Amazon advertising lets sellers promote products to shoppers on amazon.ie. The main self-serve options to look for in Seller Central Europe are Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display. Each serves a different purpose, and availability can depend on what your account and products support.
A useful starting point is to choose the product you want to promote, decide what a sale is worth to your business in euros, then set a campaign budget and bids you can afford to test. Judge the results against the profit left after your product costs and other selling costs, rather than against sales alone.
Which sponsored ad type should you use?
Sponsored Products promote individual product listings. They are a practical choice when you want shoppers searching for a relevant item, or viewing a related product, to encounter a specific listing. Depending on the targeting options available, you can select keywords or products to target, or let Amazon suggest targets automatically.
Sponsored Brands are designed to draw attention to a brand and its products. They can suit a seller who wants shoppers to explore a range rather than a single listing. Check the formats and destinations offered in your advertising console before planning a campaign around them.
Sponsored Display focuses on reaching shoppers through product or audience targeting where those options are available. It may be worth considering when you want to promote a listing beyond a straightforward keyword-search campaign. Its controls are not necessarily the same as those for Sponsored Products, so review the options shown in Seller Central Europe instead of assuming every ad type uses keywords.
You do not need to launch every type at once. Start with the product and customer intent you understand best, then compare what each campaign contributes.
How campaigns, keywords, bids and budgets fit together
A campaign groups the advertising activity you want to manage and measure together. Within it, targeting determines which shopping contexts may make an ad eligible to appear. For a keyword-targeted campaign, choose terms that describe the product and the reason someone would buy it. Review search-term reporting, where available, to see which shopper searches actually led to clicks or sales. Keywords and search terms are not always the same thing.
A bid tells Amazon how much you are prepared to offer for a click under the campaign's bidding settings; it does not promise a placement or a sale. A budget limits how much you plan to spend on the campaign over the period specified in its settings. Check those settings in the console, as bids, adjustments and budget behaviour can differ by campaign type.
Keep tightly related products and targets together so the results are easier to interpret. If a term brings clicks but no worthwhile sales, inspect the listing, price and relevance before deciding whether to lower its bid, stop targeting it or exclude it where the ad type allows. Give a campaign enough time and data for a useful review, but do not leave spending unattended.
What do ACoS and ROAS tell you?
ACoS, or advertising cost of sales, is ad spend divided by sales attributed to those ads, expressed as a percentage. A lower ACoS means less advertising spend per euro of attributed sales. ROAS, or return on ad spend, is attributed sales divided by ad spend, usually expressed as a ratio. A higher ROAS means more attributed sales per euro spent. They describe the same relationship from opposite directions: ROAS is the reciprocal of ACoS when ACoS is written as a decimal.
Neither metric is profit. Attributed sales are not the same as cash left after VAT treatment, product costs, Amazon charges, fulfilment, returns and other expenses. Attribution also describes sales credited to ads under the reporting rules shown in your console; it does not, on its own, prove that every credited sale would have been lost without advertising.
Use the ACoS calculator and ROAS calculator to express your own ad spend and attributed sales in both ways. Compare campaigns over a consistent reporting period and check how the figures change as more sales data appears.
Find your break-even point before setting a target
To judge whether ads can pay for themselves, work out the contribution left from a sale before advertising. Start with the relevant sales revenue in euros, then subtract the product's costs and other costs you expect that sale to incur. Treat VAT consistently: do not compare revenue that includes VAT with a margin calculated on a different revenue basis.
Divide that pre-ad contribution by sales revenue on the same basis. The resulting margin percentage is a starting point for your break-even ACoS: if advertising takes all the contribution, that sale has no contribution left afterwards. An ACoS below that point may leave room for profit; one above it suggests the attributed sales do not cover the costs included in your calculation. Costs you leave out, returns and differences between attributed and genuinely additional sales can change the conclusion.
The equivalent break-even ROAS is the reciprocal of break-even ACoS expressed as a decimal. Work out your product's contribution with the margin calculator, then test what ad spending it can bear with the break-even calculator. If you need a broader starting point for seller calculations, browse the tools hub.
Review ads as a business expense
Check spend, clicks, attributed sales and contribution together. A campaign can bring in orders yet still cost more than those orders contribute; a strong-looking ROAS can also hide a thin-margin product. Compare results by product and target, make measured changes to bids or budgets, and record what changed so you can assess the effect later. The aim is not a universal ACoS benchmark but an advertising limit that makes sense for your own prices, costs and goals on amazon.ie.