What Are Sponsored Ads on Amazon?

Amazon sponsored ads are based on targeting keywords and auctioning. Sellers bid on keywords, and if they win the bid then their product ad will show up in customers search results. Sellers are charged each time a customer clicks on their ad, also known as pay-per-click.

In Seller Central, go to Advertising and click ‘Create Campaign’. Next select the product/s that you want to advertise, set the daily budget for advertising spend, and how long you want the ad campaign to run for. Lastly, you must choose the keyword targeting type you want to use: manual or automatic. Manual targeting is where you pre-select the keywords that you want to target. Automatic targeting is where Amazon will select keywords for you based on what similar products are targeting.

How much you spend on Amazon sponsored ads will depend on how many keywords you target, and how much competition there is for those keywords. A general rule of thumb is to spend 10-15% of your revenue. Some sellers spend hundreds a month, and others spend thousands on advertising.

Amazon ads can be complex and takes lots of testing to optimize. Once you have created an ad campaign, let it run for at least 2 weeks so you have enough data to analyze. You can test out different bidding strategies, set what days or time of the day you want your ad budget to be used, and test out other keywords. Click here to learn more!

If you no longer want to run sponsored ads on Amazon, go to ‘Campaign Manager’ under ‘Advertising’, and then you can turn off any active ad campaigns that you are running.

You can use up to 1000 keywords for each ad campaign, but it is highly unlikely you want that many. It is generally recommended to have 20-50 keywords per ad group.

The two main reasons your sponsored ads are not showing up on Amazon are: You are being outbid on the keywords you are targeting, or you don’t have the Buy Box. To check if you have the Buy Box, look at the ‘Brand Performance’ report, under Reports in Seller Central.

It is generally recommended to spend 10-15% of your revenue on advertising. Most importantly, you should assess how much budget you are able to spend on advertising, and don’t exceed it because you don’t want to spend too much money on ads and find you don’t have enough to buy more product.