The author’s guide to Sponsored Products
How to set up your first campaign, learn key concepts such as bidding, and understand your campaign performance.
Introduction
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 they don’t just visit the Amazon store to buy books. Every day, readers are browsing to discover new titles. Sponsored Products can help you stand out to shoppers, giving your book a better chance of being their next discovery.
Our targeting allows you to reach readers searching for books or genres that are similar to yours, giving you a better chance of being their next discovery. Ads are self-service, so you’re 100% in control of your strategy, budget, and spend. It’s free to register, and you’ll only ever pay when your ads are clicked.
This guide will explain all the basics, so get ready to start reaching your future fans.
— Bryan Cohen, freelance copywriterThere were plenty of failures along the way, but every so often, I’d see a glimmer of something and wonder if it could work for all authors in any genre.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 6
Setting your advertising goals
Sponsored ads refer to several different ad products. Sponsored Products is the ad product we recommend starting with when you’re new to advertising. Sponsored Products can help you reach readers by showing ads for your books in relevant shopping results and on product pages. When customers click on your ads, they’re directed to your book’s product page.
Sponsored Products placements
Within shopping results
Product detail pages
Before you start advertising, it’s important to think about what you hope to achieve, to help you decide your approach. Some things to consider:
- What’s your goal for advertising? Is it to grow your brand? Is it to compete with similar authors?
- Who are your customers, and what do you know about them? Don’t worry if you don’t know; using sponsored ads is a great opportunity to learn about your customers so you can refine your advertising strategy.
- What budget have you allocated to spend, and what’s the price point of your book? This will inform the types of ads you use and how much you’re willing to bid.
- When will you start advertising? You might consider advertising three to four weeks before publication, or during gifting periods or relevant seasonal events.
Getting ready to advertise
There are a few things to prepare before you can learn to build ad campaigns. This section will cover how to register and make sure your account is ready.
Registering 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.”
Once you’ve registered, you can sign in to the advertising console, where you will create and manage your ads.
When you have campaigns running, we recommend signing in to the advertising console around twice a week. Make sure to check your notifications and our recommendations to enhance your campaigns—when you sign in to the ads console, click the bell icon in the top right corner.
Requirements for using sponsored ads
- The titles you advertise must be available in the country where you’re advertising.
- Ads must meet the creative requirements in the Amazon Ads guidelines and acceptance policies.
- Titles must meet the ad policy for books.
- The books you want to advertise must have been added in Author Central. For KDP authors, you can use your KDP credentials to sign into Author Central.
- You’ll need a credit or debit card added to your account to pay for advertising fees.
What to do now
Ready to create a Sponsored Products campaign? Log in to your account and click the ‘Create campaign’ button. Choose Sponsored Products and set up your campaign.
- Register to advertise
- Learn how to sign in
- Add your books in Author Central
- Add a credit or debit card to your advertising account
An introduction to targeting
Before we show you how to launch a campaign in the advertising console, we’re going to cover the basics, starting with targeting.
Here are the definitions you should know
Targeting: How you define the context in which you want your ads to appear. Remember, Sponsored Products ads can appear in search or on product pages.
Shopping queries: Words and phrases that Amazon customers use to look for products in Amazon’s store. These could be a specific product and author they’re looking for, like “Hard Times” or “Charles Dickens,” or they could be more generic, like “classic novels.” You’ll also hear queries referred to as search terms.
Keywords: Words or phrases that allow you to match your ad with the queries customers use when looking for a book on Amazon. Your keywords should reflect queries relevant to the books you’re advertising, e.g., “classic novels.” This means that when a customer uses a search term you’ve chosen as a keyword, your ad has a chance of being shown.
Types of targeting
When you launch a campaign, you’ll have to choose whether you want to run it with automatic targeting or with manual targeting.
Automatic targeting
What is it? The targeting for your ad is automatically determined and will be chosen based on details about your book, such as its genre.
When should I use it?
- If you’re new to Sponsored Products, this targeting option can help you easily and quickly launch a campaign, since you don’t have to make any decisions about what to target.
- If you want to learn more about how shoppers are discovering your books, this can help you know which targets to use in a manual campaign.
