Amazon Sponsored Products: A Guide for Authors

Amazon’s own Sponsored Products page describes them as cost-per-click ads that promote individual product listings. For an author, the product is a book: a shopper who clicks the ad lands on its detail page, and the page has to make the sale. Authors often just call them sponsored product ads, or SP ads.

There are no monthly or upfront fees. Amazon’s advertising FAQ calls the pricing cost per click and auction based, and its guide to Sponsored Products for authors says your bid, along with how relevant the ad is to the reader’s search, decides whether the ad is shown.

The same guide says the ads can appear in search results and on book detail pages on Amazon, Kindle and Goodreads. Amazon’s product page adds that in search they can sit at the top of, alongside or within the results.

KDP Help recommends starting with Sponsored Products, and Amazon’s book marketing page says they are available to all authors. They work with a single book; Sponsored Brands, the other ad type KDP offers for books, needs three or more eligible titles under the same author name. Our guide to Amazon PPC for authors covers how pay-per-click works across ad types and what a click is worth to a book.

Amazon names KDP authors among the advertisers who can use Sponsored Products, and KDP Help lists 12 marketplaces for KDP titles: the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, India, Australia and Japan. Audiobook ads are US-only for now. Amazon’s guide for authors adds two conditions: the book must be available in the country where you advertise, and it must be listed in Author Central.

Registering from KDP

Open the Marketing tab of your KDP account, click Learn more in the Amazon Ads section, then Start Advertising. KDP Help says you get an ads account for each country where you list books, each billed separately, and Change country at the top left of the console moves between them. Adding a payment method places a temporary pre-authorization hold of $50 (the amount can vary), which your bank releases within three to seven business days.

Campaigns then live at advertising.amazon.com. KDP Help calls it the Ads console and says it is the only place to check on your ads. Amazon’s own guides now call it Amazon Ads Agent: on 29 September 2026 the company announced that name for its unified ad platform, which brought the ads console and its demand-side platform together.

Moderation

Every book ad is reviewed before it runs. KDP Help says the answer usually comes within 24 hours but can take up to three business days. Amazon’s moderation guide for book advertisers rules out sexually suggestive covers and lists what to avoid in the ad, such as prices, customer reviews and unsubstantiated claims. Ads must be in the language of the Amazon site, and a book in another language needs a note in its title, such as “(French Edition)”.

Every Sponsored Products campaign uses one of two targeting types, and Amazon’s targeting guide says you cannot change it once the campaign is live. With automatic targeting, Amazon matches the ad to searches and products similar to your book, based on past shopping searches and details such as its genre, in four groups that can each have their own bid:

• Close match: searches closely related to your book.
• Loose match: searches loosely related to it.
• Substitutes: shoppers browsing the detail pages of books similar to yours.
• Complements: shoppers viewing the detail pages of products that go with yours.

With manual targeting, you choose: keywords for searches, or specific books and whole categories for product targeting.

Amazon’s advice for a first campaign is to start with automatic targeting and let it run for about two weeks before creating a manual one. Its search term report then shows which searches and books brought clicks and sales, and those are your best manual targets.

In a manual keyword campaign, each keyword gets a match type, which decides how closely a shopper’s search has to match it. Amazon’s targeting guide defines three:

• Broad match: your words in any order, plus variations, synonyms and related searches that may not contain the keyword at all.
• Phrase match: all the words of the keyword in the same order, with other words around them allowed.
• Exact match: the same words in the same order. Amazon says phrase and exact both include the plural form.

For one keyword, cozy mystery, it works out as below. The table is our reading of Amazon’s definitions.

Amazon’s getting-started guide suggests at least 30 keywords for a new manual keyword campaign, starting with broad match and moving the best performers into phrase or exact. The targeting guide adds that one keyword can run in all three match types without bidding against itself. It recommends the highest bid on exact and the lowest on broad, and one to two weeks of testing before you pause a keyword.

For KDP authors, the guide suggests a range from broad to specific: category and genre words, similar authors or publishers, and terms or themes from the book.

Product targeting is the other kind of manual targeting: you pick single books by ASIN, or whole categories, which Amazon lets you narrow by brand, price range and ratings. A targeted book’s detail page becomes eligible for your ad, and so do searches where that book ranks near the top.

The books worth paying for are ones your readers would also buy: the same subgenre, a similar price, length and tone. That includes your own. Amazon’s best practices for Sponsored Products suggest targeting your own product pages to show your range, so an ad for book two of a series can sit on the page of book one.

To find targets, read an automatic campaign’s search term report: books that brought clicks or sales appear there as ASINs, 10 characters long and either all digits or starting with a B, in the same column as the searches shoppers typed. Category targets report the same way, so books that sell can become ASIN targets.

Negatives tell Amazon where not to show your ad, in automatic and manual campaigns alike. Negative phrase keeps the ad off searches that contain the phrase, negative exact off searches that are exactly that phrase, both including close variations, and negative products keep it off the pages of specific books. They can apply to a campaign or to selected ad groups.

The targeting guide suggests judging a keyword after at least 20 clicks and leaving new negatives in place for two weeks or more. For a book, typical candidates are formats you do not publish, audiences it is not for, such as children’s searches for an adult thriller, and famous names whose readers click but never buy yours.

When a search that sells moves to an exact-match campaign, a common practice is to add it to the automatic campaign as a negative exact keyword, so it runs only in the campaign where you set its bid. Our guide to Amazon ads for books has a weekly routine for finding negatives.

