A complete action checklist for running Amazon Ads on KDP books — what to do before you launch a campaign, what to check every week, and what to review every month. Use it as your ongoing reference guide to running ads with structure and discipline.
| 10-minute read | All levels |
Amazon Ads work best when managed with consistent process rather than sporadic attention. The authors who get compound improvements over time are not necessarily the ones with the most advertising expertise — they are the ones who build a routine and stick to it. This checklist is designed to be used as a living reference document. Bookmark it. Return to it before launching new campaigns, during your weekly optimisation sessions, and during monthly account reviews. Each item represents a specific, actionable check that directly impacts campaign performance.
Pre-Launch: Listing Readiness Checklist
Before spending a single penny on advertising, your book’s product listing must be capable of converting the traffic you pay for. Ads amplify your listing — a weak listing with ads produces expensive, low-converting clicks. Work through every item here before launching any campaign.
Cover: Does your cover immediately communicate genre? Would a browsing reader understand the genre within two seconds at thumbnail size? Is the cover professionally designed with correct title typography for the genre? If you are not certain, show it to readers in your target genre without context and ask what genre they think it is. A cover that signals the wrong genre will generate high click-through rates from the wrong audience and never convert. An experienced cover designer with knowledge of genre conventions is worth the investment before you begin spending on advertising.
Title and subtitle: Does the title include relevant searchable language without reading awkwardly? For nonfiction, the subtitle is especially important — it should include the primary search intent of your target reader. “How to Stop Worrying About Money” is searchable; “A Journey Toward Financial Peace” is not. For fiction, the title does not need to be keyword-dense, but the subtitle or series name often carries search weight. Check that your title and subtitle are displaying correctly in the Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard and match what appears on your product page.
Book description / blurb: Does the first sentence create immediate desire or hook curiosity? Does it avoid opening with author backstory or publication history? Is it formatted with appropriate HTML line breaks so it does not appear as a wall of text? Does it close with a clear call to action or genre signal? The blurb is the conversion mechanism — after the cover attracts the click, the blurb closes the sale. Ensure your manuscript has gone through professional proofreading before publication so that your Look Inside quality reflects the standard your blurb promises. The Vappingo manuscript proofreading service offers exactly this standard of review.
Reviews and social proof: Does your book have at least 5–10 verified reviews? Zero reviews dramatically reduces conversion rates from paid traffic. If your book is pre-review, consider running a small ARC campaign or requesting early reviews from your reader list before committing significant ad spend. A book with 15 positive reviews will convert ad traffic at a meaningfully higher rate than the same book with none.
Pricing: Is your price competitive for your category and format? Check the top 10–20 bestsellers in your genre on Amazon. If your price is significantly above the category average without a clear reason (series entry point, brand recognition), consider adjusting. For ebooks, common price points in most genres are £2.99–£4.99 in the UK and $2.99–$4.99 in the US. For paperbacks, check category-appropriate ranges. Pricing too high suppresses conversion from both organic and paid traffic.
Keyword metadata: Have you populated all seven keyword fields in your KDP dashboard with relevant, non-redundant terms? These backend keywords influence which automatic targeting sub-types Amazon uses for your ads and affect your organic discovery. Use KDP Rank Fuel’s Keyword Goldminer to research and populate these fields with high-relevance, low-competition terms before going live with ads.
Campaign Setup Checklist
Each new campaign should be structured for both data clarity and budget efficiency. Before clicking the launch button, confirm these elements.
Campaign naming convention: Use a consistent, descriptive naming structure you can read at a glance in the dashboard. A reliable format is: [BookTitle]-[AdType]-[TargetingType]-[MatchType or Audience]. For example: “Thriller2-SP-Auto” (Sponsored Products automatic) or “Thriller2-SP-Manual-Exact”. This naming convention makes it easy to filter, compare, and manage multiple campaigns across a growing catalogue.
One ad type per campaign: Do not mix Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands in the same campaign structure. Each ad type has different auction dynamics, reporting, and attribution windows (Sponsored Products: 7-day; Sponsored Brands and Display: 14-day). Keeping ad types separate gives you clean data and accurate performance comparison.
Start date and end date: For evergreen campaigns (the majority), set no end date. For launch or promotional campaigns with a specific window, set a clear end date so the campaign does not continue running after the promotion ends. Check that your start date is the intended date — campaigns occasionally launch earlier than expected if set up late at night.
