Amazon Marketing Agency: Amazon Ads Management and Account Growth for Sellers, Vendors and KDP Authors

Updated September 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

An Amazon marketing agency plans, buys and measures a brand’s advertising and brand-building inside Amazon’s store: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, display and streaming video, the Brand Store, A+ content and the promotions calendar, all judged on profit rather than on clicks. Progression Agency runs this work for third-party sellers, vendors and KDP authors, and ties it to the Google, Meta and TikTok campaigns that send outside shoppers to Amazon listings. Progression Agency is based in New York City and works with clients across the United States and worldwide.

What does an Amazon marketing agency do?

It runs the advertising and brand-building side of a business on Amazon: deciding which products deserve budget, building and bidding campaigns, producing the creative each ad format needs, planning promotions, and reading Amazon’s reports to move money toward what sells at a profit. Listing copy, images and backend search terms are a separate discipline with its own page, Amazon listing and catalog optimization; the two share one keyword map, and most accounts need both.

Demand for the service is real and expensive to buy. “Amazon advertising” and “amazon ads” each draw about 18,100 US searches a month, “advertising agency for amazon” about 1,000 and “amazon marketing agency” about 590, and advertisers bid $141.38 for a single click on “amazon advertising agency” (Ubersuggest, September 2026). Those bids are a fair proxy for what one qualified seller inquiry is worth to the firms competing for it.

Some of that search traffic still uses an older name. Amazon Marketing Services, or AMS, was what Amazon’s self-service ad console was called before Amazon folded its advertising products into one brand, now Amazon Ads, and sellers who search for amazon marketing services today usually want the same campaign management described on this page. The marketing services Amazon offers directly (the ad console, Brand Stores, A+ content, Vine and Amazon Attribution) are free, pay-per-click or priced per use; the agency’s job is to decide how to combine them and to run them week after week.

Amazon Ads in 2026: the formats, and what Amazon changed

Amazon Ads now runs from one platform, Amazon Ads Agent, which brought sponsored ads and Amazon DSP together. Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands remain cost-per-click search formats; Sponsored Display is now called display ads; and DVA+, short for Display, Video and Audio, is the campaign type that absorbed what advertisers used to buy through Amazon DSP, Sponsored Display and Sponsored TV (Amazon Ads Agent, Display, Video, and Audio).

Existing campaigns, reports and settings carried over, so nothing had to be rebuilt. What changed is the vocabulary in the console and in agency proposals. A proposal that still treats Amazon DSP as a separate product with its own spend minimum describes the old arrangement: self-service DVA+ campaigns have no minimum, while managed service usually does.

Sponsored Products

Sponsored Products promote a single listing and send the click straight to its detail page. It is usually the first format we fund, because it meets a shopper who is already searching. The product must be in an eligible category and eligible for the featured offer; adult, used and refurbished products and closed categories cannot be advertised (Amazon Ads: Sponsored Products).

Sponsored Brands

Sponsored Brands put a logo, a custom headline and several products, or a video, in front of a search, and can send the click to a Brand Store. Third-party sellers need Brand Registry to use them; vendors, book vendors and KDP authors do not (Amazon Ads: Sponsored Brands). We use them for branded and category searches where the shopper is still choosing between brands.

Display ads, formerly Sponsored Display

Amazon renamed Sponsored Display as display ads and moved it inside Display, Video and Audio campaigns; existing Sponsored Display campaigns continue to run (Amazon Ads: Sponsored Display). We use display mainly to reach shoppers who viewed a product and did not buy, and for placements on our clients’ own and rivals’ detail pages.

What happened to Amazon DSP?

Amazon says the programmatic controls advertisers knew from Amazon DSP (audience targeting, frequency management, deal IDs and custom bidding) now sit in DVA+ advanced settings, and that the self-service and managed-service pricing options continue (Amazon Ads: Amazon DSP). DVA+ does not require products sold on Amazon, so brands that sell mostly on their own site can use the same inventory.

Is your catalog ready to advertise?

Only if the product can win the sale once the ad is clicked. Amazon Ads’ guidance is to advertise products that are in stock and eligible for the featured offer, with five or more customer reviews and a rating of 3.5 stars or higher, four or more zoomable images and at least three bullet points (Amazon Ads detail page guide).

