Ad Account Support and Reporting by Your Author VA
Advertising — Amazon Ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, BookBub Ads — is the marketing method that most directly rewards consistent attention and data-driven optimization. An ad campaign that gets reviewed weekly and adjusted based on actual performance data will almost always outperform one that gets set up and ignored. The challenge for authors is that 'weekly review and adjustment' requires time, focus, and a willingness to work in spreadsheets and advertising dashboards that competes directly with both writing time and the mental bandwidth that writing requires.
A VA who owns ad monitoring and reporting doesn't run your campaigns — making bidding decisions, changing targeting, creating new ads — those strategic and creative choices stay with you. What they do is make sure you have the right information, at the right time, to make those decisions well. The data exists in your ad accounts regardless; the VA's job is to extract it, organize it, and surface the signals that matter before you have to go looking for them.
What Ad Support Looks Like in Practice
The specific ad support a VA provides depends on which platforms you're advertising on and how sophisticated your campaign structure is. The core tasks are consistent across platforms, however.
Weekly Performance Reporting
The most immediately valuable thing a VA can do for your advertising is pull a weekly performance summary from each platform and present it in a format that takes you five minutes to read rather than forty-five to assemble. This report doesn't need to be complex — it needs to surface the numbers that matter for the decisions you're actually making.
ACoS and ROAS Tracking
ACoS (the percentage of ad revenue that went to ad spend) and ROAS (the revenue generated per dollar of ad spend) are the core profitability metrics for retail advertising. Most authors know they should be tracking these but don't track them consistently because pulling the data from multiple campaigns is time-consuming. Your VA maintains a running ACoS/ROAS tracker — updated weekly, by campaign and by title — that gives you a clear picture of which campaigns are profitable, which are marginal, and which need attention.
The most valuable part of this tracking isn't any individual week's number — it's the trend over time. An Amazon campaign with a 35% ACoS that has been creeping toward 45% over six weeks is telling you something different from a campaign that has held steady at 38% for three months. Your VA sees and flags the trend before it becomes a problem you discover after the fact.
Creative Asset Management
Ad creative — the images, copy, and video used in your campaigns — accumulates quickly across multiple platforms and multiple campaigns, and the failure to organize it creates real friction every time you want to launch something new. A VA who owns your creative asset library saves you the time and frustration of starting from scratch every time.
Maintaining a shared creative library in Canva or a shared folder, organized by platform (Facebook, Amazon, BookBub), by title, and by campaign type
Ensuring assets are saved in the correct dimensions for each platform — Amazon's display requirements, Facebook's feed vs. Stories sizes, BookBub's specific image specifications
Archiving retired creative with notes on performance (so you're not recreating something that already failed) and flagging high-performing creative for reuse or adaptation
Preparing new creative assets from your direction or from templates — not making strategic creative decisions, but executing on the direction you've provided
Budget Monitoring and Spend Tracking
Ad platforms are generally not cautious with your budget. A daily budget set too high, a campaign left running longer than intended, or a bid increase that produces unexpected spend acceleration can all result in an author discovering they've spent significantly more than planned without a monitoring system to catch it early. Your VA watches for these situations and flags them before they become expensive surprises.
Monitoring each campaign's daily spend against approved daily budgets and flagging any campaigns running significantly over pace
Tracking monthly ad spend by platform against your approved monthly budget, with a mid-month update so you can adjust if you're on track to overspend
Flagging campaigns that have exhausted their budget before the end of the intended run period, so you can decide whether to replenish or pause
What Your VA Doesn't Do: The Strategic Line
Being clear about what your VA doesn't own in advertising is as important as being clear about what they do. The optimization decisions — changing bids, pausing underperforming keywords, adjusting targeting, testing new creative angles, deciding which campaigns to scale — are strategic and creative choices that require your understanding of your marketing goals, your budget constraints, and your books. These stay with you.
The boundary is: your VA monitors and reports; you decide and act. This isn't a limitation of the VA's capabilities — it's the right division of responsibility for a function where the financial consequences of a wrong decision are real and where the strategic context lives with the author, not the assistant. A VA who understands this boundary and respects it is more valuable than one who makes optimization decisions independently, because the former produces the data that leads to better decisions, while the latter introduces risk without the context to manage it.
⚠ Never give your VA admin-level access to your ad accounts without a clear, documented protocol for what they're authorized to do. The safest configuration is read-only access (sufficient for reporting) with write access granted only for specific, pre-approved tasks like uploading new creative assets or making changes to an already-approved set of modifications. Campaign bidding and targeting changes should require your explicit direction, not your VA's independent judgment.
Connecting Ad Data to Sales Data Through ScribeCount
The most complete picture of your advertising performance comes from connecting your ad spend data to your actual sales data — seeing not just what a campaign spent and what Amazon Ads reports as attributed revenue, but what your total sales across all platforms did during the same period. ScribeCount's cross-platform view is where your VA can build this connected picture, comparing the ad activity they're tracking against the sales movement visible in your royalty data.
A VA who is both pulling your weekly ad reports and reviewing your ScribeCount sales data can start to see correlations that neither dataset reveals alone: the Amazon Ads campaign that's reporting a 45% ACoS by Amazon's attribution, but that coincided with a measurable uplift in Kobo and Apple Books sales that suggests the visibility was broader than the attributed sales captured. That kind of cross-platform intelligence is what makes author advertising decisions increasingly informed over time rather than always starting from limited information.
Conclusion
Author advertising rewards consistent monitoring and data-driven decisions more than almost any other marketing method — and consistent monitoring is exactly what a VA can provide without requiring your daily involvement in the dashboards. The weekly report, the ACoS tracking, the budget monitoring, the creative library management: all of these produce better advertising outcomes at lower author time cost than solo management. The next article covers a quieter but equally important category of VA support: the administrative tasks that form the operational backbone of your author business.
Hello, I'm Randall Wood. When I'm not pounding the keyboard or entertaining my giant dog I like to build tools for my fellow indie authors. In these articles, you'll find lessons learned over sixteen years spent in the indie author world. I share it all here to help you get one step closer to where you want to be.— Randall