Product
Sponsored Brands – Increase brand awareness
Guide
Amazon is a popular destination for readers to buy books, and with Sponsored Brands you can build your author brand and help readers discover your books. Learn how to get discovered by new audiences, capture their attention, and showcase your brand.
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Sponsored Brands ads help increase the visibility of your books and build awareness around you, as an author. These eye-catching ads are easy to manage, putting you in charge of your own strategy and budget. Plus, it’s free to register for Sponsored Brands, and you’ll only pay when a shopper clicks on your ad. Sponsored Brands ads allow you to tell your story the way you want and reach readers at the right time and place. These ads may appear in a few places, including:
Book advertisers using a custom image in their Sponsored Brands ads saw an average 48% higher click-through rate on mobile compared to advertisers who only used product images.1
There are a few steps to take before you start building your Sponsored Brands campaign:
Targeting is the process of defining the context in which you want your ads to appear. You have two types of targeting to choose from and can use one type per campaign.
Keyword targeting: These words or phrases help you match your ad with customer queries. The keywords you choose should describe different aspects of your book or your brand (“19th century authors” or “romance novels”) to help improve its visibility and reach.
Product targeting: This matches your ads to either 1) specific products, similar books, or the product page of these books or 2) entire categories or genres. The product you might choose to target if the book being advertised is Wuthering Heights could be the ASIN for Jane Eyre, for example, while the categories to target could be “fiction classics,” “Gothic romance,” or “literary fiction.”
When creating your Sponsored Brands ad, you’ll want to consider how closely you would like your ad to match what buyers are looking for through their shopping queries, and if there are any words or products you want to avoid being affiliated with. To do this, you can use the following tools:
Match types: This determines how closely a customer’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.
Negative targeting: These are keywords or products you don’t want people to associate with your ad and could be based on insights from campaigns that have run previously and underperformed.
Sponsored Brands ads operate on a cost-per-click (CPC) model, which means you only pay when a shopper clicks on your ad. This is where bidding and budgeting come in.
A bid is the price you’re willing to pay for a shopper to click on your ad. Because multiple advertisers usually target the same keywords or products, how much you bid, along with the relevance of your ad to the shopper’s query, determines which ads will be shown. For example, if you’re advertising a fictional book about war, you might select “war novels” for keywords and set your bid at $0.75. Another author also chooses the keywords “war novels” and sets their bid at $0.60. Because your keywords are the same and your bid is higher, your ad will display.
You have two budgeting options: a daily budget or a lifetime budget. A daily budget allows you to determine the maximum amount you’re willing to spend on your campaign daily. This is averaged over the course of a month. So, if you budget $10 a day for 30 days, that’s $300, and spending is paced day by day. With a lifetime budget, you set the maximum amount you’re willing to spend on the entire advertising campaign (must be at least $100). Then 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 in a few minutes.
Launching your first Sponsored Brands campaign is simple. Follow these steps to get started:
Ready to connect with readers? Sign into the advertising console and launch your Sponsored Brands campaign.
Already a registered advertiser? Sign in.
1 Amazon internal data, book publishers, US, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES, December 2022 – February 2023. This is based on past data and does not guarantee future performance.