Sponsored ads step by step for sellers en_US

Learn what you should do in your first months advertising with us – from creating your first campaign to achieving the business results you’re looking for.

Building a solid foundation

Start your journey here to learn more about the steps you should take to make the most of Amazon Ads campaigns.

Taking steps that count

Advertising on Amazon can help increase your visibility, grow your audience, and boost sales. As you get started on your advertising journey or prepare to ramp up your expertise, we can help you take the right steps to keep potential customers engaged with your brand and products. In this guide, we’ll highlight important actions you can take and habits you can build to help you get the business results you want. Here’s what we’ll cover:

Step 1: Start with Sponsored Products automatic targeting campaigns. From launching to optimizing your campaigns, and learning from the best performing keywords and products used in your automatic targeting.

Step 2: Get started with Sponsored Products manual targeting campaigns. How insights about the best performing keywords and products can help you set up more refined campaigns.

Step 3: Create Sponsored Products product targeting campaigns. Get greater control over when and where your ads appear in shopping results and product detail pages.

Step 4: Continuously measure the impact of your campaigns and optimize. The most important habit you can build when advertising, which can drive constant improvement and better results.

Step 1: Start with Sponsored Products automatic targeting campaigns

Launch a campaign in minutes to promote individual product listings to relevant audiences, learn what keywords and products work for you, and optimize to take your next step.

1. Launch a Sponsored Products
automatic targeting
campaign

Sponsored Products promote individual product listings in shopping results and on product detail pages. These ads can help audiences discover and purchase the products that you sell on Amazon. Better yet, no previous advertising experience is required, and the ad creative is automatically generated for you.

With automatic targeting, you can set up your campaign for success even if you’re not sure what keywords or products to target. That’s because Amazon Ads will match your Sponsored Products ads to the terms used by shoppers when looking for a product, as well as products similar to the item you’re advertising. This means you can create and launch a campaign in just a few minutes, and even advertise in countries where you don't speak the language, since the targeting can be done for you.

Run your campaigns continuously by setting ‘no end date’ to help build momentum and gain valuable insights to help optimize your campaigns.

When you want to showcase a product, you put it where consumers can easily see it. Sponsored products is like being in the front of the store.

William Land, Founder, Empire Case

Launch campaign

When to take this action?

We recommend you launch a Sponsored Products automatic targeting campaign within 1 week of joining Amazon Ads so you can quickly learn about what keywords, products, and bids work for you and optimize your campaigns.

2. Check in and optimize your
automatic targeting campaigns

The key to success is to monitor the performance of your campaigns regularly. Automatic targeting allows you to gain insights on shopping activities and discover keywords and products that are generating clicks and sales for your brand and products. With that information, you can refine your bid strategy and adjust your bids and budget to improve performance.

Use the advertising console to monitor your campaigns, define benchmarks for your initiatives according to your business objectives, and optimize frequently. Know that Amazon Ads is continuously learning and automatically adapting your targeting, so the more you check back the more you’ll learn.

Monitor campaign

When to take this action?

It is important that you monitor, evaluate performance against your goals, and optimize your campaigns often. If this is your first campaign, we recommend checking back within 2 weeks and then every week. Make a habit of also monitoring the notifications icon in the advertising console for key diagnostics and suggestions, and take action accordingly.

3. Learn from your best performing keywords

Another great way of using the automatic targeting campaign to your benefit is by downloading a search term report to understand what keywords are performing best in your campaigns. To get started, follow these simple steps:

First, download the search term report from the advertising console. You can find it by clicking Reports, Advertising Reports, and choosing search term as your report type or by looking at the reports available in your ad groups.
Then identify the shopping queries with high sales and low spend.
Increase your bid on those shopping queries and keep your campaign running.
Also use those to launch your first Sponsored Products manual targeting campaign and/or add new keywords to your existing manual targeting campaigns.

Download report

When to take this action?

We recommend downloading the search term report after your campaign has been running for a while – at least 2 weeks. That way your results will be more representative.

Next > Step 2: Get started with Sponsored Products manual targeting campaigns

Step 2: Get started with Sponsored Products manual targeting campaigns

Use best performing keywords to set up more refined targeting campaigns that work in favor of your business goals.

1. Create and launch a Sponsored Products
manual keyword targeting campaign

Using learnings from automatic targeting campaigns, you can take the next step and set up Sponsored Products manual targeting campaigns. In that case, you’ll manually select the keywords or products you want to target – and using those best performing ones will enable you to be more refined in your targeting strategy.

