Invisible Strings Connect Authors Together
There is a silent back-and-forth going on within Amazon KDP. Retail book marketplaces are full of your readers searching for titles like yours.
Imagine buying a beautiful, expensive billboard on a highway that was quietly closed to the public five years ago.
I’m speaking from personal experience, from conversations I’ve had with authors and brand owners while discussing the biggest challenges of marketplace marketing.
It turns out that winning on Amazon isn’t just about showing up.
Every time a shopper lands on a listing, a silent war for attention and conversion is already underway.
The biggest problem always comes down to the same thing: we throw ad spend at the wall and hope it sticks, rather than calculating the exact expected value of our attack.
Let me give you an example.
Author A writes deep-dive technical non-fiction that is genuinely ground breaking information. They target their ads against competitors who write high-level, theoretical overviews and wonder why their sales are decreasing. Later on we find out that in her field these theories are outdated and despite the fact that the books have 1000’s of reviews the search volume is minimal we are just paying to appear somewhere that is essentially a dead web page.
And here comes the issue we already mentioned: the lack of conceptual alignment & marketability.
If your products do not satisfy the exact same psychological itch, you are simply evaporating your budget. You are advertising to a ghost.
How to choose your competitors using math
Finding the right target is key, and the truth is you must asses feasibility of advertising for each specific search query node to understand the market. Think of your competitors catalog as one giant node containing all of their ASIN’s and Keywords.
- “Is our product more or less effective than top competitors at converting given where we are placing it?”
- “If we are already ranking, is our total funnel efficiency strong than the average of the market for this target?”
- “Is this placement, on this target, worth purchasing long term?”
In some cases, advertisers place their inferior listing directly next to a superior one, meaning a shopper is far more likely to defect to the competitor. In other where your listing is superior but the competitors organic traffic is dead-on-arrival then you would have won that sale anyways.
What personally helped me in this battle with the algorithm was developing a 1-to-5 metric called the ASIN Adjacency Score.
What Is The ASIN Adjacency Score?
The ASIN Adjacency Score is your market leverage.
- The Star Rating: Do you possess an equal or higher average rating? In the absence of physical touch, social proof is the currency of trust.
- The Review Volume: Do you have a vastly superior number of reviews? Density matters. A 4.8 means nothing if it is backed by ten reviews against a competitor’s ten thousand.
- The Price Point: Is your product priced significantly lower? When all other variables are equal, the wallet breaks the tie.
If you don’t mathematically dominate these metrics, you are operating at a severe Defensive Disadvantage.
But when you DO dominate those metrics... you possess the Adjacency Advantage. That is where you consider an offensive campaign, aggressively targeting their ASIN to siphon their traffic directly to your listing.
You are offering the customer an objectively better deal, and the market will reward you for the arbitrage.
Tucker B. Robinson
How I Calculate the Perfect ASIN Adjacency Score to Dominate My Niche
This was the exact system I built to ensure I never waste a drop of ad spend on a battle I am mathematically destined to lose.
I’ll admit it - finding the perfect ASINs to target was tedious at first, until I mapped out the exact 3-step execution strategy.
Here is exactly how I deploy it:
ASIN Adjacency Score: (1-5)
Here is how you evaluate the score:
1. Verify the Trope First, ensure that the competitor’s product shares your exact trope. If the products don’t align conceptually, the comparison is void.
2. Compare the Three Market Advantage Metrics Look at the competitor’s listing and compare it to your own across these three specific variables:
- Star Rating: Do you have an equal or higher star rating?
- Review Count: Do you have a vastly superior number of reviews?
- Price: Is your product priced significantly lower?
3. Determine the Verdict
- The Adjacency Advantage: If your product wins on these metrics (e.g., you have a 4.8-star rating versus their 4.2, more reviews, and a lower price), you have the advantage and should launch the offensive conquesting campaign against them to siphon their traffic.
- The Defensive Disadvantage: If the competitor has a higher rating, tens of thousands more reviews, or a much lower price, you are at a disadvantage. In this scenario, attacking them is considered an inefficient use of your budget (or “water”), because a shopper is more likely to defect from your book to the competitor’s rather than the other way around.
Thank You!
