The author's guide to Sponsored Brands

This guide helps authors build awareness and increase visibility for their books using Sponsored Brands ads. Whether you're self-published, indie, or traditionally published, this guide is for you. Learn how to set up your first Sponsored Brands campaign, understand key concepts such as targeting and bidding, and measure performance to help expand your book's visibility, find new readers, and grow your author platform.

Sponsored Brands ads are eye-catching ads that help you tell your story and reach readers at the right time and place. These ads may appear at the top of shopping results, within shopping results, and on product detail pages. Best of all, you only pay when a potential new reader clicks on your ad.

Ready to get started? This guide will teach you what you need to know about Sponsored Brands—including how to find your ideal readers, choose your ad format, bid, budget, and optimize your campaign—as you work to grow your readership.

• Launch phase: Boost visibility during pre-release and post-launch to help your book gain early momentum and reviews.
• Post-launch momentum: Build your audience of potential new readers after your initial launch period to help climb bestseller lists.
• Series promotion: Cross-sell between books in your series to help readers discover your complete catalog.

1. Review the requirements. Keep these guidelines in mind as you prepare to create your ad:
1. You must have three or more eligible book titles claimed under the same author's name.
2. Books you advertise must be available in the country where you're advertising.
3. Books must be claimed in Author Central.
4. Ads must meet the creative requirements in the Amazon Ads guidelines and acceptance policies.
5. Titles must meet the ad policy for books.
2. Register to advertise. To register, visit advertising.amazon.com and click the "Register" button in the top right corner. Select the country where you want to advertise, choose the "Amazon Author" option, and complete the rest of the registration flow.

1. Create your campaign. When you're registered and signed into the advertising console, click the "create campaign" button, and then click "Sponsored Brands."
2. Set your campaign dates and budget. Choose your launch date and determine how much you want to spend. For many authors, $10 a day is a good place to start. It's helpful to not set an end date, so you can watch and learn.
3. Select your ad format. Decide between collections and video ad format:
1. Video: Tell the story of your book using video creative to engage readers.
2. Collections: Feature 3–10 books in one ad. No custom image or headline needed—the format automatically showcases your books.

• Keyword targeting: Uses keywords to match your ads with queries readers are using (e.g. "classic novels").
• Product targeting: Matches your ads to either specific books or entire categories and genres. If you are advertising Wuthering Heights, for example, you might want to use product targeting for Jane Eyre. Categories to target could include "fiction classics," "Gothic romance," or "literary fiction."
• Match types: For keyword targeting in Sponsored Brands, match types determine how closely a reader's query must match a keyword for an ad to be shown. You'll specify which match type you want to use: broad, phrase, or exact. Broad match allows the query to contain keyword terms in any order, including variations and synonyms (e.g., "classic novels" may match "classic books" or "19th century literature")—useful for expanding reach, especially in your first campaign. Phrase match requires the exact phrase or sequence of words in the query (e.g., "classic novels" may match "19th century classic novels")—ideal for balancing relevance with reach. Exact match requires the query to exactly match the keyword or close variations like plurals (e.g., "classic novel" matches "classic novels")—best when you know which specific keywords drive the highest performance.
• Negative targeting: Allows you to specify which keywords or books you don't want to trigger your ads. For example, if you write contemporary romance, you might add "historical romance" as a negative keyword to avoid showing your ads to readers searching for period settings.

A bid is the price you're willing to pay for a reader to click on your ad. Multiple authors might target the same keywords or books, so the amount you bid, along with the relevance of your ad to the reader'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.

Try using the suggested bids when you launch your ad, and adapt them over time depending on how they perform. You can also use automated bidding, which allows Amazon to automatically optimize bids for placements below top of search based on conversion rates. Note that automatic bidding or bid adjustments will not be applied to ads with video ad format.

If not opting into automated bidding, you can increase your bid by entering a percentage increase to your base bid for specific placements like top of search and rest of search to help improve visibility in high-traffic areas.

You have two budgeting options: a daily budget or a lifetime budget.

• Daily budget: Set the maximum amount you're willing to spend 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, it will ultimately even out, and the total spend won't exceed your budget for the month.
• Lifetime budget: Set the maximum amount you're willing to spend on the entire advertising campaign (must be at least $100). When you reach that amount, the ads stop running. Lifetime budgets are spent as quickly as possible and won't be paced throughout the day. This system allows you to benefit from high traffic periods; however, a smaller budget could be spent quickly.

1. 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 your keyword reports and search term reports to learn what's performing well, then adjust your targeting and bidding accordingly.
2. Refine your targeting. Try making adjustments to keywords, match types, product targeting, and negative keywords to better reach your ideal readers. Experimentation is the key to fine-tuning your strategy.
3. Optimize your bids. Wait about two weeks after the launch of your campaign and then try adjusting your bidding strategy based on what's working and what's not. Make sure to check in every two weeks after that as you continue to optimize your campaign to grow your readership.
4. Test different ad formats. If you started with Sponsored Brands collections, consider testing video ads to see which format resonates better with your audience.
5. Use other Amazon Ads solutions. Check out some of Amazon's other advertising solutions, such as Sponsored Products, which can help increase visibility for individual titles.

• Customer reviews: Track how advertising may help increase your review count. More reviews build social proof for future readers.
• Sales rank: Monitor your titles' Amazon Best Seller Rank in relevant categories. This shows if increased visibility is helping you climb bestseller lists.
• Bookscan weekly sales report: If you're advertising books in a series, watch for increased sales across your other titles as readers discover your complete catalog.