Portfolio assignment: If you have multiple books, assign each campaign to the correct portfolio. Portfolios allow you to set budget caps across all campaigns for a single book, which prevents a book from consuming more than its allocated monthly ad budget. This is particularly important if you are managing ads across a catalogue of 5+ titles.
Bidding strategy: Select your bidding strategy deliberately. Dynamic bids — down only is the safest choice for new campaigns: Amazon can reduce bids when conversion is less likely, but cannot raise them beyond your set bid. Dynamic bids — up and down gives Amazon more flexibility to raise bids by up to 100% when conversion is considered more likely, which can improve placement but also increase spend unpredictably on new campaigns. Fixed bids are best used only when you have specific exact match keywords at precisely calibrated bid levels.
Keyword and Targeting Checklist
Automatic targeting is running: Confirm you have at least one active automatic campaign for each book. Automatic campaigns provide the Search Terms Report data that feeds keyword discovery for manual campaigns. If you only have manual campaigns, you are not running the discovery loop that generates new converting terms over time.
Manual keywords are themed: Group keywords within ad groups by a unifying theme — author comparisons together, genre descriptors together, problem/solution terms together (for nonfiction). Thematic grouping helps Amazon understand ad relevance and typically improves Quality Score over time.
Match types are balanced: Confirm your manual campaign includes a distribution of exact match (highest control, best for proven converters), phrase match (moderate flexibility), and broad match (discovery). Do not run everything as broad match — broad match generates the most waste without negative keyword management. Do not run everything as exact match — exact match limits discovery to terms you already know.
Negative keywords are populated: Before launch, add an initial list of obvious negatives: irrelevant genres, competitor names you do not want to target, format terms that do not match your offer (e.g., “audiobook”, “used book” if advertising new digital titles). Build on this list each week from the Search Terms Report.
Product targeting reviewed: If running product targeting campaigns, confirm you are targeting relevant competitor ASINs — not just any book in a vaguely related category. Research top-selling books in your sub-genre using the category bestseller lists, and target their ASINs directly. Category-level product targeting is useful for broad reach but less precise than ASIN-level targeting.
Budget and Bids Checklist
Daily budget is sufficient for data gathering: A daily budget of £5–£8 or $6–$10 per campaign is a minimum for gathering meaningful data within 30 days. If budget is set below this, campaigns may run out of daily allocation before generating enough clicks for informed decisions. For launch campaigns where speed of data matters, consider £15–£20/day for the first 4–6 weeks.
Starting bids are at or above the suggested midpoint: Check Amazon’s suggested bid range for each keyword or targeting target. Set starting bids at or slightly above the midpoint — not at the floor. Bids at the floor will rarely win impressions in competitive categories and the campaign will gather no data.
Breakeven ACoS is calculated: Before the campaign launches, write down your breakeven ACoS: royalty ÷ list price × 100. For a £2.99 ebook with 70% royalty delivering £2.09, breakeven ACoS is approximately 70%. This is your ceiling — any ACoS below this is profitable. Keep this number visible during weekly reviews so you evaluate ACoS against your actual economics, not an arbitrary target.
Weekly Optimisation Checklist
Set aside 15–30 minutes per week for your standard optimisation session. This cadence is sufficient to keep campaigns improving without over-managing or making changes before data is meaningful. Run through these items in order.
1. Run the Search Terms Report: Reports → Create Report → Sponsored Products → Search Term. Set the date range to the previous 7 or 14 days. Download the CSV. Sort by spend descending. Review every term with 3+ clicks. Categorise each: converter (add to exact match manual campaign), clear waste (add as negative), undecided (leave another week).
2. Add new negatives: Take every irrelevant high-spend term identified in the Search Terms Report and add it as a negative keyword at the campaign level. Do this before adjusting any bids — eliminating waste is always the first priority.
3. Promote converters to exact match: Any search term with 2+ orders at acceptable ACoS should be added as an exact match keyword in your manual campaign at a competitive bid. These are your empirically validated buyers — bid for them directly.
4. Adjust keyword bids: In your manual campaigns, sort keywords by spend descending. For keywords with 15+ clicks significantly above your ACoS target, lower bids by 15–20%. For keywords with 15+ clicks significantly below your ACoS target and good volume, raise bids by 10–15%. Leave keywords with fewer than 15 clicks untouched — insufficient data for a bid decision.
