Amazon advertising: how campaigns are built, optimised and scaled
Amazon advertising is not Google advertising with different logos. The auction is the same idea, but everything that decides whether you win money on it — attribution windows, what the product page does to your cost, which format captures which moment — works differently. This guide covers the parts that decide the outcome.
How the auction works: who wins the space, and at what price
Every time someone searches on Amazon, an auction runs in real time between the advertisers targeting that query. You do not pay what you bid: you pay what is needed to beat the next bid down. That is why the bid is a ceiling, not a price.
Three things decide the outcome:
- The bid — the maximum you are prepared to pay for the click.
- Relevance — how well your listing matches the query. A relevant listing wins space at a lower price than an irrelevant one bidding higher.
- The placement — top of search, rest of search, or on a product detail page. They convert differently and they cost differently, and they can be bid separately.
Which format to use
Sponsored Products — to sell now
The workhorse. It puts your product in the search results and on competitors’ detail pages, and it converts the demand that already exists. If you are running one format, it is this one.
Sponsored Brands — to be recognised
The banner with your logo at the top of the results, landing on your Store rather than on a single product. It is how you defend your own brand queries, and the format where creative testing pays most. Requires Brand Registry.
Sponsored Display — to bring back the people who looked
Retargeting shoppers who viewed and did not buy, and placement on competitor detail pages — on and off Amazon. Cheap per impression, and the format most often left switched off.
Amazon DSP — to go beyond Amazon
Programmatic display and video across Amazon properties and third-party inventory, using Amazon’s audience data. It is a different instrument with its own entry threshold, and it is the wrong first step for most accounts. We set out when it is and is not the right move on Amazon DSP.
The most common situation: campaigns switched on at different times, budget split without a rule, and nobody checking which format is actually carrying it. We manage €2 million of advertising investment a year: we look at your data and tell you where the budget is working and where it is not.
Automatic or manual: when each one earns its place
Automatic campaigns let Amazon choose the targets. They are not a lazy option — they are a discovery tool: you run them to find out which queries actually convert for your product, then promote those into exact-match manual campaigns and add the rest as negatives.
Manual campaigns are where the money is controlled: exact keywords, chosen ASINs, bids set by placement. The mistake is treating automatic as a permanent setup rather than as the source of the manual one.
The numbers to watch, and how often
Four metrics describe the health of an Amazon advertising account. The cadence matters as much as the values: the first fourteen days are not touched, because the attribution window has not closed; from there you look once a week, on the same day, so the comparisons stay comparable.
| CTR | > 0.40% | Target on Sponsored Products. A low CTR means a weak listing or an irrelevant keyword — not a bidding problem. |
| ACoS | < 30% | Advertising cost of sales. A typical sustainability threshold for mid-margin categories. On low-margin lines, aim below 18%. |
| ROAS | 4−8× | Return on ad spend. ROAS = 1 / ACoS — they are the same number read from the other end. |
| CPC | €0.20−2.50 | The range we see across the European marketplaces we run. It is a range, not a price: quiet niches sit at the bottom, saturated categories touch the top. If you are consistently above it, you are buying generic keywords. |
Attribution: how Amazon counts the sale
Amazon does not count a sale on the day it happens: it attributes it back to the click that produced it, inside a window that changes by format.
- Sponsored Products: 7 days post-click
- Sponsored Brands: 14 days post-click, plus a 7-day view-through window
- Sponsored Display: 14 days post-click, plus a 1-day view-through window
- Amazon DSP: configurable, up to 30 days
What that means in practice: a sale today can land in the numbers of a campaign clicked weeks ago, and a new campaign cannot be judged before fourteen days. The first seven days of data are incomplete by definition — killing a campaign on day five is the most common way to throw away something that was working. Check the current specifications in Amazon’s own advertising documentation, as the windows do change.
Setting a campaign up, step by step
- Sign in to Amazon Advertising from Seller Central or Vendor Central.
- Set the budget and the run. Daily budget, start date, and no end date unless there is a reason for one.
- Choose the products. Not the whole catalogue — the SKUs that already convert.
- Choose targeting and bidding. Automatic to discover, manual to control. Set placement bid adjustments deliberately rather than leaving them at zero.
- Launch, then leave it alone for two weeks. Then read the search term report, promote what converted, exclude what did not.
The five mistakes that burn budget fastest
These are what we find in the first hours of onboarding a new account. Recognising them saves thousands.
- Targeting too broad. Generic keywords on loose match. The fix: specific ASINs, selected categories, exact match.
- Budget not matched to volume. A budget too small caps exposure and pulls you out of the auction before the day is over. Start at €30−50 a day on the main SKU and scale on post-attribution data.
- Advertising products that are not ready to convert. Pushing items with few reviews or a weak listing. Advertise what is already validated: 4+ stars, 10+ reviews.