Two of those are hard stops. An advertised product that runs out of stock is paused automatically, and a product must be eligible for the featured offer before it can be advertised at all. Amazon also recommends choosing products that regularly display the featured offer, so a shared listing where another seller often holds it is a poor place for budget. The rest are conversion factors: an ad that lands on a thin page pays for the click and loses the sale. Every ASIN gets a readiness check before it gets a budget line.

Titles need particular care now that Seller Central caps new product titles at 75 characters while Amazon Ads suggests about 60 for ad creative. Those rewrites belong to the listing side of the work; see how we optimize Amazon listings.

How we build and bid Sponsored Products campaigns

We separate discovery from control. Automatic campaigns find the searches and product pages that convert; manual campaigns then buy those winners at bids we choose, while negative targets stop the spend that never converts.

Automatic targeting

Amazon matches automatic campaigns to searches and products in four ways: close match, loose match, substitutes (detail pages of similar products) and complements (detail pages of products used alongside yours). We bid each group separately, because a complement placement and a close-match search rarely deserve the same price (Amazon Ads: Sponsored Products best practices).

Manual keyword and product targeting

Search terms that produce orders move into manual campaigns: exact match for proven phrases, phrase and broad match to find their variants, and product targeting against specific ASINs or whole categories. Targeting your own detail pages keeps shoppers inside your range instead of handing the ad slot on your page to a competitor.

Bidding strategies and placements

Amazon offers dynamic bids that move down only, dynamic bids that move up and down, and fixed bids, plus placement adjustments of up to 900% for top of search, the rest of search and product pages. We start conservatively and raise a placement adjustment only where the placement report shows orders at an acceptable cost.

Budgets and pacing

Amazon suggests starting a Sponsored Products campaign at $10 a day. A daily budget is averaged across the calendar month, so $100 a day can buy up to $3,000 of clicks in a 30-day month, with some days spending more than others. A campaign that exhausts its budget by midday misses every shopper for the rest of the day, so pacing is part of the weekly review.

Sponsored Brands, Brand Stores and video

This is the brand layer. Sponsored Brands put your logo, a headline and several products or a video at the top of a search, and a Brand Store gives the click somewhere better to land than a single detail page.

What a Brand Store adds

A Store is a free, multipage storefront at a short amazon.com address, and you do not need to advertise to build one. Store insights report sales, visits, page views and traffic sources, and tagged Store links show which outside campaigns sent shoppers there (Amazon Ads: Brand Stores). We organize Stores the way customers shop a range, by use, size or bundle, rather than by internal product families.

Sponsored Brands video

Video in search results works when the product is shown doing its job in the first seconds, with the sound off. We cut these from existing footage where we can and brief new shoots only when the product needs demonstrating; our video production team handles those shoots.

Paying for impressions instead of clicks

Sponsored Brands can also be bought per thousand viewable impressions for impression share, or through reserved share of voice at a fixed price with a minimum spend commitment. We use those only for launches and seasonal peaks, where being seen matters more than the next order.

Should you add display and streaming TV through DVA+?

Usually after search campaigns are profitable, not before. DVA+ reaches shoppers away from the results page, on Prime Video and other streaming TV, online video, display and audio across Amazon properties and the open internet; self-service campaigns bill per thousand impressions with no minimum spend, and no Amazon storefront is required (Amazon Ads: DVA+).

We use it to retarget product viewers, to reach audiences that resemble existing buyers, and to support launches where awareness has to come before search demand. Brands that sell mainly on their own site can use the same inventory to send traffic there; our programmatic advertising and video advertising teams plan those buys across Amazon and other platforms.

Amazon Marketing Cloud

Amazon Marketing Cloud is a clean-room service for custom analytics and audiences built on pseudonymized signals. Amazon says it is available at no cost to eligible advertisers through a web interface and an API, with templates that do not require SQL (Amazon Marketing Cloud). We use it for questions the standard reports cannot answer, such as which combinations of ad types came before a purchase.

Brand Registry: the tools that compound

Brand Registry is free, and most of the tools on this page depend on it. Amazon requires a pending or registered trademark for the brand name or logo, issued by the trademark office of a country with an Amazon store, as a text-based mark or an image-based mark with words, letters or numbers, and the brand name permanently affixed to the products or packaging (Amazon Brand Registry).

