Guide
Best practices for your Sponsored Products ads
Success tips to help you make the most of your campaigns.
Start using Amazon Ads to promote your products and create campaigns.
Already a registered advertiser? Sign in to launch and optimize your campaigns.
Jump to:
Sponsored Products can help connect you with customers looking for items like yours as they're shopping on Amazon. With Sponsored Products, you have control over your campaign’s targeting, spend, and more. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to set up a campaign, and maximize its performance.
What are Sponsored Products, and what do they do?
Sponsored Products are cost-per-click (CPC) ads that promote individual product listings on Amazon, and on select premium apps and websites. Sponsored Products are available for professional sellers, vendors, book vendors, authors, and agencies, allowing them to promote products to shoppers who are actively searching with related keywords or viewing similar products on Amazon. Sponsored Products appear in shoppers’ Amazon search results and on product pages. Ads serve both on desktop and mobile browsers and on the Amazon mobile app. When shoppers click your ad, they are taken directly to your product’s detail page. Sponsored Products only appear when your advertised items are in stock, and include trusted Amazon shopping attributes.
Sponsored Products campaign example
Why should I use Sponsored Products?
Sponsored Products can help you promote your products, increase sales, and improve brand visibility on Amazon and select premium apps and websites. It’s a cost-effective and insight-driven solution for both new and established advertisers to plan, launch, and optimize their advertising strategy in an easy way. Here are five benefits of Sponsored Products:
- Reach shoppers with relevant messaging. Select from flexible keyword and product targeting options and recommendations to reach relevant shoppers to help optimize your campaigns.
- Drive sales with a few clicks. Take shoppers directly to the product detail page and help boost sales by making it simple for customers to browse or buy in one or two clicks.
- Manage ads for your specific needs. You have control over your ad spend with daily or lifetime budget options, allowing you to manage your costs effectively.
- Optimize for your budget. Only pay when a shopper clicks your ad. This means your investment goes toward engaged customers.
- Use informative insights to advertise smarter. The reporting dashboard provides valuable data on ad performance, helping you optimize your campaigns.
How to get started
Sponsored Products ads take just minutes to create, and offer flexible targeting, bidding, and budgeting options. No previous advertising experience is required. Here is how to get started:
- Start by registering for Amazon Ads.
- Sign in to your account, click “Create campaign” and choose Sponsored Products.
- Add the products that you want to advertise. Your suggested products are most likely to generate impressions and clicks if you advertise them with Sponsored Products. Adding them to your ad campaigns can help increase your ad-attributed sales, as there is a greater chance of a shopper engaging with that advertised product.
- Define your targeting, keyword, and bidding strategies.
- Choose your settings: Give your campaign a name, define your start and end dates, and input your daily budget.
- Launch your campaign.
Fact: Suggested products are 321 times more likely to generate ad-attributed sales when advertised, compared to products that are not suggested.1
Set advertising objectives
It’s important to have a specific goal in mind before you launch your campaign. For example:
- Brand exposure: Get the word out for your company.
- New product promotion: Build buzz for new items.
- Inventory clearance: Promote sales of items you’re looking to replace or upgrade.
- Peak season promotion: Maximize products during the holidays, such as Prime Day.
Strengthen your products and detail pages
The quality of your product information, as well as on detail pages, can have a direct impact on your ad performance and sales. Follow these guidelines to help reach more customers:
- Check if your products display the featured offer. The featured offer is an automated window that appears at the top right of a product detail page above the Buy Now button.
- Price products competitively. Shoppers may be more motivated to click on your ad and ultimately make a purchase if you offer affordable prices for your products.
- Make sure your products are in stock. Your products need to be in stock to be the featured offer and eligible for advertising.
- Create a strong product title. Be clear and concise. Make titles approximately 60 characters long.
- Get the Prime badge. Enroll your eligible products in Fulfillment by Amazon.
- Pick products with positive customer reviews. Advertise products that have five or more customer reviews—with a rating of 3.5 stars or higher.
- Feature four or more high-quality, zoomable images. Images must be at least 1,000 pixels in height or width to enable the zoom function.
- Include at least three bullet points. Consider the following: contents, uses, dimensions, operational considerations, age rating, skill level, and country of origin.
- Enhance your product detail page with A+ content. Available to vendors as well as sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, A+ content lets you describe your product features using interactive images and videos and customized text placements.
Targeting options
Targeting is the way you define the context in which your ads appear to audiences— targeting your ads with keywords helps raise visibility of your products within relevant shopping searches. Sponsored Products campaigns offer automatic targeting, manual targeting, and negative targeting—an optional targeting capability for both automatic and manual options.