- High CPC left unmonitored. Accepting Amazon’s suggested bids and never testing down. Test bids weekly and walk the CPC down to the efficient level.
- Ignoring the data. Not downloading the search term report, not checking ACoS by keyword. Weekly: remove what does not perform, scale what does.
None of them is visible from the dashboard: they show up when you put spend, search terms and margin per product next to each other. If you want to know which of the five is costing you most, we start there — with no obligation.
Why the product page lowers your ACoS more than the bids do
Campaigns do not live in isolation. A weak listing burns budget even with perfect targeting, because you are paying for clicks that were never going to convert. Three areas decide the post-click conversion rate.
Images
The main image on a white background, filling at least 85% of the frame. The secondary images have work to do: the product in real use, size against a reference, quality and materials, comparison with the alternatives, an infographic of the benefits. Minimum 1600px on the long side, or zoom does not switch on.
Bullet points
Five bullets, each between 150 and 250 characters. A structure that works: main benefit plus key feature; the primary use case; what makes it different from the competition; a guarantee or trust signal; who it is for. Open each bullet with a capitalised phrase so the page can be scanned rather than read.
Reviews and proof
Reviews are the single biggest conversion driver on Amazon. To grow them without breaking policy: Amazon Vine (requires Brand Registry), the automated Request a Review, a package insert pointing to the review page, and customer service fast enough to head off the one-star before it is written.
The critical threshold is 4.3 stars. Below it, visibility suffers — and no bid fixes that.
From campaigns that were not returning to +40% ROAS: Lubrialpha
Lubrialpha sells Castrol motor oil on Amazon. They came to us from advertising with an unsatisfactory CTR and ROAS, in a saturated category where lubricants all look alike and everybody ends up competing on price alone. The budget went out; the sales did not follow.
What we changed:
- analysis of the previous campaigns, to see where the budget was being lost;
- keyword research on long-tail searches and product-specific phrases;
- Sponsored Products segmented by search intent, not by catalogue structure;
- Sponsored Brands to be recognised in a category where nobody looks at the maker;
- dynamic bidding and continuous optimisation, not a month-end review;
- retargeting on the people who looked and did not buy.
+40% campaign ROAS · +50% click-through rate · +35% monthly motor oil sales · +57% customers new to the brand · +60% total revenue.
This was not a three-month intervention: the project has been running for over two years on Amazon Italy and Germany, and it covers Amazon Ads and DSP, SEO and A+ content, and account management. The campaigns return because the rest supports them — which is why this page insists on the product page as much as on the bids.
Read the Lubrialpha case study in full →
Frequently asked questions
What does advertising on Amazon cost?
Two separate numbers. The media budget is what you pay Amazon for the clicks — you set it, and it stays in your account. The management fee, if you use an agency, is what you pay them. Below roughly €150 a month in media there is not enough data to optimise on: you would be paying to learn nothing.
What is a sustainable ACoS?
It depends on your margin, not on a benchmark. Under 30% works for mid-margin categories; low-margin lines need under 18%. The right question is not «what is a good ACoS» but «at what ACoS does this SKU stop making money».
Keyword, ASIN or audience targeting?
Keywords capture demand that exists. ASIN targeting takes share from a specific competitor. Audience targeting — on Display and DSP — reaches people who are not searching at all. Most accounts should be running the first two before touching the third.
How long does it take to optimise a campaign?
The first meaningful read is at fourteen days, because of attribution. Structural improvement takes two to three months. Anyone showing you a transformed account after three weeks is showing you noise.
When do I move from automatic to manual?
When the automatic campaign has produced enough converting search terms to build a manual one — typically after a few hundred clicks per product, not after a fixed number of days.
Is an agency worth it for Amazon advertising?
It depends on the spend and on whether anyone in-house has the hours. Below the threshold where the fee is covered by the improvement, it is not — and we say so in the audit rather than after the contract. Above it, the gain usually comes from the things nobody has time for: daily negatives, placement bidding, and the listing work that lowers the cost per sale more than bidding does.
Where to start
If you are starting from nothing: one Sponsored Products campaign, automatic, on the three SKUs that already sell, at a budget you are willing to lose for two weeks. Read the search term report. Build the manual campaign from what converted. Everything else comes after that.
If the campaigns already run and the numbers do not add up, the problem is usually not the bids. It is structure, attribution being read too early, or a listing that does not convert the clicks you are paying for.
We are an Amazon SPN, Ads Advanced and DSP Advanced certified agency, and we have run over 200 brands. If you want your account looked at, book the free 30-minute call: we analyse account structure, keyword performance, ACoS by SKU and attribution, and show you where the margin is going and in what order to fix it.
What ongoing management covers is on Amazon Ads management.
Amazon Ads and DSP certified agency: book a free call and we will look at your objectives.
