The four ad types inside Seller Central, a Sponsored Products launch sequence, and the point where the native Campaign Manager stops being enough.
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Advertising on Amazon Seller Central starts as a five-minute setup and quickly becomes the biggest line item on a seller's P&L. Sponsored Products alone accounts for the majority of paid clicks across the marketplace, and the campaign manager inside Seller Central is where most of that spend gets launched, optimized, and bled away. This guide walks you through how to advertise on Seller Central in 2026: what each campaign type does, the four-step launch sequence that actually works, and where the native reporting falls short once you spend more than a few thousand dollars a month.
Open Advertising → Campaign Manager and you see four campaign families. Each one solves a different funnel problem.
| Ad type | What it does | Who can run it |
|---|---|---|
| Sponsored Products | Boost individual ASINs in search results and product pages. Pay-per-click, keyword or product targeted. | Any seller in the Professional plan with active offers. |
| Sponsored Brands | Headline banner above search with logo, custom headline, and multiple ASINs. Drives store and category traffic. | Brand Registry sellers only. |
| Sponsored Display | Retargeting on and off Amazon. Audience and product targeting. | Brand Registry sellers and vendors. |
| Sponsored TV | Streaming video inventory on Freevee, Twitch, Prime Video ad tier. Low-cost entry into video advertising. | Brand Registry sellers in eligible categories. |
DSP is the fifth ad type but it lives in a separate console (and minimum spends start much higher). If you're starting on Seller Central, you'll spend 80% of your budget on Sponsored Products. See our Sponsored Products deep dive for tactics inside that one type.
From Campaign Manager, click Create campaign and choose Sponsored Products. The form is long but only four decisions matter on day one.
Automatic campaigns let Amazon pick the keywords and ASIN placements. They harvest data you don't have yet. Set a daily budget you can stomach losing for two weeks ($20 to $50 is enough for most categories), set bids at the suggested mid-point, and let it run. The point of the auto campaign is to discover converting search terms, not to be efficient.
After 7 to 14 days go to Advertising → Reports → Sponsored Products → Search Terms Report. Filter for search terms with 1+ orders. These are the keywords that actually convert for your ASIN. The first time you pull this report it is unreasonably valuable.
Create a manual Sponsored Products campaign with exact-match keywords for the converting search terms. Bid 10 to 20% higher than the suggested bid for top-of-search placement on terms you know convert. This is where most of the profit happens.
Once a search term is in the manual campaign, negate it in the auto campaign. Otherwise both campaigns bid against each other on the same query and Amazon collects the spread.
Campaign Manager shows clicks, spend, sales attributed within a 7-day click window, and ACoS. Reports → Sponsored Products gives you placement, search term, advertised product, and targeting reports. That's enough to optimize individual campaigns.
What it doesn't show, and what every seller above $10k a month in ad spend eventually wants:
| Capability | Seller Central Campaign Manager | Nova PPC Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Launch + edit campaigns | Yes (required for setup) | Read-only insights, edits stay in Seller Central |
| TACoS by SKU | Not natively | Yes, with hourly refresh |
| True ROAS (net of fees and COGS) | No | Yes |
| Multi-account / multi-marketplace | One at a time | Unified across up to 330+ accounts |
| Organic vs ad sales mix per SKU | Manual export | Built-in view |
Most sellers launch in Seller Central and add an analytics layer once monthly ad spend crosses $5k to $10k, because the spreadsheet cost of joining ad data with revenue data starts to outweigh the subscription.
Each ad format has its own placement inventory, eligibility rules, and benchmark efficiency. Knowing where each one lives on the page (and where it competes) is the difference between picking a format because it sounds new and picking one because it solves a real funnel gap.
| Format | Where it shows up | Typical ACoS band | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sponsored Products | Top of search, rest of search, product detail pages | 15% to 35% | Defending best-sellers, harvesting search terms, launch velocity |
| Sponsored Brands | Headline banner above search, brand video below search | 10% to 25% | Brand awareness, store traffic, category-level capture |
| Sponsored Display | On-Amazon detail pages, third-party sites, audience targeting | 20% to 40% | Remarketing cart abandoners, competitor conquesting |
| Sponsored TV | Freevee, Twitch, Prime Video ad tier | Not directly comparable (brand metric) | Upper-funnel reach for brands with video assets |
ACoS bands are directional. A best-seller defending its top-of-search slot will run closer to break-even ACoS; a launch campaign will run at 2x to 3x break-even on purpose for the first 60 days. The right ACoS is always relative to your break-even, never an absolute number. Calculate yours with the break-even ACoS calculator.
ACoS and TACoS measure different things and they can move in opposite directions. A simple numerical walkthrough makes the difference obvious.
A kitchen accessory SKU does $50,000 in total monthly revenue. Ad spend is $5,000. Of the $50,000 revenue, $20,000 is ad-attributed and $30,000 is organic.
25%
$5,000 ad spend / $20,000 ad-attributed revenue. Campaign-level efficiency.
10%
$5,000 ad spend / $50,000 total revenue. Business-level efficiency.
Now imagine the same SKU next month: ad spend climbs to $8,000, ACoS drops to 20% (you optimized bids), but total revenue stays at $50,000. ACoS got better. TACoS rose to 16%. Translation: you're spending more to defend the same revenue, ads are cannibalizing organic, and the campaign that looks healthy in Campaign Manager is quietly bleeding margin. This is the exact failure mode TACoS exists to catch.
Ad spend lives in Advertising. Total revenue (organic + ad) lives in Business Reports. Seller Central does not join them. Calculating TACoS by SKU means exporting both, matching by date and ASIN, then dividing. Doable for one SKU; intractable for a catalog of 50. That is the single most common reason sellers add a dedicated PPC analytics layer.
Advertising → Reports inside Seller Central can generate roughly a dozen report types. Four of them carry 90% of the optimization weight.
Pull these four weekly for the first 90 days of a new campaign. After that, monthly is enough unless you launch a new SKU or category.
Sponsored Brands is the only Seller Central ad format where creative quality outweighs bid strategy. The format gives you a logo, a custom headline, and a row of products (or a video). Three rules separate a Sponsored Brand that earns its placement from one that wastes budget.
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