Amazon Ads Console Walkthrough: Where Everything Is and What It Does

The Amazon Ads console (advertising.amazon.com, also reachable from Seller Central under Advertising) is where you create campaigns, set bids and budgets, add keywords, and pull reports. The screens you'll use most are the campaign manager, the ad group and targeting tabs, the search terms tab, and Sponsored ads reports under Measurement & Reporting.

Amazon updates the console's layout regularly, so labels can shift slightly. The structure below has been stable for a long time and will help you find your way.

Getting in and choosing an account

Sign in with your Seller Central credentials. If you sell in several marketplaces or manage several brands, use the account and marketplace selector at the top of the page to switch. Each marketplace has its own campaigns, budgets, and currency. Agencies managing several clients can be invited as users with specific permissions; check the account's user management settings.

The main navigation

Campaign manager

This is the home screen. You'll see a performance chart at the top and a table of campaigns below. Useful things to set up once:

• Columns: click the columns control and choose impressions, clicks, CTR, spend, CPC, orders, sales, ACoS, and ROAS. Hide the rest until you need them.
• Date range: default to the last 14 or 30 days. Short ranges are noisy and the most recent days are still collecting attributed sales.
• Filters: filter by ad type, state (enabled, paused), portfolio, or performance (for example, ACoS greater than 40%).
• Portfolios: group campaigns by product or brand to see totals and set budget caps.

Creating a campaign

1. Click Create campaign and choose Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, or Sponsored Display.
2. Name the campaign using a consistent convention, such as 'SP | Exact | Product | Core'.
3. Choose a portfolio (optional), start date, end date (optional), and daily budget.
4. Choose targeting: automatic or manual.
5. Choose a bidding strategy: dynamic bids down only, up and down, or fixed. Set placement adjustments if you want them.
6. Create the first ad group: select the products to advertise, then add keywords or product targets with bids.
7. Add negative keywords if you already know terms to exclude.
8. Review and launch.

For the settings to choose when you're starting out, see Amazon PPC for beginners.

Inside a campaign

Click a campaign name to open it. The left-hand tabs typically include:

• Ad groups: the ad groups in this campaign and their performance.
• Placements: performance by top of search, rest of search, and product pages, and where you set placement adjustments.
• Negative keywords and negative targeting: campaign-level exclusions.
• Budget rules: automatic budget increases by schedule or performance.
• Campaign settings: name, dates, budget, and bidding strategy.
• History: a log of changes made to the campaign.

Inside an ad group

• Ads: the products being advertised. You can pause individual products.
• Targeting: keywords (with match types) or product targets, each with its own bid and metrics. This is where most bid changes happen.
• Negative targeting: ad-group-level negative keywords or ASINs.
• Search terms: the actual searches that triggered your ads, with performance. You can add a term as a keyword or negative directly from here.
• Ad group settings: name and default bid.
• History: changes made to the ad group.

A weekly routine in the console

Here's a 30-minute weekly pass using only the console:

Our Amazon PPC checklist expands this into daily, weekly, and monthly tasks.

Reports

Go to Measurement & Reporting, then Sponsored ads reports, and click Create report. Choose the ad type, report type, time unit (summary or daily), and date range. You can schedule reports to run daily, weekly, or monthly and arrive by email. The most useful report types:

• Search term: the searches behind your clicks and sales.
• Targeting: performance by keyword or product target.
• Placement: performance by placement for each campaign.
• Advertised product: performance by SKU.
• Purchased product: what was bought after ad clicks, including other SKUs.

Remember that sales are credited within the attribution window, so numbers for the last few days will keep rising. Read the attribution window explained before judging recent results.

Bulk operations

Bulk operations let you download a spreadsheet of your campaigns, edit bids, budgets, keywords, and states in Excel or Google Sheets, and upload it back. It's the fastest way to make dozens or hundreds of changes. Download a fresh file each time, change only what you mean to, and check the upload results for errors.

Common bulk-file uses

• Applying the same negative keyword list to many campaigns at once.
• Raising or lowering bids by a percentage across hundreds of keywords.
• Building a new campaign structure for a product line from a template.
• Pausing all campaigns for an out-of-stock product in one step.

Billing

Sellers are typically charged to the payment method on file or deducted from seller proceeds, depending on settings. If a payment fails, campaigns can stop serving, so check this section if spend suddenly drops to zero.

Doing all of this by hand each week is manageable for a few campaigns. As accounts grow, AdSpark connects through Amazon's official Ads API and handles the repetitive parts: bid changes toward target ACoS, search-term harvesting and negation, and budget pacing, with every action logged and reversible. For the vocabulary used throughout the console, keep the Amazon PPC glossary handy, and compare ad types in Sponsored Products vs Sponsored Brands vs Sponsored Display.

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