- If you don’t have time or don’t feel ready to optimize your campaigns on a regular basis, this option can adapt dynamically to changing trends.
Manual targeting
What is it? This targeting option gives you greater control over your targeting by manually selecting the keywords or products you want to target. This also allows you to manage performance more precisely, as you can set higher bids for more competitive targets or for those that drive the strongest conversion for you.
Manual targeting is separated into two categories :
Keyword targeting
This uses keywords to match your ads with queries customers are using, e.g., “vegetarian cookbooks.”
Product targeting
- Matches your ads to specific products, enabling you to target similar books so your ad shows in search results or on product pages
- Matches your ads to entire categories, i.e., genres
When should I use it? Choose this option when you know which keywords or products you’d like to bid on, if you’d like to vary your bid by target, or if you’d like to bid for specific placements. We recommend trying one of these strategies once you’ve run a campaign with automatic targeting. There’s more detail on this in Your next 30 days.
Tip:
For both automatic and manual targeting, you have the option to add negative targeting to a campaign. Negative targeting allows you to specify which keywords or products you don’t want to trigger your ads.
Match types
Match types determine how closely a customer query must match a keyword or product for your ads to be shown. You’ll need to specify which match types you want to use, as well how much you’re willing to bid.
After you create a Sponsored Products campaign with automatic targeting, you can see the match type options and adjust them to meet your campaign objectives. Here’s when you’d choose each option.
1. Close match:
This will only match your ad to customer queries that contain the exact keywords, either fully or partially, that were automatically chosen for your campaign.
For example, if your book is Hard Times by Charles Dickens, automatic keyword or product targeting will have included the keywords “Hard Times” or “Charles Dickens.” A shopper would need to enter one of these terms in order for your ad to match.
When to use it: This is a good option when you want to be precise with the keywords you’re targeting.
2. Loose match:
Customer queries don’t have to exactly match the keywords chosen for your campaign for your ad to be shown, since our system decides which shopping queries are related to the ones you’ve targeted.
For example, if your targeting includes the keyword “19th century literature,” loose match may also show your ad when a customer searches for “classic novels.”
When to use it: Since loose match shows you the queries shoppers are actually making, it can be a good way of researching the keywords you want to match exactly or those you want to increase your bids on.
You’ll also see options for complements and substitute match types. These ways of matching aren’t relevant for books, so we don’t recommend using them.
What to do now
When you’re creating your campaign, select automatic targeting, then choose both close and loose match types.
Bidding and budgets
You might be worried about getting your spend correct, so here’s how to manage it. You’ll control it through a combination of bids and budget. The first thing to consider is bidding.
What is bidding?
There are usually multiple advertisers targeting the same keywords or products. When shoppers perform shopping queries on Amazon for products, we run a real-time auction to decide which ads will appear for customer queries and which order, if any, they will appear in.
This is known as an auction-based or cost-per-click (CPC) system. You will only ever pay when your ad is clicked, meaning it won’t cost you money when your ad is displayed but isn’t clicked. Ad impressions, which are the number of times a shopper views your ads, are free.
Your bid is how much you are willing to pay for a reader to click your ad. You decide how much you bid, and you can adjust this at any time.
The system considers both the bid values and the ads’ relevance to shopping queries. More relevant and better-performing ads are more likely to be shown than less relevant ones, and the more customers click an ad in response to a particular query, the more relevant it becomes for that query.
Example
If your book is a novel about war, then your campaign is targeting the keyword “war novels,” and you have chosen to bid $0.75.
There is also an author bidding $0.60 for the same keyword, and another author bidding on the keyword “war books,” also for $0.60.
Since you’re the highest bidder and the keyword you bid on matches the shopper’s query exactly, you will win the auction and your ad will be shown. However, you only pay $0.01 more than the second-highest bid—meaning that although you bid $0.75, you will pay $0.61, one cent more than the second-highest bid of $0.60.
Bid options
When running campaigns with automatic product and/or keyword targeting, you have two options:
- Set a default bid. This means you are setting one bid for both close and loose match types.
- Set bids by targeting group. You can set different bids by match type. You might want to try bidding higher for close match, since close match queries may be more likely to result in a sale for you.