Registration opens Sponsored Brands, Brand Stores, A+ content, Brand Analytics and Vine, along with protection tools: reporting suspected infringement, Transparency serial codes against counterfeits and Project Zero for removing listings directly. A brand that sells without registering is advertising with one hand tied.

A+ content

A+ content replaces the plain product description with images, comparison charts and, in the Premium tier, video and interactive modules. It is free for eligible sellers and pays off twice: shoppers who arrive from an ad see a richer page, and fewer of them leave to compare. Module rules and sizes are covered on our Amazon listing page.

Vine for a new product’s first reviews

Amazon Vine lets brand owners with FBA listings offer free units to invited reviewers, whose reviews carry a label showing the product was free. It is the only free-product review program we use, and the enrollment fee depends on how many units are offered; eligibility and fees are set out on our Amazon listing page.

Brand Analytics

Brand Analytics shows brand representatives how customers search and buy, including a Search Query Performance dashboard for the brand’s top queries (Search Query Performance dashboard). It tells us which searches already convert organically and which deserve exact-match budget.

Coupons, deals and Prime discounts alongside ads

A discount changes what an ad click is worth, so promotions and bids are planned together rather than in separate calendars. The requirements below are Amazon’s, from its own seller guide (Sell on Amazon: promotions, coupons and deals).

A Professional selling plan costs $39.99 a month plus selling fees, so every promotion above sits on top of a fixed cost. Before a coupon goes live on an advertised product we model the discount, the referral fee and the ad cost together; a promotion that looks cheap on its own can turn a profitable campaign into a loss-making one.

How much does an Amazon marketing agency cost?

Two budgets are involved: what you pay Amazon for media, and what you pay an agency to manage it. Our management fees follow the paid-media planning ranges we publish for Google Ads and Meta management, and the actual quote follows a written scope.

Media is billed by Amazon, not by us. Sponsored ads are cost per click with no minimum spend, and self-service DVA+ campaigns bill per thousand impressions with no minimum. These ranges match our marketing agency pricing guide, and clients outside the US are priced the same way.

Those cost-per-click figures are what agencies pay Google to be found by sellers, not what Amazon charges for a product click. They show how crowded the market for Amazon help has become, and why a written scope with a named team matters more than a low monthly number.

Amazon KDP advertising and marketing for authors

Amazon KDP advertising runs in the same ad console with two formats: Sponsored Products, which place a book in shopping results and on product pages across Amazon, Kindle and Goodreads, and Sponsored Brands, which showcase several titles or a video. Books must be claimed in Author Central first, and Sponsored Brands need a pen name with at least three unique titles (KDP: Advertising for KDP books, Amazon Ads guide for authors).

KDP titles can be advertised in the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, India, Australia and Japan, while audiobook ads run only in the US. KDP places a temporary $50 pre-authorization hold on the payment card, which the bank releases within 3 to 7 business days. Interest is steady: “amazon kdp advertising” and “amazon kdp ads” each draw about 210 US searches a month and “amazon kdp marketing” about 140 (Ubersuggest, September 2026).

Amazon KDP marketing beyond ads

KDP Select is a free 90-day program for Kindle eBooks that places an enrolled title in Kindle Unlimited and opens two promotional tools, Kindle Countdown Deals and Free Book Promotions (KDP Select). We plan ads around those windows, since a countdown deal with nothing behind it is a discount few readers see. Our book marketing and author website design services cover the work that happens off Amazon.

How we judge ads for books

Book economics differ from product economics. An ad is judged against the royalty per sale and, for Kindle Unlimited titles, page reads; for a series, against read-through into later books rather than the first title’s list price. We target comparable titles and authors with product targeting, test categories, and keep automatic campaigns running to find reader searches no keyword list predicted.

Should Amazon sellers pay for Google, Meta and TikTok traffic?

Sometimes, and it can now be measured properly. Amazon Attribution is a free tool that reports how search, social, display, video and email campaigns outside Amazon lead to detail page views and purchases, and it is open to Brand Registry sellers, vendors, KDP authors and agencies (Amazon Attribution).

Brand owners can also enroll in Brand Referral Bonus, a credit against Amazon referral fees on qualifying sales driven by non-Amazon marketing, which Amazon describes as averaging 10% of those sales (Sell on Amazon: Brand Referral Bonus). The credit improves the economics; it does not make a losing campaign profitable.