It’s worth considering that advertisers who start using manual targeting in their Sponsored Products campaigns for the first time see an average of 71% increase in impressions and an average of 101% increase in sales in the next month, compared to advertisers who do not take this action.¹

Make sure you use the different keyword match types to help you be even more precise in your targeting.

Broad match offers the widest traffic exposure. Your ad may appear when customers shop using your keyword in any order, including close variations.
With phrase match, your ad may appear when customers’ shopping queries use a phrase or sequence of words in your keyword.
And exact match is the most restrictive, but can connect you with the most relevant shoppers. In order for your ad to show, shopping queries must match your keyword exactly.

Launch campaign

1. Amazon internal data, US, August 2020

When to take this action?

We recommend you launch a Sponsored Products manual targeting campaign within 3 weeks of joining Amazon Ads. You can use shopping queries from your automatic campaigns and the keywords recommended on Console while creating your manual targeting campaign.

2. Learn what products are
ready to be advertised

In order to create the most impact, we optimized each listing with clear images, informative infographics, videos, and enhanced branded content, which helped us drive traffic to the different product listings. Sponsored Products is one of the most efficient ways to generate product buzz.

Hank Berger, CEO, Mad Dogs Concepts

When shoppers click your ad, they see your product detail page. That’s why it’s important to keep in mind that the quality of your product information and detail pages can have a direct impact on your ad performance and sales.

Here’s a list of improvements you can make today to help get your ads in front of shoppers, engage them once they reach your product detail page, and ensure they have the right information to make a purchase decision.

1. Check if your products display the featured offer
The featured offer is the section of the product detail page where customers can add items to their cart or buy now. We recommend choosing to advertise products that regularly display the featured offer to help maximize your visibility and sales (use your business reports to see how often your products are the featured offer). Price products competitively to help boost their chances of displaying the featured offer.

2. Keep your products reasonably priced
Shoppers may be more motivated to click your ad, and ultimately make a purchase, if you offer great prices for your products.

3. Make sure your products are in stock
Your products need to be in stock in order to be the featured offer and eligible for advertising. We suggest having a plan for products that tend to sell out quickly.

4. Create a strong product title
An informative, easy-to-read title lets shoppers quickly know key facts about your product; we recommend making titles approximately 60 characters long.

5. Pick products with positive customer reviews
We recommend advertising products with five or more customer reviews, plus a rating of 3.5 stars or higher.

6. Feature four or more high-quality, zoomable images
Images can show your product from different angles, and highlight important details. Make sure your images are at least 1000 pixels in height or width to enable the zoom function on Amazon, so customers can get a closer look.

7. Include at least three bullet points
Bullet points can give shoppers a clear overview of your product’s key features; contents, uses, dimensions, operational considerations, age rating, skill level, and country of origin are all ones to consider.

8. Enhance your product detail page with A+ Content
Available to vendors as well as sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, A+ content lets you describe your product features using enhanced images, text placements, and stories.

Then all you have to do is add those ASINs optimized for advertising to your campaigns.

Optimize pages

When to take this action?

We recommend you check what products are ready to advertise before launching your first campaigns. That way you’ll make sure to use ASINs that are ready to be promoted, and focus on improving the ones that require attention.

Next > Step 3: Create Sponsored Products product targeting campaigns

Step 3: Create Sponsored Products product targeting campaigns

Target products and categories with your campaigns.

1. Target products and categories with your campaigns

After your automatic campaign runs for a few weeks, you’ll be able to see which shopping queries are converting or not converting to sales. Using these insights in your manual campaigns help fine-tune your targeting to drive more sales.

Use product targeting to target your ads to specific products or entire categories that are similar or complementary to the products you’re advertising. This option gives you greater control over when and where your ads appear in shopping results and product detail pages.

Target high performing products to help drive more sales: Download your ‘search term report’ to identify your best performing products and target those in a manual product targeting campaign.
Use category targeting to help increase visibility of new products: Choose the category of the new product you want to promote; this allows you to target all products similar to yours.
Target your own product pages to showcase your product range: Targeting your own products and bidding higher on them can help you increase visibility for your range on your product pages.

Run your campaigns continuously by setting ‘no end date’ to help build momentum and gain valuable insights to help optimize your campaigns.

When to take this action?

We recommend you launch a Sponsored Products manual targeting campaign selecting product targeting within 2 months of joining Amazon Ads.

Launch campaign

2. Monitor and optimize all campaigns following these steps

Use the advertising console to monitor your campaigns, gain insights, and optimize regularly. With manual targeting campaigns, we recommend you take the following steps.

Adjust bids

Set your bids to the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for a click on keywords and products that are performing well. Lower your bids on those that aren’t.