For both options, you can use our suggested amount in the Default bid box. This is based on what we think will help you win the most clicks—or, if you prefer, you can adjust this yourself.
Bidding strategies
Whether you’re running campaigns with automatic or manual keyword or product targeting, you can choose from three bidding strategies.
1. Dynamic bids—down only
We’ll reduce your bids for auctions if we consider that your ad is less likely to convert to a sale, e.g., if it has a less relevant shopping query or is on a placement that doesn’t perform well.
When to use it: We recommend starting with this bidding strategy to give you greater control over spend as you learn what works for your campaigns. You can also use this strategy to control spend of underperforming campaigns.
2. Dynamic bids—up and down
We’ll also increase your bids for auctions that we consider more likely to result in a sale. Your bid will be increased by up to 100% for placements at the top of the first page of shopping results, and increased by up to 50% for all other placements.
So, if your default bid is $0.75, you could pay $1.50 for clicks when your ad shows at the top of the first page of search results and $1.13 for all other placements.
When to use it: When you’ve already run a campaign with “Dynamic bids—down only”:
- If you want to learn how much you should be bidding for specific keywords or products.
- If you want to win the ad placements at the top of the page.
- If you have a high-performing campaign and want to help maximize results.
3. Fixed bids
With the fixed bids strategy, Amazon Ads will use your exact bid for all opportunities and won’t adjust your bids. Compared to dynamic bidding strategies, you may get more impressions but fewer conversions for your ad spend with this strategy.
When to use it: When your priority is how many times your ad is shown, rather than how many times it is clicked.
What is a daily budget?
This is defined as the maximum amount you’re willing spend on clicks per day. It’s different from the bid amount, which is the amount you’re willing to pay for each individual click. It’s also different from your overall spend, which is how much you will actually pay for the clicks your ads generate.
How do daily budgets work?
Your daily budget amount is the average over the course of a calendar month. By the end of the month, you’ll never have spent more than the daily budget you’ve set, multiplied by the number of days in that month. So, if your daily budget is $10, your total spend for that campaign for the month will never exceed $310 for months with 31 days.
How much you spend on a daily basis may vary. On any given day, your daily spend may be equal to, less than, or up to 10% more than the daily budget you set for your campaign. This allows you to benefit from high-traffic days when you’re getting lots of clicks on your ads. Remember, this will average out, so it’ll never exceed $310 per calendar month for months with 31 days.
Here’s an example of how your spend may vary from day to day.
Say you set your daily budget for your campaign as $10 and your winning bid amount is $0.50. If you’re running with dynamic bidding, your bid amount may change for each auction, but for the purpose of this example, it stays at $0.50.
- On the first day, you win 20 auctions. Your spend for the day is $10
- On the second day, you win 10 auctions. Your spend for the day is $5, so you don’t spend your full daily budget.
- On the third day, you win 22 auctions. Your spend for the day is $11, so you spend 10% over your daily budget.
Your daily budget was $10, so your total budget over these three days was $30. However, your total spend came to $26 due to days of higher and lower traffic for your ads. Your total spend for this campaign for the month will not exceed $310.
Budget tips
- If you’re not sure where to start with your budget, suggested budget recommends the amount to keep your campaign active throughout the day.
- If you don’t see a budget suggested, a good place to start is with $10 a day. This amount gets most advertisers through a day.
- Then, as you begin advertising, you can see how your strategy is working and adjust from there.
- You can change your budget at any time. Here’s how
What to do now
- Choose either default bid or bid by targeting group.
- Use our suggested bids or choose your own.
- Select “Dynamic bids—down only” as your bidding strategy.
- Decide the daily budget for your campaign. We recommend starting with $10 per day.
Preparing your campaign, step-by-step
Now that you’ve learned the basics of product and keyword targeting and bidding, we can talk about setting up your first campaign.
Did you know you can find in-portal information and support while you’re building your campaign? Hover over the “i” for an explanation of the field or click the “?” for help related to each section.
Sign in to the advertising console, click the “Create campaign” button, then click “Sponsored Products.
Step 1: Readying your products
Select the books you want to advertise within your campaign. Search by book title or ASIN, and click “Add.” Make sure to include all book formats, such as Kindle e-book, paperback, and hardcover. This allows you to see all sales from your ad, no matter which format the reader chooses.
