Publisher Rocket Review and Results for AMS Ads Campaigns

When it comes to keywords on Amazon, I sit firmly in Steve Scott’s camp: they are a nice-to-have, but absolutely not crucial.

My experience confirms that. I have two books that have #1 spot for some decent keywords: “persistence,” and “personal mission statement.” Yes, they both characterize with less volatile sales than my other books, which don’t have this advantage.

But it’s nothing groundbreaking. I guesstimate 1–2 copies a day are sold because of the impact of being ranked #1 for those keywords.


What is more, I didn’t consciously focus on getting those #1 spots. I had focused on writing the best books possible on those topics. My book descriptions and reviews (which also impacts keywords relevance) reflect this focus. I didn’t need a keyword research tool to do that. I didn’t need any fancy gimmicks and for sure I didn’t need to spend my money and time on keyword research.

And that’s what Publisher Rocket is – a keyword research tool dedicated for books on Amazon.
I would have happily kept ignoring the matter of keywords and any paid tools for mining them, if not the “minor” issue of Amazon Marketing Services advertising campaigns (called AMS ads or Amazon ads further in this post).

My Amazon Ads Experience

I started advertising my books on Amazon in September 2016, and it was a real game changer for me. My sales, revenues and profits exploded. In fact, my wife has given a notice in her day job last month, because my book sales were so consistently good for the past several months.
And in advertising on Amazon, keywords are extremely important.

In the first 8 months of running my Amazon ads, I painstakingly harvested a bit over 6,100 unique keywords and created over 100 campaigns for my 10 books. I made on them about $12,000 of profits.

And then Publisher Rocket Appeared
Well, not exactly. It was around for months, and I deliberately ignored it. But Dave added a new feature to it: AMS keywords research.

Knowing Dave Chesson, I didn’t need much encouragement to purchase it. Besides, there is a 30-day refund guarantee for the tool. I bought it on the spot. I promptly discovered all too many of its shortcomings when it comes to finding keywords for AMS ads.

My Final Evaluation

Well, since the first version of this post, Dave and his team fixed most of the troubles with using Publisher Rocket for AMS keywords research. Eliminating special characters and forbidden keywords made the usage of Publisher Rocket for mining keywords even more effective. And easy.

It created a different problem; I often get a double space in the place where the deleted keyword was, but this is a minor nuisance compared to how the process looked in the past.
This, and the fact that authors are still put in separate columns than the rest of keywords, are the only two downsides left in the Publisher Rocket.

However, the Rocket’s team works hard to add a whole new bunch of features. KDP Rocket became a Publisher Rocket and users get a whole range of options to filter through the original Rocket’s findings. The most useful one at first glance, is the ability to exclude some categories from the results. For example, if you look for keywords for your fantasy book, you can exclude results from nonfiction categories and vice versa.

While all the above remarks are honest, they don’t change the fact that using Publisher Rocket accelerated my keyword research literally by hundreds times. I had only four sessions of keyword research with Publisher Rocket, and I obtained over 12,000 unique keywords.

12,000!!!

That’s twice as much as I got collecting keywords manually for months in the Amazon store. And I count only unique words. Many of the words Publisher Rocket found for me I’ve been already using in my campaigns, because I started my manual research from the most popular books.

The easiness and convenience of using Publisher Rocket is mind-blowing. Yes, it took me a few hours to clean the results and submit my AMS campaigns.
Yet, it was still lightning fast. Getting as many keywords via manual harvesting in the store is so much harder and longer.

My Publisher Rocket Results

I created 300 new AMS ad campaigns within three weeks. In the first month they generated over 31 hundred clicks on my ads. I profited over $6 a day (net!) on average from those campaigns. I got the return on investment in two weeks. In a year, the Publisher Rocket will bring me about $2,000. These numbers, of course, assume I will be as lazy with keyword research and creating new campaigns as I am right now.

Those are outstanding results!

I suspect I could get even better effects, if I hadn’t used the “spray and pray” tactic. I haven’t optimized my campaigns even one bit. I just put a random bunch of keywords together and created the ads from them.

More Reasons to Get Publisher Rocket

I’m prospecting around with outsourcing AMS ads for other authors. I was confident that the keywords I gathered before Publisher Rocket would work universally for all kind of books, including fiction.

But now, with this awesome tool, I can research any niche in a matter of a couple of hours and create targeted campaigns. I can get a new client one day and have several campaigns dedicated for his genre up and running the next day.

If you ever intend to run AMS ads for someone else, Publisher Rocket is a must-have and a no-brainer.

Conclusion

If you ever intend to advertise your books on Amazon, there is no better tool than Publisher Rocket.
It will save you hundreds of hours of manual research. Depending on your dedication, it can bring the return of a meager ($97) investment in a matter of weeks, or even days.

More Results After Two Years

Here is my numbers breakdown after almost two years:

I earned $1,900 since the original post, selling about 2,100 copies of my books thanks to the Publisher Rocket.

I also used the keywords I discovered via Publisher Rocket to advertise books of my 30+ Resurrecting Books service customers (I’ve advertised over 100 titles of my customers). I didn’t go over my customers’ numbers as meticulously as with mine, but I guesstimate we sold about 3,500 copies thanks to the Publisher Rocket.

As you can see Publisher Rocket became even more awesome than at first glance. What is more, it is still becoming better and better. The ease of use compared to the early versions is unbelievable. And my royalties grow and grow every month thanks to this awesome tool.

The most shocking fact?! The price is still $97. I have no idea how long Dave Chesson intends to keep this insane disparity between the price and delivered value.
But if I were you, I wouldn’t be sitting on my hands waiting for the price increase.

*fine print
If you purchase Publisher Rocket via my affiliate link (any link in this post) you can contact me and I’ll share my top three universal keyword sets with the brief manual to maximize their performance for your ads.