5. Check for campaigns hitting budget cap: Campaigns that regularly exhaust their daily budget before the day ends are self-limiting your spend on good opportunities. If a campaign is hitting its cap with acceptable ACoS, raise the daily budget 20–30%.
6. Pause genuinely underperforming keywords: Exact match keywords with 25+ clicks and zero conversions over 30 days are candidates for pausing. Do not pause based on 5–10 clicks — that is not enough data. Only pause with high click counts and a sustained pattern of non-conversion.
Monthly Review Checklist
Monthly reviews involve a bigger picture look at campaign direction, structure, and economics. These questions cannot be answered weekly because they require 30-day trend data to be meaningful.
Calculate TACoS: Take your total Amazon Ads spend for the month from the advertising console and divide it by your total KDP earnings for the month (from the KDP dashboard). Multiply by 100. This is your TACoS — the true cost of advertising as a percentage of all income. A TACoS of 8–20% typically indicates a healthy, growing account. Above 30% may indicate ads are not generating sufficient organic uplift or pricing needs adjustment.
Review placement performance: Run the Placement Report for each Sponsored Products campaign. Compare ACoS and conversion rate across Top of Search, Rest of Search, and Product Pages. If one placement is significantly outperforming others, increase its bid modifier. If one is significantly underperforming, reduce or remove its modifier.
Assess campaign structure: Are any campaigns significantly overlapping in targeting? Identical or near-identical keywords across multiple campaigns can result in internal competition — your campaigns bidding against each other. Consolidate overlapping campaigns where necessary.
Review organic rank changes: Check your organic rankings for your 5–10 most important keywords using KDP Rank Fuel’s Keyword Rank Tracker. Has sustained ad spend moved your organic rank upward? If yes, your ads are working as intended. If organic rank has not moved despite consistent ad spend, reassess whether you are targeting the most relevant search terms.
Evaluate KENP contribution (KU authors): If your book is in Kindle Unlimited, review your KENP earnings in the KDP earnings report. Estimate the additional royalty per page read and factor it into your effective income per ad-driven reader. This often makes apparent high-ACoS campaigns genuinely profitable once KU income is included.
Scaling Checklist
Scaling means investing more in what is demonstrably working. Before scaling any campaign or keyword, confirm these conditions are met.
Data maturity: The campaign or keyword has been running for at least 30 days with sufficient click volume (30+ clicks for campaigns, 15+ for keywords) to establish a reliable performance pattern. Do not scale on early data — early performance is often unrepresentative of steady-state performance.
ACoS is stable: ACoS has been consistently below your target for the assessment period, not just in one good week. A campaign with ACoS of 20% one week and 80% the next is not ready to scale — it needs investigation, not investment.
Budget increment is conservative: Raise campaign daily budgets by 20–30% at a time. Doubling budgets immediately can alter campaign behaviour — Amazon may shift the distribution of impressions and placements unpredictably. Incremental budget increases give the algorithm time to adjust while maintaining the efficiency you are trying to preserve.
Bid increases are monitored: When raising bids on high-performing keywords, monitor ACoS for 7–10 days after each increase before raising again. The goal is to find the bid ceiling where incremental impression gains no longer come at profitable ACoS — not simply to bid as high as possible.
Account Health Checklist
Run through these broader account health checks quarterly or whenever you add new books to your advertising account.
Confirm that all live book listings are up to date: correct pricing, accurate category assignments, populated keyword metadata. Ads send traffic to your listing — if the listing has changed (new edition, revised pricing, updated cover) since the campaign launched, verify the ad creative and targeting still match. Sponsored Brands campaigns that reference a custom headline or store page should be checked to confirm the destination page is still live and correct.
Review any campaigns that have been paused for more than 60 days. Either restart them with updated bids (auction prices change over time) or archive them permanently to keep the campaign dashboard clean. Dormant campaigns with outdated bid levels can confuse reporting and clutter the interface when managing an active catalogue.
Confirm your payment method on file with Amazon Ads is current and has sufficient available balance or credit limit. Campaigns that pause mid-flight because of a payment failure lose algorithmic learning and placement momentum. Set a calendar reminder to check payment details quarterly, and when you update your credit card anywhere, update it in the Amazon Ads billing console as a second habit.
