Advertising best practices: A guide for Amazon selling partners

Overview

Advertising in the Amazon store can help you reach more customers, increase sales, and drive product and brand awareness. Before getting started, prepare for success by learning about different advertising types, tips, strategies, and eligibility requirements


  • Advertising types
  • Before you begin advertising
  • Sponsored Products
  • Sponsored Brands
  • Sponsored Display
  • Stores
  • Advertising tips & strategies
  • Key takeaways
  • Additional resources

Advertising types

Sponsored Products

Promote individual product listings to customers as they’re browsing and searching for items in the Amazon store.

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Sponsored Brands

Help customers discover and engage with your brand in prominent search placements, and generate awareness with customizable ads that link directl to a landing page or your Store.

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Sponsored Display

Use browsing and buying signals to automatically reach audiences who may be interested in your promoted product on and off Amazon.

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Stores

Build brand awareness and offer an immersive experience where customers connect with your brand to explore your products in a dedicated place

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Before you begin advertising

Ask these questions to help your business get the most out of advertising in the Amazon store:

1. What are my goals?

Your advertising goals will shape your strategy.

If driving sales is your priority, focus on converting ad clicks into orders. Track your Advertising Cost of Sale (ACOS), which is calculated by dividing your total ad spend by total sales from advertising.

If creating brand awareness is your priority, focus on impressions. Impressions are the number of times your ad is seen. Set strong cost-per-click bids to help you win more keywords.

2. Which products should I advertise?

Choosing the right products will help you accomplish your advertising goals.

Select products that are in stock, priced competitively, winning the Featured Offer, and receiving a high number of visits.

3. Are my product detail pages ready?

Review the product detail pages of the products you choose to advertise. We recommend your product detail pages include:


  • Accurate, descriptive titles.
  • High-quality images
  • Relevant product information
  • At least five bullet points
  • Search terms

Advertising can help customers discover your products, but a strong product detail page plays an important role in converting ad clicks into sales.

Sponsored Products

Sponsored Products allow you to promote individual product listings to customers as they’re browsing and searching for items to buy in the Amazon store. Sponsored Products ads are targeted to keywords or products. They appear above and within search results, and on product detail pages on both desktops and mobile devices.


You pay only when customers click on your ads. You also control how much you spend by setting a budget and choosing how much to bid per click. Since you can choose your own campaigns, including budget and bids, Sponsored Products can be used by advertisers of any size of business for a wide variety of goals, such as generating awareness of a new product, promoting seasonal items, clearing excess inventory, or showcasing a best-selling item.

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To advertise with Sponsored Products, you must have:

  • An active Professional Seller account
  • Products in one or more eligible categories
  • Products eligible for the Featured Offer

With a simple campaign creation process, and the ability to go live in minutes, Sponsored Products is the recommended way to get started with advertising in the Amazon store.

Steps for success with Sponsored Products

  • Take an always-on approach with your campaigns by setting no end date. This will help customers discover your products any time they search in the Amazon store, increasing the likelihood of demand for your items year round.
  • Choose automatic targeting to let Amazon do the work of matching your ads to search terms and products. These matches are based on your product information and are regularly updated with changing search trends.
  • Prepare to bid competitively. We recommend setting the maximum bid you’re willing to pay. You can also refer to suggested bids for guidance.
  • Check your search term report in Advertising Reports to see which search terms are resulting in ad clicks and sales after two weeks. Use this information to create a Sponsored Products campaign with manual targeting, where you choose your own keywords or products and set individual bids.

Steps for success with Sponsored Products (continued)

  • Continue to run your automatic campaign to stay on top of search trends and understand how customers find and buy your products.
  • Set your manual campaign with no end date, just like your automatic campaign. Customers are always on, meaning your ads should be, too. Remember, you’ll never spend more on a campaign than the daily budget you set.
  • Continue to track your search term report to generate more keywords for your manual campaign. Aim to reach at least 30 keywords within your first few months. If you need more help finding potential keywords to try, refer to suggested keywords.
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Sponsored Brands

If you meet the seller requirements for Sponsored Products, and are also enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, you may be eligible to use Sponsored Brands


Sponsored Brands campaigns help customers discover and engage with your brand through prominent search placements. They generate awareness with customizable ads that link directly to a landing page or your Store.


