your cash via expensive courses and the like. The remedy to this is to be your own guru. Research. Verify. Test. Treat Google as your friend, and it’ll enable you to dig deeper until you find the truth. Then network with people doing the same and share your knowledge.
For all that Amazon don’t make a big deal about it, they have a relevance score like Facebook and Google. Their statement even shows that CTR appears to be the main factor in determining the score, but they don’t say it’s the only one. More on that shortly.
All this adds so much more weight to the need to target ads accurately instead of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. It explains why ads get shut down. It also shows that bid is not the only important factor to ad placement. The more relevant, the lower you can bid for good ad placement. The less relevant, the higher you have to bid for the same spot. If you can get there at all.
We now know that relevance is critical to success at Amazon ads. And we know that CTR is a major component of how it’s calculated. But what, if any, are the other factors?
Conversion rate is a likely candidate. Afterall, nothing says relevance like an actual sale. But CTR
is probably more important. It’s only an indicator of relevance, rather than the dead-set certainty that a conversion is. But clicks happen a lot more frequently than conversions. Because of their greater number, they’re more statistically relevant.
What else might go into the calculation?
It’s speculated, among Amazon sellers (of non-book products) that metadata is taken into account. That is, ad copy, search term keywords entered on uploading the product and the product description.
All this is possible. Even likely. For this reason, it’s not a bad idea to use keywords in ad copy especially. If your book is a medical thriller, working that into the ad copy might do some good. The same for your blurb. It may help show that your book is relevant to the big-time medical thriller you’re trying to show your ad on.
Despite the theories, I’m not fully convinced. If the metadata does have an influence on the relevance score, it’s weighted far less than CTR and conversions.
I’ll say this though. If you try to work keywords into your ad copy, do it well. The potential gain from this is far less than the potential loss if your copy stinks. Good copy will drive up the CTR, which is key. Bad copy will reduce it.
For what it’s worth, I’ve trialed keywords in ad copy, and I never noticed a difference in ad placement or cost per click. But I’m not a data guy.
Do your own experiments and see what happens. What I did notice was that my CTR went down. Keywords work great in BookBub ads, but they didn’t work well for me on Amazon. Customer expectation and behavior can be different on different platforms.
It’s also contended that reviews play a role in this too. I suspect that concept will be new to most of you. There’s so much about Amazon ads that rarely, or never, gets discussed in author circles.
But if reviews are factored in, they’re weighted much lower than CTR and conversions. Also, you have no real control over them, or the keyword terms reviewers use when they talk about your books. Be wary of trying to get that control, because that’s the sort of thing that could trigger Amazon to terminate your account.
It’s the same for the keywords you enter on publishing the book. Follow the rules set out for them. Pick the keywords that are best for your book in terms of getting into the right categories and showing up on customer searches.
What other conclusions can we draw from the presence of a relevance score on Amazon?
A massive one. Don’t run keywords with a poor CTR. Kill them with fire. They’re toxic, and it’s speculated that this poison transfers over on an account level. That is, if you have a history of poor ads and keywords, Amazon gives your account a lower relevance score. This part is speculation, to be sure.
All of this leads us very nicely into the next chapter. What is a good CTR? And what are the uses of the other metrics?