Automatic targeting: Automatic targeting is the easiest and quickest way to get started. Amazon matches your ads to keywords and products, saving you time and providing you with important insights. You can also use any of the four automatic targeting match types to support your campaign objectives. Make your selection during or after campaign creation.
| Match type | Description | Example |
| Close match | We may show your ad to customers who use shopping terms closely related to your products. | If your product is "Doppler 400-count Cotton Sheets," we'll show an ad when customers use shopping terms like "cotton sheets" and "400-counts sheets." |
| Loose match | We may show your ad to customers who use shopping terms loosely related to your products. | If your product is "Doppler 400-count Cotton Sheets," we'll show an ad when customers use shopping terms like "bed sheets" and "queen-sized cotton sheets." |
| Substitutes | We may show your ad to shoppers who use the detail pages of products similar to your products. | If your product is "Doppler 400-count Cotton Sheets," we'll show an ad on detail pages that include "300-count cotton sheets" and "queen 400-count sheets." |
| Complements | We may show your ad to shoppers who view the detail pages of products that complement your products. | If your product is "Doppler 400-count Cotton Sheets," we'll show an ad on detail pages that include "queen comforter" and "feather pillows." |
Manual targeting: With manual targeting, you can manually select which keywords or products you want to target. This targeting option gives you the flexibility to choose your own targets and manage performance at the target level
Manual targeting example
Product targeting: To target your ads to specific products or entire categories that are similar or complementary to your products, use product targeting. This option gives you greater control over when and where your ads appear in shopping results and product detail pages.
- Target high performing products to help drive more sales: Download your ’search term report’ to identify your best performing products and target those in a manual product targeting campaign.
- Use category targeting to help increase visibility of new products: Choose the category of the new product you want to promote; this allows you to target all products similar to yours.
- Target your own product pages to showcase your product range: Targeting your own products and bidding higher on them can help you increase visibility for your range on your product pages.
Add negative targeting to automatic or manual targeting: Adding negative products and brands to your campaigns prevents your ads from appearing on specific shopping results or detail pages that don’t meet your performance goals.
Example: You’re running an ad for a camera lens. Your advertising objective is for your ad to appear near complementary products, but you find it appearing by a noncompatible camera. By adding this camera as a negative ASIN, you can stop your ad from appearing there and save paying for placements you don’t want. Here are three steps to get started:
- Go to the campaign manager.
- Select a campaign and an ad group, and then go to the negative targeting section.
- Click "Add keyword" for negative keyword targets; "Exclude" for negative product/brand targets
Add negative targeting
Managing budgets and bids
Sponsored Products campaigns have no monthly or upfront fees. You bid the maximum amount that you’re willing to pay when a shopper clicks an ad for your products. You’ll set a daily budget for your campaign. The daily budget is a daily amount you are willing to spend on a campaign over a calendar month. For example, if you set your daily budget at $100, you may receive up to $3,000 worth of clicks in that calendar month (assuming a full 30-day month).
Daily budget: We recommend starting with a daily budget of $10 or equivalent. You have the flexibility to adjust your budget at any time.
Refine your bidding strategy: Choose a campaign bidding strategy to control how you’ll pay for clicks on your ads.
- Use “dynamic bids—up and down” or “dynamic bids—down only” and Amazon adjusts your bid in real time.
- Choose “fixed bids” to use the exact bid you chose.
- Adjust placement bids as necessary to balance campaign performance across top of search, rest of search, and product pages placements. You can add bid adjustments up to 900% to stay competitive for top of search (first page) or product page placements.
Reporting and measurement
In the first week, monitor your metrics at least twice a week to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign, and adjust accordingly. Key measurements include:
- Impressions: How many times your ad has been displayed, which helps make sure that your ads are visible for customers.
- Clicks: How many times your ad is clicked, which measures if your ads are driving additional page views to the detail pages of your advertised products.
- Sales: Total value of products sold attributed to your ads—the ultimate measurement of your campaign’s effectiveness.
- Cost-per-click: The average amount that you’ve paid for an ad click (total spend divided by the total number of clicks). Brands can use this metric to decide whether they need to adjust their ad budget.
- New-to-brand orders: Attributed orders from first-time customers of your brand on Amazon, measuring whether your brand is expanding its reach through the ad campaign.
Fact: New products are 231 times more likely to generate ad-attributed sales when advertised, compared to products that are not new.2
Types of reports
Amazon offers several reports, available through the Amazon Ads console, to help you understand your campaign performance and measure your success.
