How to launch your first Sponsored Display campaign if your business does not sell in the Amazon store

Whether your goal is to collect customer leads, drive traffic to your website, or boost visibility with the right customers, Sponsored Display can help drive the outcomes that matter most for your business regardless of whether or not you sell products or services in the Amazon store. This includes industries such as:

2. Choose your campaign settings.

Name your campaign: Give your campaign a straightforward name that will help you easily identify it later. For example, if you’re looking to use Amazon audiences targeting to advertise tickets for a music festival, you could name your campaign “Sponsored Display | Amazon audiences | Music fans | [Name of event].”

Select start and end dates: We recommend running your campaign without an end date, unless you’re using Sponsored Display to promote a limited-time offer. This will help customers discover your business year-round. You can pause or restart a campaign at any time.

Set your budget: Set a daily budget that’s high enough to keep your ad showing throughout the day. Exactly how much you should invest depends on your advertising budgets and benchmarks. If you don’t yet know how much to commit to the initial campaign, set an amount that you’re comfortable with as a test. Then monitor the campaign to learn more about how much you need to spend to achieve your goals. You can always adjust your budget.

Create an ad group: Ad groups are a way to organize and manage ads within a campaign. You can use ad groups to group your ads, such as by theme or audience strategy. Each campaign consists of one or more ad groups. The first ad group is created when you start a campaign. You can add more ad groups to the campaign after you’ve saved it.

3. Select your bid optimization strategy. To provide you with additional flexibility and control, you have three optimization strategies within Sponsored Display reach, page visits, and leads. The optimization strategy you select helps to optimize your bids against specific campaign metrics and will also determine how you’re charged for your ads.

4. Select your locations. The Locations feature allows you to optimize your Sponsored Display ads and promote your products and services to customers relevant to specific geographical locations. You can personalize your campaigns to reflect local culture and preferences and make them more relevant to your customers. You can add up to 1000 locations per ad group. Locations include postal code, city, Designated Market Area (DMA), and state. You won’t be able to edit the location once your campaign is live. To modify locations, you’ll need to archive or disable the ad group and create a new one.

5. Select your audiences. You can tap into our exclusive customer insights and shopping signals to help you define, reach, and connect with the right audience for your business.

Views: Define and reach audiences based on what they browsed for in the Amazon Store, such as those who've viewed products that are similar or relevant to your business. For example, a hotel chain could reach customers who've previously viewed travel guides, luggage, or other travel-related items on Amazon.

Purchases: Reach audiences based on past purchases in the Amazon Store, such as those who've purchased products that are similar or relevant to yours. You can also reach customers who've viewed or purchased products in specific categories in the Amazon store within a specific lookback window. For example, a local yoga studio could define and reach audiences who've purchased yoga mats in the Amazon store in the past 60 days.

Amazon audiences: You can leverage thousands of pre-built audience segments to help reach prospective customers. These audience segments are built using Amazon’s proprietary shopping, streaming and entertainment signals, including those from Amazon.com, Twitch, and IMDb.

There are four main audience categories to choose from: in-market, lifestyle, interests, and life events. You’ll be able to select audiences in a similar way to how you would describe your business’s core customers; for example, “yoga enthusiasts” or “foodies.”

In-market: What are Amazon customers shopping and browsing for right now?
Lifestyle: What does the content they consume and retail behavior tell us about them?
Interest: What have they bought in the past?
Life events: What important events are going on in their lives?

6. Build your ad creative. Help your ads and your business stand out with compelling creative. Your Sponsored Display ads can appear on Amazon owned-and-operated sites such as Amazon.com (product detail and shopping result pages), Twitch, IMDb, and thousands of third-party publisher websites and apps. You can add your own custom lifestyle images as your ad creative, or discover Shutterstock’s library of more than 390 million high-quality images for free—available directly in the Amazon Ads console.

Custom headline and logo: You can edit or add your own business logo, headline, and lifestyle imageto Sponsored Display ad creatives. Use your creative headline to promote your product or service, including special offers and discounts (e.g., “save X”, or “do X to get Y”). This helps you combine business storytelling with your audience strategy.

It’s easy to tell if there are any problems after you’ve submitted your ads for moderation. For rejected ads, the status will change to "Not approved" and provide a rejection status reason. For issues with your creative assets, you can check the rejection reason on the "Creatives" tab in your campaign and resubmit for moderation after you’ve fixed any highlighted issues.

7. Launch your campaign. Once your campaign is built, the “Launch campaign” button will turn from grey and you can launch your campaign.