Amazon Ads in India: The Complete Advertising Guide for Sellers

The three Amazon ad formats in India

Sponsored Products are the workhorse: your product appears in search results and on product pages, and you pay per click. They work for almost every category and are where every seller should start.

Sponsored Brands show your logo, a headline and multiple products at the top of search results. They require brand registry and suit sellers building a brand rather than moving a single SKU. Sponsored Display lets you retarget shoppers who viewed your product or similar products, on and off Amazon.

How bidding and budgets work

Amazon ads run on a cost per click auction. You set a maximum bid for each keyword or product target, and you pay roughly one paisa more than the next highest bidder. Daily budgets can start as low as a few hundred rupees, which makes testing affordable even for new sellers.

Start with automatic campaigns so Amazon discovers which search terms convert for your product. After two to three weeks, move the converting terms into manual campaigns with tighter bids, and add the wasted terms as negative keywords.

Understanding ACoS and profitability

ACoS, or advertising cost of sale, is your ad spend divided by ad revenue. If you spend 1,000 rupees to generate 5,000 rupees in sales, your ACoS is 20 percent. Whether that is good depends on your margin: your break-even ACoS equals your profit margin before ads.

New products often run at a high ACoS deliberately to win reviews and ranking, then bids are tightened as organic sales pick up. Mature products should target an ACoS comfortably below the break-even point.

Common mistakes Indian sellers make

• Running ads on listings with weak photos, titles or reviews, which burns budget without converting
• Setting one campaign and never adding negative keywords, so spend leaks to irrelevant searches
• Judging campaigns after two or three days instead of two to three weeks of data
• Bidding the same amount on broad, phrase and exact match keywords
• Ignoring the search term report, which is where all the real learning lives

When to bring in an agency

Once monthly ad spend crosses a meaningful level, the cost of mistakes exceeds the cost of professional management. An experienced team restructures campaigns, harvests search terms weekly, and aligns ads with inventory and pricing so spend never outruns stock.