- Search term report: Find the shopping terms used by customers shopping on Amazon that resulted in at least one click on your ad.
- Targeting report: Find sales metrics for keywords and products in all of your campaigns with at least one impression
- Advertised product report: Review sales and performance metrics for each of your advertised products to see how they’re performing over time.
- Placement report: Discover insight into the performance of your ads in the top-of-search placement compared to other placements on Amazon.
- Performance over time report: Use this summary of clicks and spend to see your average cost-per-click and your total spend change over time.
How to optimize your Sponsored Products campaign in the first 30 days
You can help your Sponsored Products perform better and help you meet your goals through optimization, based on insights collected from the campaign’s from initial results.
- Take an always-on approach with your campaign by setting no end date.
- Advertise at least 2 suggested products.
- Adjust budget and bids based on performance. If your campaigns frequently run out of budget, add to your budget to help keep your ads showing throughout the day. If your campaigns don’t require further investment or are overfunded, decrease your budget so you can allocate that money to support other ad campaigns.
- Create manual campaigns to supplement your automated campaign.
- Adjust keywords to maximize matches for exact searches, broad matches, and phrase matches to boost results.
Extend your opportunities with cross-product campaigns
Increase your brand’s reach by using different types of Amazon Ads in addition to Sponsored Products. Self-service ad solutions, such as Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Sponsored TV, can be combined with your Sponsored Products Campaign to help improve your chances of generating more impressions, which attracts more shoppers, amplifies your message, and helps you generate more sales.
FAQs
Use bulk operations to edit, optimize, and even create multiple campaigns at once, saving you time when you want to make many changes.
Use separate campaigns or ad groups for each product group to focus your advertising strategy and organize your keywords and budgets.
Save your campaign as a draft and come back to finish it later.
Start creating portfolios to organize your campaigns by brand, category, season, or any way you choose.
Only include ASINs from the same category in one campaign. Each of the products that you select will be displayed as an ad.
- Keyword or product targeting, and bids apply to all products within an ad group, so we recommend choosing products that are closely related to each other. When creating an ad group with manual targeting, we recommend you add as many similar products to the ad group as you can.
- You can add new products to an existing ad group at any time. To add products, select the ad group and go to the Products page. Click Add products, and you will see your list of eligible products to add to the ad group. You can add 1,000 products to an ad group at a time.
- Group ASINs based on price range and conversions within the same category, so not to mix products that have different performance on ROAS. For products with a higher price, you could bid higher and still see a high ROAS while for a very low price product you might want to bid lower.
The ROAS is calculated by dividing the total sales by the total spend on the advertising campaign. To make sure advertising is helping drive your sales, you want this number to be high. First, check the search term report to identify keywords and products that are resulting in higher sales and conversion rate. Then increase the bid on those and add them as exact match type to optimize. Also, identify the keywords and products with low sales and conversion rates and decrease your bids on them. And again, this is another opportunity for you to consider adding negative targeting to exclude keywords and products that are not relevant for your campaign, which can mean you’ll spend less budget on placements that are not relevant to your brand. Make sure you also check the ASINs you’re advertising to confirm they’re aligned to your campaign’s goals and have good product detail pages. Once you understand how they’re performing, consider deleting or pausing ASINs that are not driving your goals and dialling up on the ones that are performing best.
Make sure you’re utilizing your strongest products—ones that display the featured offer and have great detail pages. These should be front and center of your Sponsored Products strategy. Start by doing an audit of your products, checking them against the guidance you see in the Success tip 1: Optimize your products and detail pages section. Are your products frequently displaying the featured offer? Are they well-reviewed and rated? Do their product detail pages have the qualities that help engage customers—multiple images, bullet points, a product description? If your advertised products are lacking in any of these areas, take the steps to improve them. Or, you can remove these products from your campaigns and add products that do meet this criteria.
If you’re only using automatic targeting, consider increasing your campaign budget and adjust your default bids using dynamic bids- up and down, to help generate additional impressions, clicks, and sales. You can also try using manual targeting. This method gives you increased control over your targeting and allows you to split campaigns based on objectives, as well as to better control your spend–helping you bid more competitively on targets that perform well for you.
Take an always-on approach with your campaigns by setting no end date, and help customers discover your products any time they shop on Amazon.
Already registered? Sign into Vendor Central or Seller Central and hover over ‘Advertising’ in the menu
1 Amazon internal data, WW, Dec 2021 – May 2023. Limited to sellers with minimum Sponsored Products campaign duration of 6 months post launch.
2 Amazon internal data, WW, 3/26/23-4/1/23.