Update bidding strategy

To optimize for sales, use ‘Dynamic bids - up and down’. With this bidding strategy, Amazon raises your bids (by a maximum of 100%) in real time when your ad may be more likely to lead to a sale, and lowers your bids when less likely to convert to a sale.

Did you know that campaigns that use dynamic bids deliver 14% lower ACOS on average than campaigns that use fixed bids, while delivering similar sales?²

2. Amazon internal data, US, August 2020

Update keywords and products

Add new keywords and products that are relevant to the campaign and pause underperforming ones. The same is true for negative keywords or products, which you can add to exclude your campaign from appearing against.

Modify budget

To make the most of Sponsored Products, set a daily budget that’s high enough to keep your ads showing and not miss out on potential sales. Note that on busy days, your daily budget might run out so make sure to monitor and increase if needed to keep your campaigns running.

Add negative targeting

First download the search term report by clicking Reports, Advertising Reports, and choosing search term as your report type. Then identify the keywords and products with no or low sales and high spend, or competitor brands and products, and add them as negative targeting for product targeting or automatic targeting campaigns. That will avoid showing your campaigns against those terms, minimizing your spend, and improving results.

Advertisers who start adding negative keywords to their Sponsored Products campaigns for the first time see an average of 86 % increase in impressions and an average of 90% increase in sales in the next month, compared to advertisers who do not take this action.³

3. Amazon internal data, US, August 2020

Optimize campaigns

When to take this action?

It is important that you monitor, evaluate performance against your goals, and optimize your campaigns often. We usually recommend to wait at least 2 weeks before taking a look at campaign insights, and then to do so every week. Make a habit of also monitoring the notifications icon on console for key diagnostics and suggestions, and take action accordingly.

Next > Step 4: Continuously measure the impact of your campaigns and optimize

Step 4: Continuously measure the impact of your campaigns and optimize

Check reports often, learn about your performance, and optimize for better results.

Keep an eye on your campaigns

We'll run reports at the end of the week and we'll see what we converted on. We'll see what was losing us money or keywords that we really don't need to have.

Mason Thomas, Superior Labs

Reporting is a fundamental part of understanding the performance and return on investment you’re getting from campaigns.

In the campaign manager, you can view insights for a specific time period, including day, week, month, lifetime, or a customized range. Information is updated every hour, though sales and ACOS metrics can take up to 48 hours to populate, and spend can be updated until three days after a click occurs, as we validate traffic.

Some metrics to keep in mind as you analyze your campaigns:

Return on ad spend (ROAS) measures what you’ve made per every dollar you’ve spent on advertising and is a helpful metric to evaluate the overall effectiveness of a sponsored ads campaign.
Advertising cost of sales (ACOS) is the percentage of total ad spend divided by total sales from advertising.
New to brand (NTB) enables you to measure orders and sales of your products generated from first-time customers of your brand on Amazon.

Let your campaigns run for about 2 weeks, so you have sufficient metrics, then review them in the campaign manager every 48 hours to learn how your campaign performs over time and to make informed decisions on improving results.

Optimize campaigns

When to take this action?

We recommend you start monitoring as soon as your campaigns are live. Once you have sufficient metrics, you can make informed decisions to optimize your campaigns.

Next > Additional resources

Note that not all of these solutions are available in all marketplaces, so be sure to check if you have access to them where you want to advertise.

Additional resources

Other materials to help you keep progressing in your advertising journey.

Get ready to advertise using
other self-service solutions

To use some of our solutions you must be enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. Enrolling in Amazon Brand Registry unlocks a suite of tools designed to help you build and protect your brand, creating a better experience for customers. Try it now!

Your products must also be in one or more of the eligible categories. At this time, adult products, used products, refurbished products, and products in closed categories aren’t eligible for advertising. For a full list of permitted and prohibited categories review the creative acceptance policies for Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display.

Your products must also be eligible to be the featured offer. The featured offer is the offer displayed on a product detail page with an Add to Cart or Buy Now button. A key feature of the Amazon website is that multiple sellers can offer the same product, so you may be one of many sellers who are considered for the featured offer placement. To check your products eligibility, follow these steps:

In Seller Central, go to your Manage Inventory page and then click Preferences
Select featured offer Eligible, and at the bottom of the page, click Save Changes
The featured offer Eligible column will display the status for each of your ASINs

Next > Additional resources about sponsored ads solutions

Ready to get started? Here’s how:

Go to advertising.amazon.com to register, or for more information about our solutions.

Stores

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Guide: Best practices for your Store
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