KDP Ads Account Setup: Your First Amazon Advertising Campaign

Amazon's advertising platform for books — known as KDP Ads or Amazon Ads, accessed through the Amazon Advertising Console — is the primary paid visibility tool available to indie authors on the world's largest book marketplace. Used well, it puts your book in front of readers who are actively searching for books in your genre. Used poorly, it burns budget without generating proportional sales.

This guide covers the setup and navigation side: accessing the console, understanding what campaign types are available, setting your first campaign's budget and bids, and reading the basic reports that tell you whether your campaign is working. Advertising strategy — keyword research, ACoS targets, campaign optimization — is covered in the Book Marketing section of ScribeCount's author resource library. This guide gets you operational.

Accessing the Amazon Advertising Console

KDP Ads are managed through the Amazon Advertising Console — a separate interface from your KDP Bookshelf. Access it from your KDP dashboard:

• Log into kdp.amazon.com

• From the top navigation, click Marketing (or look for the Promote and Advertise option next to a title in your Bookshelf)

• Select Amazon Ads from the dropdown, or click Run an Ad Campaign on any individual title

• The Amazon Advertising Console opens in a new tab or window at advertising.amazon.com

You can also access the console directly at advertising.amazon.com — sign in with the same Amazon account you use for KDP. Your advertising account is linked to your KDP account and can only run ads for books published through that account.

Campaign Types Available for Books

Sponsored Products

Sponsored Products are the most commonly used and most beginner-appropriate campaign type for indie authors. They display your book's product card (cover image, title, star rating, price) in search results and on product detail pages — the same format as organic search results, with 'Sponsored' labeling. When a reader searches for 'dark fantasy romance' and your Sponsored Products campaign targets that keyword, your book can appear in the results alongside organic listings.

Sponsored Products campaigns are keyword-targeted — you select the search terms (or allow Amazon to auto-target) that trigger your ad display. You pay per click (CPC — Cost Per Click), not per impression. You only pay when a reader actually clicks your ad.

Sponsored Brands

Sponsored Brands display a custom banner with your author name, a custom headline, and up to three book covers at the top of search results. They're brand-level advertisements rather than individual-book advertisements — designed to build author brand awareness and showcase a series or catalog.

Sponsored Brands require you to have at least three books enrolled in the campaign (to show three covers in the banner). They're most effective for established authors with multiple titles in the same genre. For authors with one or two books, Sponsored Products are the appropriate starting point.

Sponsored Display

Sponsored Display ads appear on product detail pages of other books, in browsing contexts, and in some off-Amazon placements. They target readers by audience interest or product category rather than by keyword search. Sponsored Display is typically more appropriate after you have experience with Sponsored Products — for first campaigns, start with Sponsored Products.

Setting Up Your First Sponsored Products Campaign

Step 1: Start a New Campaign

From the Advertising Console dashboard, click Create Campaign. Select Sponsored Products. The campaign creation interface walks you through several configuration steps.

Step 2: Campaign Settings

Automatic vs. Manual Targeting

This is the most important setup decision for a first campaign.

Automatic targeting lets Amazon choose which search queries trigger your ad based on your book's metadata and categories. Amazon's algorithm analyzes your title, description, and BISAC categories to match your book to relevant searches. Automatic campaigns are the recommended starting point for most authors — they require minimal setup, generate search term data you can learn from, and often discover converting keywords you wouldn't have thought to target manually.

Manual targeting requires you to provide specific keywords or product targets that trigger your ad. Manual campaigns give you more control but require keyword research and experience to run effectively. After running an automatic campaign for 2–4 weeks and collecting search term data, you can use the best-performing terms from your auto campaign to build a more focused manual campaign.

For your first campaign: start with Automatic targeting. Run it for 4 weeks. Use the Search Term Report to see which queries actually generated clicks and sales, then build a Manual campaign targeting your best performers.

Step 3: Ad Group Setup

Each campaign contains one or more Ad Groups. For a first campaign, one ad group is sufficient. Name it descriptively (e.g., 'Auto — [Book Title]') and set your default bid.