Step 2: Targeting
Choose automatic targeting. Use our suggested bids to either set a default bid or bids by targeting group.
Negative keyword targeting is optional, so if you have phrases you want to exclude, add them. Otherwise, don’t worry about putting anything in this section.
Step 3: Campaign bidding strategy
We recommend starting with “Dynamic bids—down only.” You can change this at any time.
Step 4: Settings—Campaign length
Choose the start date for your campaign. We recommend setting no end date, which allows you to learn what’s working for your campaign. This can also be changed whenever you’d like.
Step 4: Settings—Daily budget
A daily budget of $10 will keep most advertisers in budget for the day. You can change this whenever you need, too.
Step 5: Launching your campaign
Click the “Launch campaign” button, and that’s it: Your campaign is now live and ready to start reaching readers.
Review your performance
Don’t forget about your campaign. Make sure to check in on it a couple of times a week to see how it’s doing. This will help you find areas to improve, such as adjusting your bids or daily budget.
You can review the topline performance in campaign manager. There, you can select the date range that interests you, and you can customize the columns so you’re only seeing the metrics you’ve chosen to see.
You’re probably eager to see results right away, but remember that your first campaign is an opportunity to learn where to refine your strategy. That said, there are some things you can adjust within your first campaign:
- Your campaigns are spending all your budget, and you are seeing conversion. We recommend that you increase budget on that campaign, or reallocate budget from low-performing campaigns or campaigns that aren’t spending their budget.
- Your campaigns aren’t spending their budget, and you are seeing conversion. We recommend that you maintain budget but monitor in case you need to increase it.
- You aren’t seeing conversion for your campaign. We recommend that you reduce campaign budget or move it to higher-performing campaigns. Once you’re running manual campaigns, you can also optimize targeting.
We suggest giving it two weeks before you start more advanced optimization strategies.
Your next 30 days
You’ve had your campaign running for a few weeks, and you’re ready to learn some more advanced strategies. Here’s where to start.
- Check out your reports
- Try out manual targeting
- Optimize your bids
- Add other Amazon Ads products to your strategy
- Help solve common problems
1. Check out your reports
There are a number of reports available to help guide your book advertising strategy. To find your reports, go to the “Measurement and reporting” tab from the left sidebar on your advertising console, and click “Create a report.”
2. Try out manual product or keyword targeting
A quick reminder: Keyword targeting uses keywords to match your ads with queries customers are using, and product targeting allows you to target other relevant books or whole categories.
We’ll cover the basics of each of these, then we’ll give you some practical ideas for how to use them in your advertising strategy.
Keyword targeting
Types of keywords
Your campaigns should include a range of keyword types.
- General keywords and genre-related keywords can help you increase your reach and visibility, as can keywords related to other books and other authors. Examples of this include “19th century authors,” “books about war,” or “romance novels.”
- Keywords relevant to your own pen name and titles to help you cross-sell your other titles will appear when customers browse for your books, or launch a new book or series. Think of these as branded keywords, just like Adidas or Nike.
Match types: Keyword targeting
With manual keyword targeting, you can use multiple match types for a keyword, and can adjust your bid for each type. You might want to start off by using all match types for each keyword, then adjust bids depending on which match type performs stronger.
Broad match
With broad match, a shopping query can contain the keyword terms in any order. It may include singulars, plurals, variations, synonyms, or related terms. The keyword itself may not be contained in the shopping query.
For example, the keyword “classic novels” may match queries such as the variations of “classic books” or “classic horror novels,” or the related term “19th century literature.”
When to use it: Choose this option to expand your keyword coverage, helping potentially increase the reach of your campaigns. We recommend starting your first manual campaign with broad match to allow you to measure which keywords perform best.
Phrase match
Phrase match is more restrictive than broad match but may generally result in more relevant placements for your ad. The shopping query must contain the exact phrase or sequence of words, but will include plurals.
For example, the keyword “classic novels” may match queries such as “19th century classic novels” or “classic novels by women.”
When to use it: Use phrase match when you want to balance relevance with reach or for keywords you’ve chosen based on high performance in your last campaign.
