1. Home
2. Amazon
3. How to Run Amazon Sponsored Product Ads

How to Run Amazon Sponsored Product Ads

Sponsored Products is Amazon's entry-level PPC product and where almost every seller starts. The bidding model is straightforward, but the difference between profitable and money-burning campaigns lies almost entirely in keyword selection and bid discipline.

Requirements

To run Sponsored Products you need: a Professional seller account, a product that owns the Buy Box on its listing, and at least one image and a few bullet points on the listing itself. Ads simply boost the visibility of an existing organic listing — they cannot rescue a thin one.

Auto vs Manual

Automatic targeting: Amazon picks the search terms and product placements based on your listing. Useful as a discovery tool — runs cheaply and tells you which queries actually convert.

Manual targeting: you specify exact keywords or product ASINs. Higher control, better for scaling proven winners.

Most strategies use an Auto campaign to harvest keywords, then move converting terms into a tighter Manual campaign with negative keywords added back to the Auto campaign so you do not double-bid.

Launching your first campaign

From Seller Central pick Advertising → Campaign Manager → Create campaign → Sponsored Products. Set:

• Daily budget — start small, e.g. $10-20. Amazon may spend up to 100% over budget on high-traffic days and balance out monthly.
• Targeting — Auto for discovery; Manual + Broad match if you already have a keyword list.
• Bidding strategy — start with Dynamic bids — down only. This lowers your bid when Amazon thinks the click is unlikely to convert. Safer for new advertisers.
• Default bid — slightly below the suggested bid. You can always raise it.

Reading the report

Three numbers matter:

• ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales) — ad spend ÷ ad revenue. Lower is better.
• TACoS (Total ACoS) — ad spend ÷ total revenue including organic sales. This captures the halo effect of ads boosting organic rank.
• CTR / CVR — click-through rate from impressions and conversion rate from clicks. Low CTR signals an image/title problem; low CVR signals a listing/price problem.

Wait until each keyword has at least 10 clicks before judging it. Earlier than that, statistical noise dominates.

Optimization loop

Once a week:

1. Pull the Search Term Report.
2. Add converting terms as exact-match keywords in a new Manual campaign.
3. Add wasteful terms (high clicks, no sales) as negative exact in the original campaign.
4. Raise bids on top converters; lower bids on borderline ones; pause anything spending more than 2× your target ACoS with no sales.

Related guides