With our built-in marketing feature, users can manage Amazon’s Sponsored Products ads directly through our platform.
Amazon’s Sponsored Products are cost-per-click ads for individual product listings that appear on product pages and search results throughout Amazon’s website. They are one of the most powerful tools for driving ebook sales and helping authors reach new readers on Amazon.
Available Amazon’s Sponsored Products ads on our platform:
- Automatic targeting - Suggested for beginners. With this option, Amazon matches the ad with relevant keywords and products that are similar to the book being advertised.
- Manual Keyword Targeting - Suggested for advanced users. You can handpick the keywords you want to target.
- Negative Keywords - Suggested for advanced users. Exclude keywords to prevent irrelevant traffic from driving up costs.
Integration with PublishDrive’s Proprietary Artificial Intelligence
The Amazon Advertising tool also includes integration of Savant, our exclusive AI technology. Savant helps identify the most relevant products to target for optimal campaign performance. (Note: Savant can only be used by authors whose books are fully uploaded and distributed to Amazon through PublishDrive).
Our built-on Amazon Advertising tool can be found under „Promotions” – „Paid promotions”.
All you have to do is set:
- your desired daily budget (The minimum daily budget is $1.)
- bid
- start date (end date is optional)
The advertising campaigns can be easily adjusted at any time, and you will have access to analytics that showcases your ad performance.
To start the scheduling process, please click on the „Create campaign” button.
As the first step, you will be able to select if your book is uploaded to PublishDrive or not.
If your book is uploaded to PublishDrive, please select the answer „Yes”, and select the book you wish to promote from the drop-down list.
Amazon Advertising campaigns can be scheduled for books in ebook and print-on-demand format.
This is a beta test version, where everyone, including those who never had PublishDrive accounts before, can use the tool. It’s also open for those who never had any books uploaded to our platform yet. For those who would not like to sell on Amazon through us, we will have to create your book to the platform as a draft, before the creation of the campaign.
Enter the campaign details: name, start and end date, daily budget, max bid.
Please note that the end date is optional, but if you decide to pick one, it must be at least 5 days after the first day of the campaign. This is needed because Amazon requires time to process the details of your campaign, and making your campaign at least 5 days long ensures that it does not run out of time to due Amazon’s processing time.
What does daily budget mean?
The daily budget is the maximum amount of money you're willing to spend per day on a specific ad campaign.
Amazon uses this number to control how often and when your ads show. If your ad performs well and starts getting lots of clicks, Amazon will stop showing it once your daily budget is used up for the day.
If your daily budget is $50, Amazon will try not to spend more than $50 in one day on that campaign. Some days it might go slightly over or under, but it averages out over the month.
What does max bid mean?
The max bid is the highest amount you're willing to pay for a click on your ad in an auction.
Every time someone searches for a product, Amazon runs an auction behind the scenes to decide whose ad shows up. Your max bid helps determine your chances of winning that auction and getting your ad shown.
If you set a max bid of $1.00 for the keyword "fantasy books," you're telling Amazon you're willing to pay up to $1.00 per click for a shopper searching for that term. You might end up paying less, depending on what your competitors bid.
As the last step, you will be able to select your targeting. Currently, we offer Automatic Targeting and Keyword Targeting (including Negative Keyword Targeting).
If you choose Keyword Targeting, you can handpick keywords you want to target.
Next to the keyword you enter, you will be able to select the match type.
Broad: Contains all the keywords in any order, and includes plurals, variations and related keywords.
Phrase: Contains the exact phrase or sequence of keywords.
Exact: Exactly matches the keyword or sequence of keywords.
Once you are done, please click on the „Add keyword” button.
If you change your mind about the keyword you added, you can remove it with the red „Remove” button.
You can finetune your Amazon Advertising campaigns with Keyword Targeting better by also adding negative keywords to your promoted book.
Here, you can add the keywords you wish to exclude keywords to prevent irrelevant traffic from driving up costs.
You can also select the match type:
Negative phrase: Contains the exact phrase or sequence of keywords.
Negative exact: Exactly matches the keyword or sequence of keywords.
Once you are done, please click on the „Exclude” button.
If every field is filled out, please double-check the details of your campaign. After that, you can decide to finalize it by clicking on the „Launch campaign” button, or save it as a draft.
Once your campaign is scheduled, it will go into the “On the way” status. This means that we are delivering the details to Amazon, and they are processing it. Once their processing is finished, your campaign’s status will change to “Running”.
You can check your campaigns in the list view: all of your campaigns, basic information of your campaigns, and also a chart with aggregated data (total numbers of all campaigns). On this chart, we always show 2 data series (e.g. "Spend" and "Sales" but the user can change it by clicking on other data series, e.g. "Impressions").
Click on "Details & edit" next to a running campaign to see all details about that specific campaign. –
You can edit campaign details anytime by clicking on the "Details & edit" button.
Marketing Budget
You can add funds to your marketing budget with credit card, Venmo, Google Pay, Apple Pay or PayPal. You can do so by clicking on your name on the top right corner, selecting „Account settings” from the drop-down menu, and then going to „Promotional budget”.
Later, you can transfer money from your previous earnings to the marketing budget.
Please note that there is a 5% handling fee every time you add funds to your promotion budget.
If you wish to transfer your remaining unused funds back to your bank account, please reach out to our Support Team (https://publishdrive.com/contact-us.html).
Download Reports
You can review how your Amazon Advertising campaigns perform by downloading the detailed reports in Excel form.
You can do so by
- downloading the data of all of your campaigns combined from the main menu of Amazon Advertising:
- or, you can download the campaign specific report by clicking on the „Details & Edit” button next to your campaign, and then clicking on the „Download report” button on the chart:
If you would like to learn more about how to optimize your campaign and make it more effective, you can check out Amazon's FAQ about the Advertising tool.