Step 4: Setting Your Bid

Your bid is the maximum amount you're willing to pay per click on your ad. Amazon uses a second-price auction — you pay one cent more than the second-highest bid, up to your maximum bid. Setting your bid too low means your ad rarely wins the auction and receives little traffic. Setting it too high means you pay more per click than necessary.

Amazon shows suggested bids based on competitive data for your book's category. Use these suggestions as a starting benchmark, not a prescription. Start at the lower end of the suggested range, let your campaign run for 2 weeks, and then adjust based on actual performance data.

Step 5: Select Your Book

Add the book you want to advertise to the ad group. For Sponsored Products, each ad group advertises one or more books. A single-book ad group is the cleanest setup for analysis — you can clearly see which campaigns and keywords are generating sales for a specific title.

Step 6: Launch

Review your campaign settings and click Launch Campaign. Your campaign enters Amazon's review process (typically a few hours) and then begins serving ads. You'll see it in your Advertising Console dashboard with 'In Review' status, then 'Running' once approved.

Reading the Basic Advertising Dashboard

After your campaign has run for at least a week, you'll have data worth reviewing. The key metrics in your dashboard:

Understanding ACoS

ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales) is the most important metric for evaluating campaign efficiency. It tells you what percentage of your ad-driven sales revenue was spent on ads.

ACoS = Total Ad Spend / Total Ad-Attributed Sales × 100

Example: You spend $50 on ads and generate $200 in sales attributed to those ads. ACoS = 50/200 × 100 = 25%.

What's a good ACoS? It depends on your royalty margin. If your royalty per sale is 70% of a $4.99 book = $3.49, and you're spending more than $3.49 to generate each sale, you're losing money on the ad. A break-even ACoS is your royalty margin as a percentage of list price. Any ACoS below your royalty margin percentage means you're profitable on that advertising spend. ACoS above that threshold means you're spending more in advertising than you're earning in royalties.

The Search Term Report

The Search Term Report is the most valuable data your automatic campaign generates. To access it:

• From the Advertising Console, click Measurement & Reporting in the left sidebar

• Select Search Term Report

• Set your date range (last 30–60 days)

• Download the report as a CSV

The report shows every search query that triggered your ad, along with impressions, clicks, spend, and sales for each. Sort by sales descending — the terms that generated sales are your most valuable targeting data. These high-performing search terms are the foundation of your next manual campaign. Terms with high spend and no sales are targets to add as negative keywords to stop wasting budget on them.

Campaign Hygiene: The Basics

• Check your campaigns at least weekly — not daily (daily is too reactive; weekly gives enough data for meaningful decisions)

• Pause keywords with high spend and zero sales after 2–3 weeks of data — these are costing money without converting

• Add negative keywords (terms that triggered your ad but are clearly irrelevant) to prevent wasted spend

• Increase bids on keywords that are converting profitably — you may be leaving impressions on the table

• Keep your budget set so campaigns run throughout the day — if your daily budget runs out by mid-morning, you're missing afternoon and evening traffic

Common KDP Ads Setup Mistakes

• Starting with Manual targeting before running Auto campaigns to discover what keywords actually convert for your specific book

• Setting daily budget too low ($1–$2) — insufficient data for meaningful optimization decisions

• Not downloading and analyzing the Search Term Report from automatic campaigns

• Evaluating campaign performance after only 3–5 days — Amazon's attribution window is 14 days; give campaigns time to accumulate meaningful data

• Not accounting for series read-through when evaluating ACoS on series starter advertising

The Advertising Console is complex for first-time users, but the setup itself is straightforward: create an automatic Sponsored Products campaign with a reasonable daily budget and a bid in the suggested range, let it run for four weeks, and use the Search Term Report data it generates to build your next, more targeted campaign. The strategy — what to target, how to optimize, how to scale — is the harder and more interesting work. This guide gets you to the point where you can do it.

-Randall Wood