Guide
The author’s guide to Sponsored Products
Learn how to set up your first campaign, learn key concepts such as bidding, and understand your campaign performance to help you reach more readers.
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Books are in our DNA. The Amazon store started as a bookseller, and today we’re a destination where readers all over the world shop for books and browse to discover new titles. Sponsored Products ads can help you stand out to readers. Our targeting allows you to reach readers searching for books or genres that are similar to yours, giving your book a better chance of being their next discovery. Sponsored Products ads may appear in relevant shopping results and on product pages. When customers click on your ad, they’re directed to your book’s product page.
Ready to get started? This guide will teach you what you need to know about Sponsored Products—including how to target, bid, budget, and optimize your campaign—as you work to reach more readers.
Getting started
Launching your first Sponsored Products campaign is simple. Here are the steps:
- Review the requirements. Keep these guidelines in mind as you prepare to create your ad:
- Books you advertise must be available in the country where you’re advertising.
- Books must be listed in Author Central.
- Ads must meet the creative requirements in the Amazon Ads guidelines and acceptance policies.
- Titles must meet the ad policy for books.
- Register to advertise. To register, simply visit advertising.amazon.com and click the “Register” button in the top right corner. Select the country where you want to advertise, and select either “I have an Author Central account,” or “I have a Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) account.”
- Create your campaign. When you’re registered and signed in to the advertising console, click the “create campaign” button, and then click “Sponsored Products.”
- Select the products to showcase. Search by book title or Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). Click “add” and make sure to include all available formats, such as Kindle e-book, paperback, and hardcover.
Understanding targeting
Targeting is the process of defining the context in which you want your ads to appear. Here are key terms to know:
Shopping queries/search terms: Words and phrases that Amazon customers use to look for products. They could be specific (“Hard Times,” “Charles Dickens”) or generic (“classic novels”).
Keywords: Words or phrases that match your ad to queries customers use when looking for a book (“classic novels,” for example) and should be relevant to your book.
Automatic targeting: This targeting is automatically determined based on details about your book, such as its genre. It can be helpful for authors who are new to Sponsored Products and learning as they go.
Manual targeting: This targeting option gives you greater control over your targeting by manually selecting the keywords or products you want to target. There are two types of manual targeting:
- Keyword targeting: Uses keywords to match your ads with queries customers are using, e.g., “vegetarian cookbooks.”
- Product targeting: Matches your ads to specific products or genres. If you are advertising Wuthering Heights, for example, you might want to use product targeting for Jane Eyre.
Match types: This determines how closely a customer’s query must match a keyword for an ad to be shown. Match types include “close match” and “loose match.”
Negative targeting: Allows you to specify which keywords or products you don’t want to trigger your ads.
Setting your bids and budgets
Sponsored Products ads operate on a “cost-per-click” model, which means you only pay when a shopper clicks on your ad. Bidding and budgeting determine the amount you’ll spend. Here’s how they work:
Bidding
A bid is the price you’re willing to pay for a reader to click on your ad. Multiple advertisers usually target the same keywords or products, so the amount you bid, along with the relevance of your ad to the shopper’s query, determines whether your ad will be shown. For example, say you select “war novels” as a keyword and set your bid at $0.75. Another author chooses the same keyword and sets their bid at $0.60. Based on your bid, you will win the auction and your ad will be shown.
There are three different bidding strategies you can choose from:
- Dynamic bids—down only. Amazon Ads will reduce your bid if your ad is less relevant to the shopping query or is on a placement that doesn’t perform well. This strategy can offer greater control over spend as you learn what works and can help control spending on underperforming campaigns.
- Dynamic bids—up and down. Amazon Ads will increase your bids for auctions that are more likely to result in a sale. Bids will be increased by up to 100% for placements at the top of the first page of shopping results and by up to 50% for all other placements. This is a useful strategy if you want to learn how much you should be bidding for specific keywords or products, if you want top-of-the-page placement, or if you have a high-performing campaign and want to maximize it.
- Fixed bids. Amazon Ads uses your exact bid for all opportunities and won’t adjust it. This strategy may get you more impressions but fewer clicks, compared to dynamic bids.
Budget
Your daily budget allows you to set the maximum amount you’re willing to spend on clicks per day. It’s averaged over a month, so if you budget $10 a day for 30 days, your total spend for the month will never exceed $300. While the actual daily spend could vary (some days you may win more bids than others) it will ultimately even out and the total spend won’t exceed your budget for the month.
Optimizing your campaign
Launching your Sponsored Products campaign is an important first step. But don’t just set it and forget it. Every few weeks, make time to analyze how different keywords and strategies perform so you can make improvements. Here’s how to optimize your campaign:
- Read your reports. You’ll have access to reports with insights on search terms, placements, keywords, and more. To find your reports, go to the “measurement and reporting” tab on the left sidebar in your advertising console and click “Create a report.” Review the results and adjust accordingly.
- Try manual targeting. If you started out using automatic targeting, try making some adjustments to keywords, match types, product targeting, and more.
- Optimize your bids. Wait about two weeks after the launch of your campaign and then try getting more advanced with your bidding strategy based on what’s working and what’s not. For example, use dynamic bids to automatically increase or decrease your bid when it’s more or less likely to lead to a sale. Make sure to check in every two weeks after that as you continue to optimize your campaign to reach more readers.
- Use other Amazon Ads products. Check out some of Amazon’s other advertising solutions, such as Sponsored Brands, which can spotlight additional books and help build your platform as an author.
Ready to connect with readers?
Sign into the advertising console and launch your Sponsored Products campaign.