Sponsored Brands ads feature your brand logo, a custom headline, and up to three of your products. These ads appear in multiple locations on desktop and mobile pages, including above search results. When Amazon customers click your brand logo, they’ll be directed to your Store or landing page. When they click on your product, they’ll be directed to its product detail page.


You also have the option to use a video ad to feature a single product. Video ads are eligible for mobile and desktop placements in search results. These ads are cost per click, so you only pay when an Amazon customer clicks your ad. You control how much you’ll spend by setting your budget and choosing how much to bid per click.

Steps for success with Sponsored Brands.

Plan for the Sponsored Brands review process.

Once you finish creating your campaign, it’s submitted for review. If your campaign is approved, you’ll be notified within three business days. If your ad is rejected, you’ll be notified with an explanation of why it wasn’t approved.

Common rejection causes to avoid:
  • Mismatch between a headline and either products in an ad or keywords being targeted
  • Unsupported claims such as “best” or “top-selling”
  • Incorrect punctuation, spelling, or capitalization
    • 2. See how you’re attracting new customers to your brand

    Refer to your “new-to-brand” metrics to measure attributed orders and sales of your products from first-time customers of your brand in the Amazon store over the past 12 months. You can also identify keywords that have the highest percentage of new-to-brand orders.

Sponsored Display

Sponsored Display ads are available to professional sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. These ads appear in multiple locations and differ from Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products by reaching audiences on and off of Amazon based on a variety of shopping signals.


Sponsored Display ads use browsing and buying signals to automatically reach audiences who may be interested in your promoted product. You’ll have the option of focusing on products or audiences using a daily bid and budget charged on a cost-per-click basis. Advertisers can choose how their ad displays using an automated image or custom image.

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Steps for success with Sponsored Display

  • Use creatives, or ads, with custom product images. These images can help tell your story when serving ads on or off Amazon in your own visual language. You can still benefit from nonimage elements of the creative that can help drive performance, such as star rating, product titles, pricing, and Shop now call to action.
  • Use both Sponsored Display audience and product campaigns at the same time to help drive an increase in sales and incremental reach.
  • Add more than 10 ASINs in each Sponsored Display campaign. When you advertise more products in your campaigns, those products can participate in more auctions. This means your campaign is more likely to serve an ad—and when it does, your ad is more likely to be relevant because there were more products to pick from for that ad
  • Include products that do well on Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Products that generate solid click-through rates or conversion rates through Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands may perform successfully on Sponsored Display
  • Use product targeting suggestions. When you create a campaign, you’ll be provided with several product suggestions based on the products you choose to advertise. The suggestions are more likely to drive relevant clicks and are ranked based on their likelihood of generating product detail page views.

Stores

If you’re enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, you can also create a Store for your brand.

Stores can help build brand awareness and offer an immersive experience where customers connect with your brand in a dedicated place.


Stores provide different design templates to help you showcase your unique brand.

Your Store’s unique brand URL can also be used in Sponsored Brands campaigns and any off-Amazon marketing you use.

Stores design templates include:

  • Product grid: A simple, organized way to display your selection
  • Marquee: Curated product selection with additional space for specific imagery and copy, such as product descriptions and customer quotes
  • Highlight: A content-rich layout that features a broad selection of products and provides plenty of space for product information and images
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Steps for success with Stores.

  • Add multimedia content that can help bring your brand to life. Images can illustrate your brand story, and videos can demonstrate your products in action.
  • Select product listings for your Store, or use dynamic widgets to auto-populate different product displays. These widgets use shopping insights such as keyword search, best-selling products, and recommendation history to automatically update your Store’s pages when you add new listings.
  • . Check your Store’s insights regularly for information on sales, page views, and traffic sources from both on and off Amazon.
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Advertising tips & strategies

Your advertising timeline: The first 60 days

You don’t have to decide your advertising strategy all at once. To stay organized, break up the work and check off a few items each week.

Your first couple of weeks are especially valuable as a test-and-learn period. By investing time in steps, you can deepen your knowledge of advertising and position yourself for long-term success.