Exact match
Exact match is the most precise match type but also the most relevant to a query, and therefore it has a higher potential likelihood of conversion. The shopping query must exactly match the keyword or sequence of words in order for the ad to show, and will also match close variations of the exact term, such as plurals.
For example, the keyword “classic novel” may match queries such as “classic novels.”2
When to use it: Use exact match when you know the exact keywords that result in the highest conversion for your ads.
Product targeting: Product
When targeting a product, your ad will be eligible for impressions on its product detail page as well as shopping result pages where the targeted product appears among the top of the shopping results.
So, if your book is Wuthering Heights, you may target the ASIN for Jane Eyre. This would mean that when a reader searches for “Jane Eyre” or visits the product page, your ad may be shown in the same shopping results or on the product page.
- When to use it: Use product targeting when you know which books or products you want to trigger your ads; when you want to be specific about the titles your ads are triggered by, but you want to broaden your reach beyond a single product; or when you want to discover additional products related to the items you’re already targeting.
Tip:
As with keyword targeting, you can use insights from automatically targeted campaigns. Check the search term report for previous campaigns, and target ASINs that generate clicks or conversions which show up in the “search term” column. You can also negatively target products that are underperforming.
Product targeting has two match types:
Expanded match
Target a single product along with others closely related to it.
For example, you might target “Jane Eyre,” and expanded match would target “Jane Eyre: CliffsNotes.”
When to use it: When you want to be specific about the titles that trigger your ads, but you want to broaden your reach beyond a single product, or to discover additional products related to the items you’re already targeting
Exact match
Target a single product. Your ads will only be triggered when this product is shown in search results or the product page is viewed.
If you targeted “Jane Eyre,” your ad would only show on the product page for Jane Eyre, or when “Jane Eyre” is in search results.
When to use it: When you want to be ultraprecise with your targeting
Product targeting: Category
Category targeting allows you to target whole categories in the Amazon store. Your ad may show up on the product page of any product for the category you've targeted or in shopping results when a customer enters a keyword related to the genre.
For example, if your book is Wuthering Heights, you may want to target the categories “fiction classics,” “Gothic romance,” and “literary fiction.” This would mean your ad could appear when a customer searches for the keyword “fiction classics,” or for a book that is also in the category of fiction classics.
- When to use it: Use category targeting when you’re not sure which individual ASINs to target or when you want to learn more about which ASINs in the category are relevant to your book. You can use this insight in your keyword or product targeting strategies of other campaigns.
You may know which category you want to target, or you can also use the suggested tab under the category targeting option recommendations of relevant categories to target.
Create your targeting strategy: Keyword targeting
Next, after your automatic campaign has been running for at least two weeks, check your search term report to find your top-performing queries. Your top performers will be those that generated the most clicks and sales.
Here’s how to decide which keywords to use in your manual campaign. Group keywords into the three categories below, then take the recommended action.
| Category | Description | Action |
|---|---|---|
| A | Keywords with conversions above your target spend | Use these keywords in your manual targeting campaigns. Use phrase match or exact match to target these terms more precisely to focus your investment on what you know is working. |
| B | Keywords either without conversion or with conversion above your target spend | Remove these keywords from your campaigns or set as negative keywords to help improve campaign performance. |
| C | Keywords without conversion but where spend is within your target spend | Leave these keywords in your campaigns and continue to monitor the performance of the keywords. |
Tips:
- In addition to manually choosing your keywords based on their performance in your previous campaigns, you can add suggested keywords to your campaign. Our suggestions are based on keywords that performed well for you in the past, as well as those that performed well across Amazon more broadly.
- We suggest adding at least 30 keywords to your campaign, as this can increase the opportunity for your ads to be shown.
- You might want to keep your automatic campaign running with a lower daily budget, even if you’ve moved onto a manual campaign. This will help you keep learning what to include in your manual campaign.
Create your targeting strategy: Product targeting
Download the targeting report from your automatic campaign. This will show you search volume and performance trends for your products and categories. Narrow down your target list, and set budgets for the targets that you really want. You can take the same approach as with keyword targeting, by categorizing products based on performance.