Google ads for Amazon sellers

Search ads that point to an Amazon listing or Brand Store suit branded searches and products with a clear search term. The click lands on Amazon, so results come from Amazon Attribution rather than Google’s own conversion tags. Our Google Ads management team runs these from the same keyword map as the Amazon campaigns.

Facebook ads for Amazon sellers

Meta campaigns suit launches, bundles and products that need showing rather than searching for. When a product needs explaining we send the click to a Brand Store page first, and every link is tagged so Amazon Attribution can report page views and purchases. See Facebook ads management and Instagram ads.

TikTok and creators

Creator videos often prompt a branded search on Amazon rather than a click, which is hard to attribute; we pair tagged links with tracking of branded search volume in Amazon’s reports. Creators who are paid or sent product must disclose the connection, as the FTC’s Endorsement Guides require (FTC Endorsement Guides FAQ). Our TikTok ads and influencer marketing teams run that work.

When the traffic belongs on your own store

If you also sell on your own site, some outside traffic is worth more there: no referral fee, and a customer email you keep. We split that decision product by product with our Shopify Shopping and search campaigns team and our ecommerce advertising service.

Which numbers prove Amazon advertising is working?

Attributed sales and advertising cost of sales show whether a campaign pays for itself; new-to-brand orders and total ad cost as a share of all sales show whether advertising grows the business or only buys sales you would have made anyway.

The reports we read every week

Amazon’s console offers a search term report (queries that earned at least one click), a targeting report, an advertised product report, a placement report and a performance-over-time report (Amazon Ads reporting guidance). The search term report feeds three things at once: exact-match campaigns, negatives, and the listing team’s keyword map.

Profit, not only ACOS

An ACOS target means nothing without a margin. We calculate break-even ACOS for every product, meaning the margin left after landed cost, Amazon’s referral and fulfillment fees and expected returns, before any advertising, and set targets below it for mature products, at it for products whose job is winning new customers, and briefly above it for launches.

An Amazon marketing strategy for the first 90 days

A marketing strategy for Amazon starts with the products that can already win and spends to learn before it spends to scale. Amazon’s own guidance is to check a new campaign’s metrics at least twice in its first week and to optimize through its first 30 days; our sequence stretches that discipline across a quarter.

Searches for “marketing strategy amazon” (480 a month) and “marketing strategy for amazon” (320) mix two questions, how Amazon markets itself and how to market on Amazon (Ubersuggest, September 2026). This page answers the second; our marketing strategy guide covers how to write a strategy for a whole business.

How do sellers ask ChatGPT, Claude and other assistants to find an Amazon agency?

More and more by asking the assistant for a shortlist, which names a few firms and links to a few pages. Being on that list depends on pages that say plainly what an agency does, for whom and at what price, and on other sites saying the same.

The questions sellers type

The prompts are practical and specific, and they often include the seller’s category or spend level. Typical examples:

• “Which Amazon PPC agency works with supplement brands at our spend level?”
• “Is it worth hiring an Amazon advertising agency, or should I run ads myself?”
• “What should an Amazon marketing agency charge, and is a percentage of spend fair?”
• “Who can run Amazon ads for a self-published author?”
• “Compare these two agencies for Amazon ads and tell me which reports they send.”
• “Read this search term report and show me where I am wasting money.”

What the assistants cite

When ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot or Google’s AI Overviews search the web for these questions, they draw on agency service pages that state scope and pricing in text, directory listings such as Clutch’s Amazon agency list and Semrush’s agency directory, “best Amazon agencies” roundups, Reddit threads from seller communities, and Amazon’s own product pages when the question is how a feature works. None of them publishes how it weighs those sources, and a small change in a prompt’s wording can change the firms named, so we test a fixed set of prompts, worded identically, every month.

What we publish so a client gets named

The same rules apply to our clients’ brands and to agencies: specific, crawlable pages beat slogans. For brands selling on Amazon, that means:

• Product pages on the brand’s own site with the full specifications, so assistants have a source outside Amazon.
• Comparison and buying-guide pages written from primary sources, with dates.
• The same company and product facts across the site, Amazon, social profiles and directories.
• Key facts in HTML text, not only in images or PDFs.
• Crawler access for the bots that feed assistants, checked in robots.txt and in any firewall rules.
• Earned mentions in reviews, press and forums; never paid placements dressed up as opinions.