We recommend starting with Sponsored Products, as it’s fast, easy, and can help you learn how customers find your products.

Start a Sponsored Products campaign.

To create your first campaign, visit the Advertising tab located in Seller Central. Then select Campaign Manager to be taken to the Advertising Console.

While setting up your Sponsored Products campaign, you’ll want to set a daily budget that’s high enough to keep your ads visible. If your budget runs out in the middle of the day, customers won’t find your advertising during their search.

We recommend a daily budget of at least $10.

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How does my daily budget work?

A daily budget is the amount you’re willing to spend per day over a calendar month. Ad spend on any given day may exceed your daily budget but, at the end of the month, the average daily spend will not exceed your daily budget.

This is also a good time to familiarize yourself with the four keyword match types: broad, phrase, exact, and negative. Together, they can help you reach relevant customers and drive sales.

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Keyword match types:

  • Broad match: Your ad may appear when a customer searches for your keyword in any order, including close variations. Broad match offers the widest exposure
  • Phrase match: Your ad may appear when a customer searches for either your exact phrase or a sequence of words in your keyword. While this is more restrictive than broad match, it can drive more relevant traffic to your ads.
  • Exact match: For your ad to show, a customer’s search term must match your keyword exactly. This is the most restrictive match type, but can help generate the most relevant traffic.
  • Negative phrase and exact match: Applying a negative match type to keywords in your campaigns prevents your ads from showing when customers search for those terms. This helps you maximize relevant clicks and minimize those that aren’t.

We recommend starting with broad match and then reviewing your campaign performance reports to see which specific terms are performing best. Add phrase match or exact match to use more precise terms, and help reach a highly relevant audience as they search to buy

The more campaigns you run, the more opportunity you’ll have to learn what helps you drive the most sales. We recommend launching at least five Sponsored Products campaigns within your first few weeks of advertising. From these campaigns, you can identify top-performing products and keywords so you know where to focus your resources

Optimize your campaigns regularly. Here are some recommendations:

  • Add negative keywords to your campaigns to help prevent your ad from displaying when a customer searches those terms. This can help minimize irrelevant clicks.
  • Increase your bids on search terms that perform well to help you meet business goals.
  • Take advantage of our dynamic bidding feature. With this, Amazon will adjust your bid in real time (by a maximum of 100%) when it’s more or less likely to lead to a sale.
  • Create a campaign with product targeting for specific products, categories, brands, or other product features that are similar to the product in your ad. This can help customers find your product when browsing detail pages, categories, or shopping for products in the Amazon store.
  • Take advantage of the increased traffic in the weeks leading up to and during major shopping periods, like Prime Day or the holiday season, by raising your bids and budgets. This action can help you reach new audiences interested in buying your products during the busiest shopping seasons.
  • We recommend new advertisers start with Sponsored Products, but the strongest advertising strategy includes a mix of ad types. Our advertising solutions can help you reach and engage customers at every stage of their journey, from awareness to purchase and beyond. Take advantage of them all to maximize your performance.

Six key strategies to remember

Build your advertising success by using a combination of strategies.

  • Launch your first Sponsored Products campaign with automatic targeting. Then use the results to build a manual keyword campaign, product campaign, or both.
  • Run your ad campaigns without an end date to keep your products discoverable with search trends.
  • Use at least 30 keywords. Your search term report will include keywords that customers use to find your ads.
  • Start with broad match for your keywords, and then focus on the top performers in search trends with phrase match or exact match.
  • Use separate campaigns for product groups to focus your advertising strategy and organize your keywords and budgets.
  • Partner your Sponsored Products ad campaigns with Sponsored Brands or Stores to grow your brand audience and increase customer loyalty.
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How to use reports.

From impressions and clicks to sales, subscriptions, and gaining new customers, reports can help you understand what your advertising accomplishes.

Understanding the insights and reporting available to you can help you measure your ad performance and make the best choices for optimizing your campaigns.

