The Amazon Advertising Console is where every Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display campaign is built, funded, and reported on. It is also one of the more confusing interfaces a new seller encounters, because it is separate from Seller Central, has its own navigation, and buries the useful reports several clicks deep.
This walkthrough is for sellers who have just gotten access, or who have been clicking around it for months without a clear map. It covers what each section does, which parts matter day to day, and what to set up before you launch a campaign.
Getting in
The console lives at advertising.amazon.com, and you reach it either directly or through the Advertising menu in Seller Central. The same login works for both. If you sell in more than one marketplace, each marketplace has its own console view, and switching between them is done from the account menu rather than from inside a campaign.
If you are an agency or run software on behalf of a seller, access is granted from inside the console, not from Seller Central. The seller invites your email with an advertising role, and you then see their account alongside any others you manage. That separation is deliberate: advertising access does not expose orders, inventory, or payouts.
Campaign Manager
Campaign Manager is the home screen and the section you will spend most of your time in. It lists every campaign across all three sponsored ad types, with columns for status, budget, spend, sales, ACoS, and whatever other metrics you choose to show.
The hierarchy runs campaign, then ad group, then targets. A campaign holds the budget and the bidding strategy. An ad group holds a set of products and the keywords or product targets that promote them. Inside an ad group you see each keyword or target with its own bid and its own performance.
Two things worth doing immediately. First, customize the columns. The defaults are fine for a glance but miss click-through rate, conversion rate, and impressions, which are the numbers you need to diagnose anything. Second, set the date range to something meaningful. The console often opens on a short window, and a three-day view of a campaign tells you almost nothing.
The filters at the top of the list are more useful than they look. You can filter by ad type, by status, by a text match on the campaign name, and by metric thresholds. A filter for campaigns with ACoS above your target is a faster weekly review than scrolling.
Creating a campaign
The campaign creation flow asks for a name, a start and optional end date, a daily budget, and a targeting type, then takes you into ad group setup where you choose products and targets. Most of the decisions here are covered in the Sponsored Products guide, but two console-specific details are easy to miss.
Campaign names are the only way you will find things later. Put the product, the targeting type, and the match type in the name. A campaign called "Campaign 14" is a problem you will regret in six months.
Portfolios sit above campaigns and let you group them, usually by product line or by client. Portfolios can also carry their own budget cap, which is useful when several campaigns share a monthly limit. Set them up before you have fifty campaigns, not after.
Reports
The reports section is where the console earns its keep and where most sellers never go. Reports are generated on request, take a few minutes to build, and download as spreadsheets. The ones that matter:
The search term report shows the actual queries shoppers typed before clicking your ad, with spend and sales for each. It is the raw material for keyword harvesting and negative keyword work, and the single most valuable report in the console.
The placement report breaks performance down by top of search, rest of search, and product pages. It tells you whether your placement modifiers are set sensibly.
The targeting report shows every keyword and product target with its own metrics, across campaigns. It is the fastest way to find a keyword that is spending heavily with no sales across your whole account rather than one campaign at a time.
Hourly data is available for some report types and is the basis for building an hourly heatmap of when your ads actually convert. This guide to Amazon Ads reports covers the full list and how to read each one.
Bulk operations
Bulk operations let you download your entire account structure as a spreadsheet, edit it, and upload the changes. It is how you change two hundred bids in one pass, add negatives across every campaign at once, or restructure ad groups without clicking through each one.
The workflow is: request a bulk file for a date range, download it, make changes in the sheet without altering the columns, and upload. The console validates the file and reports errors by row. Keep the original download. If an upload goes wrong, the original is your undo.
Bulk operations are also how most agencies and consultants work on accounts, which is why a well-structured account with consistent naming is so much easier for anyone else to help with.
Budgets and billing
Daily budgets are set per campaign and are an average, not a hard cap: Amazon may spend more than the daily figure on a strong day and less on a weak one, within a monthly limit. A campaign that shows "out of budget" has hit its daily figure and will stop serving until the next day. This post covers what to do when campaigns run out of budget early.
Billing is separate from Seller Central payouts. Ad spend is either invoiced or charged to a card on file, depending on your account setup, and the billing section shows invoices, payment methods, and the current balance. Check it monthly; a declined payment pauses every campaign at once.
Settings worth changing on day one
Set up user access before you need it. Add a second owner-level user so a lost login does not lock you out, and add any agency or software with an advertising-only role.
Turn on budget notifications. The console can email you when a campaign runs out of budget or when spend crosses a threshold. It will not catch everything, but it catches the obvious failures.
Choose a default attribution window and leave it. Changing it changes every historical number you compare against.
Save a custom column set in Campaign Manager so you are not rebuilding the same view every time you log in.
What the console will not do for you
The console is a control panel, not a manager. It will run whatever you set and report on it, but it will not pause campaigns at 2 a.m. when your category stops converting, restore a budget the morning after a sales event, or lower a bid because yesterday's ACoS was out of range. Those decisions have to be made by a person or by rules running outside the console.
Amazon does offer some campaign-level budget rules of its own, and they are worth knowing about. They are limited to raising budgets on a schedule or on performance and do not cover dayparting, bid adjustments, or restoring settings after a change. For the full picture of what rule-based tools add, see this overview of rule-based automation.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Amazon Advertising Console the same as Seller Central?
No. Seller Central manages your listings, inventory, orders, and account. The Advertising Console manages ads. You reach the console from the Advertising menu in Seller Central, and it opens in its own interface with its own navigation, reporting, and permissions.
Why does the console show different numbers than my business reports?
The console attributes sales to ads using a lookback window, typically 7 days for Sponsored Products, and counts only orders that followed an ad click. Business reports count all orders. Ad-attributed sales will always be a subset of total sales, and the console numbers also update for a day or two after the fact as late conversions are counted.
Can I give someone else access to the console without giving them Seller Central access?
Yes. The console has its own user management under access and settings. You can invite a user with an advertising-only role, which lets an agency, a contractor, or software see and manage campaigns without reaching your orders, inventory, or payments.
Off Hours connects to the console with advertising-only access and runs the scheduling and bid decisions the console leaves to you, every 15 minutes. Start a free 14-day trial.