Our answer engine optimization service does this work, and how to rank in ChatGPT and why ChatGPT recommends a competitor explain the mechanics.

AI agents inside Amazon Ads

The tools are changing on Amazon’s side as well. Amazon Ads Agent accepts natural-language instructions, and since February 2026 the Amazon Ads MCP Server, in open beta for partners with API credentials, has let assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini create campaigns, run reports and manage settings through the Amazon Ads API (Amazon Ads: MCP Server announcement). We use AI for analysis and first drafts; a person on our team approves every budget, bid and campaign change, and the accounts stay in the brand’s name.

Reviews, incentives and disclosure: the rules we work inside

Advertising can buy visibility; it cannot buy reviews. Amazon’s Community Guidelines forbid reviews created or changed in exchange for payments, refunds, discounts, free products, gift cards, warranties or services (Amazon Community Guidelines), and the FTC’s Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, in force since October 21, 2024, treats paying for reviews that express a particular sentiment as an unfair or deceptive practice (FTC: the consumer reviews rule, questions and answers).

Three habits follow. Coupons, rebates and promotions are never tied to leaving a review. Creators who are paid or sent free product disclose the connection clearly, as the Endorsement Guides in 16 CFR Part 255 require (16 CFR Part 255). And Vine is the only free-product review route we use. Amazon’s anti-manipulation policy allows it to suspend accounts, remove reviews, delist products and withhold payments (Amazon anti-manipulation policy). We build campaigns inside these rules; this is how we work, not legal advice, and categories such as supplements and cosmetics carry their own claim rules on top.

How to choose an Amazon advertising agency

Ask for evidence on each point in the table and use the right-hand column to check it before you sign. The same test works whether you are comparing an Amazon PPC agency, a full-service advertising agency for Amazon or a single consultant.

One more test: ask what they would not advertise. An Amazon marketing company that says yes to every ASIN is selling spend, not judgment. If you want the same team running search ads outside Amazon, our pay-per-click management service covers Google and Microsoft Advertising.

Sellers, vendors, brands and authors we work with

The mechanics are the same across account types; the levers differ.

Third-party sellers using FBA

Amazon seller advertising for FBA brands turns on two questions: margin after fees, and whether each product holds the featured offer. FBA products carry the Prime badge into their ads automatically, and an active FBA listing is required for Vine, so fulfillment choices shape amazon fba marketing as much as bids do. Amazon’s referral and fulfillment fees go into every ACOS target.

Vendors selling to Amazon

Vendors sell wholesale to Amazon and work through Vendor Central and the Amazon Ads console. They can run Sponsored Brands without Brand Registry and create A+ content in Vendor Central; the constraint is usually availability, which Amazon controls as the retailer, so our plans lean on stock forecasts.

Shopify and direct-to-consumer brands adding Amazon

Brands that already sell on their own site bring creative, product knowledge and customer insight that a new Amazon account lacks. We keep pricing consistent across channels, send the right traffic to each, and coordinate with Shopify store design and development and email and SMS flows for online stores.

Authors and small publishers

KDP authors and small presses get the same console with book-specific rules, covered in the KDP section above; our book marketing agency page covers launch work beyond Amazon.

Brands in claim-sensitive categories

Beauty, personal care, food and supplement brands face stricter claim rules in listings and ads. We write ad copy to the claims the brand can substantiate and route anything health-related to the brand’s own regulatory reviewer. See CPG marketing and beauty brand marketing.

Related services for Amazon sellers

• Amazon listing and catalog optimization: titles, item highlights, search terms, images, A+ content and reviews.
• Ecommerce SEO: search visibility for your own online store.
• Shopify Shopping and search ads: paid traffic to the store you own.
• Pay-per-click management: Google and Microsoft search campaigns.
• Shopify store design and development: the destination for traffic you keep.
• Email and SMS for ecommerce brands: retention outside Amazon.
• Ecommerce advertising: Google Shopping, Meta and TikTok for online stores.
• Book marketing: launches for authors and publishers.
• Programmatic advertising: display and connected TV beyond Amazon.
• Marketing analytics: one view of Amazon, your store and paid media.
• AEO for ecommerce: getting products named in AI answers.
• Selling on Target Plus: another marketplace, with different rules.
• Etsy shop optimization: search and ads for makers selling on Etsy.

Frequently asked questions