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Your campaigns started serving inside creator content in August, at your existing bids, without anyone asking. Here’s the setup that accounts for it.

Sponsored Products are cost-per-click ads that promote individual product listings. Amazon makes them available to professional sellers, vendors, book vendors, authors, and agencies, with no Brand Registry requirement. That’s why nearly every seller starts here.

The setup mechanics have held steady. What changed is where the ads go. Sponsored Products have served on premium third-party sites and apps since 2023, and on August 10, 2026, Amazon added a new class of offsite inventory: content published by creators in the Amazon Influencer Program. Amazon updated its off-Amazon support documentation on August 4 and notified advertisers that campaigns would be enrolled by default, at their existing bids and budgets, with no action required.

That default deserves a decision rather than a shrug. Placement bid adjustments, the lever most accounts use to push money toward top of search, do not apply to offsite delivery. A campaign built around a heavy top-of-search adjustment stops expressing that preference the moment it serves in creator content, and nobody edited anything to cause it.

Here’s how to build a campaign that accounts for all of it.

Get Your Detail Pages Ready Before You Spend

Ad performance is capped by listing quality. Amazon publishes specific thresholds for this, and they’re more modest than most sellers assume.

Amazon’s guidance is to advertise products with five or more customer reviews at a rating of 3.5 stars or higher, four or more zoomable images at a minimum of 1,000 pixels on the long side, at least three bullet points, and a title of roughly 60 characters. The product also needs to hold the featured offer and be in stock, since Sponsored Products only serve when your advertised items are available.

Two things follow from that. First, the bar to start is lower than the “wait until you have 100 reviews” advice floating around seller forums. Second, if a product misses those marks, fix the listing before raising bids. No bid solves a page that doesn’t convert, and our Amazon SEO guide covers that groundwork.

Automatic Targeting and the Four Match Types Most Sellers Never Touch

Automatic campaigns are where Amazon picks your targets. Most guides stop there. What they skip is that automatic targeting contains four separate match types, each of which can be managed and bid on independently:

• Close match serves against shopping terms closely related to your product. Amazon’s example: a 400-count cotton sheet set showing for “cotton sheets.”
• Loose match serves against loosely related terms, like “bed sheets” for that same product.
• Substitutes serves on detail pages of similar products, such as a competitor’s 300-count sheets.
• Complements serves on detail pages of products that pair with yours, like a comforter or pillows.

These four behave nothing alike. Close match tends to carry the intent. Loose match is the discovery lever and the usual source of waste. Substitutes is conquesting. Complements is a bet on adjacency that works in some categories and burns money in others.

Running them at one shared bid is the most common structural mistake in a new account, and it’s invisible in a campaign-level report. Split the bids, watch them separately, and you’ll learn which of the four your category actually rewards.

Manual targeting is the control layer you graduate into once automatic has produced search-term data. The full sequencing, match type strategy, and dynamic bidding decisions are covered in our Amazon PPC bid strategy guide.

Building the Campaign

Amazon’s own starting recommendation is a daily budget of $10 or the local equivalent. There are no monthly or upfront fees, and your daily budget is an amount you’re willing to spend per day averaged across a calendar month, so a $100 daily budget can absorb up to roughly $3,000 in clicks over a 30-day month.

For bidding you get three strategies: dynamic bids up and down, dynamic bids down only, and fixed bids. Placement bid adjustments layer on top and can go as high as 900% for top of search, rest of search, and product pages.

One caution on that 900% ceiling. It reads like a growth lever and behaves like a risk multiplier, especially now that those adjustments stop applying to offsite delivery. Set them deliberately and check them against a placement report rather than setting them once at launch.

Add negative targeting from the start rather than reactively. Amazon supports negative keywords plus negative product and brand targets in both automatic and manual campaigns, and the framework for building that list before spend accumulates is in our negative keyword strategy guide.

The Off-Amazon Decision

You cannot switch offsite delivery off entirely. US advertisers also have creator-level exclusions and deny-list preferences for specific sites, apps, or creator tags.

The honest read: this is not automatically bad inventory, and for discovery-stage products it can work. What makes it a problem is that it arrived switched on, it doesn’t inherit your placement adjustments, and it hides inside blended campaign numbers. A campaign can show an acceptable overall ACoS while the offsite segment runs at multiples of your target.

Pull a Sponsored Products placement report and look for the “Off Amazon” row alongside top of search, rest of search, and product pages. Judge it on its own numbers, then set the toggle per campaign rather than across the account. Brand defense and tight-margin campaigns are the obvious candidates for limiting offsite spend. Broad discovery campaigns on new products are where increase reach can earn its keep.

What You Actually Pay Per Click

Nearly every Amazon PPC guide states that the winning advertiser pays one cent more than the next-highest bid, usually with a tidy worked example.

Amazon doesn’t say that. Their published language is that your final cost-per-click “will be based on your adjusted bid plus additional factors, but will never exceed your maximum adjusted bid.” The second-price model is an industry assumption that Amazon has never confirmed in its own documentation, and the “additional factors” phrase is doing real work in that sentence: relevance and expected performance influence both whether you win and what you’re charged.

The practical takeaway survives either way. Your bid is a ceiling, not a price. Your CPC will usually land below it, and improving listing relevance lowers what you pay without touching the bid. If you want the full breakdown of what drives your number, our Amazon CPC guide goes deeper.

Reading the Reports

Five reports matter for Sponsored Products, each answering a different question:

• Search term report shows the shopping terms that produced at least one click. This is the harvest file for building manual campaigns.
• Targeting report shows performance by keyword and product target.
• Advertised product report shows performance per ASIN over time.
• Placement report compares top of search against other placements, and this is where the “Off Amazon” row lives.
• Performance over time report tracks average CPC and total spend movement.

Amazon recommends checking metrics at least twice a week during the first week. After that, weekly is enough for most accounts. New-to-brand orders sit in your metrics as a measure of whether you’re reaching first-time customers of your brand, though it’s a reporting metric in Sponsored Products rather than something you can target directly.

For judging whether the whole thing is working, ACoS alone won’t tell you. Our ACoS and TACoS guide covers how the two read together.

When to Add the Other Formats

Master Sponsored Products before layering anything on. Once your campaigns produce steady conversion data and real detail page traffic, Sponsored Brands adds branded search defense and top-of-page presence, and display ads, which Amazon renamed from Sponsored Display, adds retargeting against the traffic your search campaigns generate. Both require Brand Registry. Sponsored Products does not, which is part of why it stays the foundation.

How Canopy Manages Sponsored Products

Canopy Management is a full-service omnichannel marketing agency working with brands across Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, TikTok Shop, Chewy, Shopify, Meta, and Google. Our partners have generated over $3.3 billion in revenue, and our brand managers treat Sponsored Products as the data engine for the whole advertising stack rather than a standalone line item.

For this format specifically, that means automatic targeting split and bid by match type, negative targeting built before spend accumulates, placement and offsite decisions made per campaign against real placement data, and listing work sequenced ahead of bid increases rather than after them.

Frequently Asked Questions