3. Optimizing bids
Now that you know what you’ll be targeting in your campaign, you can get more advanced with your bidding strategy. Here are two reasons why you might want to adjust your bids.
- You want to appear in a specific placement that is performing better for you.
- You want to win more auctions for keywords or products that convert well for you.
Here’s how you can identify each of these situations and the changes you can make to your bids.
You want to appear in a specific placement that is performing better for you.
You can adjust your bids and view the performance of your ads by downloading a placement report. If there’s a placement where you’re seeing low impressions, a good click-through rate (CTR), and high conversions, consider increasing your bids for this placement to maximize results.
When you’re adjusting bids by placement type, you’ll choose this in the campaign bidding strategy section of campaign builder, as this works alongside the different bidding strategies. You can keep your bids as they were, but in the “Adjust bids by placement type” dropdown, you can select how much you’re willing to exceed your bids to win specific placements
Example
Using the example of a “mystery book,” you’ve bid $1 for a keyword and set a 50% adjustment for top of search (on the first page) and a 25% adjustment for product page placements.
A fixed bid of $1 with an adjustment set at 50% for top of search placement results in a bid for that placement of $1.50. A 25% adjustment for product page placement results in a placement bid of $1.25. The bid for the rest of the search placement stays at $1, since this is a fixed bid.
Now, with “Dynamic bids—down only,” Amazon Ads will decrease your bid by a maximum of 100% when it’s less likely to lead to a sale.
With the top of search bid adjustment set at 50% and the product pages placement adjustment at 25%, it means the maximum amount you can bid for these placements is the same as above, but we’ll also decrease the maximum you will pay, giving you a range between $0 and $1.50 for top of search; between $0 and $1.25 for product pages; and between $0 and $1 for the rest of search.
With “Dynamic bids—up and down,” Amazon Ads will increase or decrease your bid by a maximum of 100% when it’s more or less likely to lead to a sale.
So, if you start with a $1 bid and have a 50% top of search adjustment, the base becomes $1.50 instead: a 50% increase, and as your bid may be increased by up to 100%, you could pay a maximum of $3 to win a bid for this placement.
To help you better understand which keywords or products convert well for you
Download a search term or targeting report, and look at where you’re getting sales but have low impressions. You can adjust your base bids for these keywords or products, or you could adjust your bidding strategy to “Dynamic bids—up and down.”
One last tip
It may take some experimentation to find the strategy that works best for you. The key is to keep learning and refining.
4. Using other Amazon Ads products
Sponsored Brands
After getting comfortable with Sponsored Products, here’s how adding Sponsored Brands to your advertising strategy could help.
- Build awareness of your brand as an author.
- Showcase a collection of your titles, such as books in the same genre or series.
- Capture attention of readers looking for books like yours using prominent placements.
5. Common problems, and the solutions that may help
Here are some final quick tips for optimizing your campaigns. To discover other educational materials, consult the final chapter, Additional resources. For more information, there are details of how where to go to speak to other authors working with Amazon Ads.
Low or no impressions
- Add more ASINs to your advertising campaigns.
- Increase bids on existing campaigns.
- Use generic terms relevant to your books, and use broad match.
- Increase the daily budget of the ad campaigns.
- Use “Dynamic bids—up and down,” and tweak bids based on different placements’ performance.
High impressions but low or no clicks
- Make sure you’ve chosen books with a good customer review score.
- Make bid adjustments by leveraging the search term reports.
- Add keywords with high spend and no or very low sales as negative keywords.
High costs but low sales
- Lower the budget/bids on low-performing campaigns, keywords, or ASINs. Use Amazon’s suggested bid to set a competitive bid for each ad group or keyword.
- Use the search term report to identify shopping queries with high spend and no returns. Use them as negatives in automatic and manual targeting campaigns.
- Add high-performing search terms (terms with high sales and CTR) to manual targeting campaigns. Bid high on exact match, lower on phrase match, and minimum on broad match.
- Pause or reduce bids for keywords with high spend and no sales.
Ready to get started?
Go to advertising.amazon.com to register, sign in to the KDP portal and choose “Amazon Ads” in the Marketing tab.
Thank you for reading
The author’s guide to Sponsored Products