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Sponsored Products reports

  • Search term report: Provides visibility into the actual search terms entered by customers when they click on your ad at least once while shopping in the Amazon store. Use this report to identify top-converting search terms.
  • Targeting report: Offers insight into sales metrics for keywords and products in all campaigns that have received at least one impression. Use this report to see how well your targeting is performing, when to adjust your bids, and if you should expand your keyword or product targets.
  • Advertised product report: Gives information on sales and performance metrics for advertised ASINs in all campaigns. Use this report to see how your advertised products are performing to help determine a strategy for future campaigns.
  • Purchased product report: Provides details on all products purchased that weren’t promoted by your ad. Use this report to find new advertising opportunities and gain insight into what customers are buying
  • Placement report: Provides insight into the performance of your campaigns on top-ofsearch placements compared to other placements. Use this report to measure performance across different placement types, and identify Sponsored Products campaigns that could benefit from adjusting bids by placement.
  • Campaign report: Summarizes your performance by campaign for a selected date range. Use this report to get insights into performance across different placement types and identify campaigns that could benefit from a placement-level bid adjustment.
  • Performance over time report: Summarizes clicks and budget over a specific period. Use this report to see the average cost per click, plus your total amount spent and how it changed over time.
  • Search term impression share report (SIS): Shows the numeric rank of your account-wide impression relative to all the other advertisers using the same search terms. Use this report to see the percentage of your share of the total impressions for each search term.

Sponsored Brands reports

  • Keyword report: Shows sales and performance metrics for keywords in all campaigns that received at least one impression. Use this report to see search volume and performance trends for your keywords.
  • Keyword placement report: Shows performance broken down by ad placement. Use this report to gain insight across different placement types.
  • Campaign report: Summarizes your performance by campaign for a selected date range. Use this report to gain insight into performance across different placement types and identify campaigns that could benefit from a placement-level bid adjustment.
  • Campaign placement report: Shows campaign performance broken down by ad placement. Use this report to gain insight into performance across different placement types and identify campaigns that could benefit from a placement-level bid adjustment.
  • Search terms report: Shows terms entered by customers searching in the Amazon store that resulted in at least one click. Use this report to identify high-performing searches that can be added as new keywords, or add underperforming terms as negative keywords to help increase campaign performance.
  • Search term impression share report (SIS): Shows your share of all ad impressions captured for your Sponsored Brands search terms. Use this report to track the impact of bidding, marketing, and budget changes on your share of impressions.
  • Category benchmark report: Shows your advertising performance with the median (50th percentile), lower-performing quartile (bottom 25%), and top-performing quartile (top 25%) values achieved by your peers (by retail performance). Use this report to break down metrics by your account's brands and identify benchmarks within specific categories to determine where your Sponsored Brands campaigns weredisplayed.

Key takeaways

  • Sponsored Products: Promote individual product listings to customers as they browse and search for items to buy. With a simple campaign creation process, and the ability to go live in minutes, Sponsored Products is the recommended way to get started with Amazon Ads.
  • Sponsored Brands: Sponsored Brands campaigns can help customers discover and engage with your brand in prominent search placements. They can help generate awareness with customizable ads that link directly to a landing page or your Store. Use more than three of your top-performing products to create a Sponsored Brands campaign.
  • Sponsored Display: Reach relevant audiences who browse, discover, or purchase products on or off of Amazon with ads that may appear on the Amazon home page, product detail pages, shopping results pages, third-party websites, and apps.
  • Stores: Help Amazon customers learn your brand story and discover your product portfolio. Use drag-and-drop tiles or predesigned templates to create a customized, multi-page Store with rich media like images and video—no coding necessary.
  • Daily budget: Your daily budget is the amount you’re willing to spend per day over a calendar month. Ad spend on any given day may exceed your daily budget but, at the end of the month, the average daily spend will not exceed your daily budget.
  • Broad keyword match: Start with broad match, and then review your campaign performance reports to see which specific terms are performing best. Add phrase match or exact match to use those terms more precisely and to help reach a relevant audience as they search to buy
  • Advertising reports: Use advertising reports to measure performance and identify ways to optimize your campaigns. From impressions and clicks to sales, subscriptions, and gaining new customers, reports can help you understand what your advertising accomplishes.

Summary

Now that we’ve covered advertising types, steps for success, and tips and strategies, you have the tools to get started with advertising using the right solutions for your business.

Additional resources

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