A bid is the most you will pay for one click: per targeting group in an automatic campaign, per keyword or product target in a manual one. Amazon suggests bids, but the figure that matters is what a click is worth to this book: its royalty times the share of clicks that buy. A $4.99 ebook with a 2 MB file earns $3.28 a sale on Amazon.com on KDP’s 70% royalty plan, after a delivery cost of $0.15 per MB, so if 8% of clicks buy, a click is worth about $0.26. The Amazon Ads cost calculator shows what your own cost per click and conversion rate add up to over a month.

Each campaign also has a bidding strategy: dynamic bids down only, dynamic bids up and down, or fixed bids. Up and down can raise a bid by up to 100%, and Amazon’s guide to that strategy tells you to be prepared to spend double the bid you enter; its guide for authors gives 50% as the limit outside the top of the first page. Down only is the cautious start; our PPC guide compares all three.

Placement adjustments come on top. A campaign can raise its bid separately for top of search (first page), rest of search and product pages, by up to 900%, per Amazon’s best practices. With fixed bids, a $0.40 bid and a 50% top-of-search adjustment means up to $0.60 a click there, so leave adjustments at 0%, the default, until the placement report shows where the book sells.

The lowest daily budget is $1.00 or the local equivalent, per Amazon’s FAQ, but its budget guide recommends at least $10 a day per campaign for many advertisers, and the getting-started guide lists a recommended minimum for each marketplace:

The budget is averaged over the calendar month: a busy day can spend up to 25% more, but a $10 daily budget stays within $300 over 30 days. Budgets are not paced through the day, so a small one can be gone in minutes, and the ad waits for the midnight reset. A campaign that makes money and runs out early deserves more budget; for one that runs out without sales, the budget guide says to work on bids, targeting and the detail page first. For a seasonal book, Amazon’s guide to advertising books suggests starting early and running for at least four to six weeks.

Here is a first campaign in the order Amazon’s guides suggest, with the choices that matter for a book.

1. Get the book ready. It must be available in the marketplace and listed in Author Central, and KDP Help asks for a detail page with a good summary.
2. Open the campaign builder. Register from the KDP Marketing tab and add a payment method, then use Change country, click Create campaign and choose Sponsored Products.
3. Add the book. Search by title or ASIN. Amazon suggests adding all formats; a paperback that earns far less per sale than the ebook can get its own campaign, bid to its own margin.
4. Name it and set the budget. Amazon recommends a straightforward name, no end date and at least $10 a day in the US: roughly $140 for a two-week test.
5. Choose automatic targeting. Keep all four groups on, bid at or below what a click is worth even if Amazon suggests more, choose down only and leave placement adjustments at 0%.
6. Launch. Moderation usually takes less than 24 hours.
7. Review after about two weeks. Move searches and books that sold into a manual campaign as exact or phrase keywords and product targets, add negatives for searches with about 20 clicks and no sale, and check in every two weeks after that, as Amazon’s guide for authors suggests.

From there, add a manual exact campaign for proven searches and keep the automatic one finding new ones, the structure our guide to profitable Amazon ads for books walks through.

Amazon’s reporting guide for book advertisers lists seven Sponsored Products reports. Three do most of the work for a first campaign: search terms, with every search that got at least one click; placement, which compares top of search with the rest; and advertised product, which shows each title and format.

Read the numbers as KDP Help defines them. Ad sales are the total value of books sold within 14 days of a click: the price the reader paid, not your royalty, and only sales of the advertised ASIN count. Kindle+ page reads are left out; the console reports them separately, as estimated KENP pages and royalties for pages read within 14 days after a click.

KDP and Amazon Ads will disagree for other reasons too. KDP counts every sale, Amazon Ads only attributed ones; KDP records a paperback when it ships, Amazon Ads when it was bought; and orders can take up to 12 hours to reach the ads reports. KDP Help suggests waiting until all orders data is in before you judge a campaign.

A worked example

Two weeks of an automatic campaign for the $4.99 ebook alone, enrolled in KDP Select and run on Amazon’s suggested bids, might look like this. The numbers are our example.

An ACOS of 92% looks hopeless next to this ebook’s break-even ACOS of about 66% ($3.28 ÷ $4.99). Add the Kindle+ royalties, and the campaign is about a dollar from breaking even. The fix is not to switch it off but to cut the searches that spent without selling and bring the cost per click under the roughly $0.44 a click earned here ($40.32 ÷ 92).

Every book has its own line: the KDP royalty calculator gives the royalty and the ACOS calculator the break-even ACOS. Our guide to what ACOS means for KDP books explains why one ACOS can be a profit on one book and a loss on another.

When a test is worth it

For most books, two weeks of an automatic campaign at Amazon’s recommended budget, judged on royalty rather than ACOS, is a test worth running. Wait if the royalty is a dollar or two. A 200-page paperback at $8.99 gets the 50% rate below $9.99 and, after a printing cost of $3.40, earns $1.10 a copy, a break-even ACOS near 12% that few campaigns meet.

By hand, this gets slow once several books run in several marketplaces. The SelfPub Go ads module creates Sponsored Products campaigns and reads each one against a break-even ACOS worked out from the book’s own royalty, price, format and marketplace, and royalty analytics reads the KDP report you already download, so ad spend and royalty sit side by side for every book.

Rules and limits in this guide come from Amazon Ads and KDP Help as of the date at the top of the page; the example campaigns are ours, on Amazon.com prices. If something here no longer matches, the linked pages are the source to trust.