Amazon Advertising: how does Amazon charge you for your ad campaigns?

Last updated: September 2021

I grew a passion for Amazon ads. I originally released two parts of a three video series. One video covers the ad copy creation, and the other talks about how to set up your auto ads. I was supposed to post my results analysis but one of you asked an interesting question:

Does Amazon Advertising pull the payment from your royalties at the end of the month, or does a micro-payment go through at the end of the day? Do you get charged at the end of the campaign? How does paying for the ads work exactly?

Okay, that’s 3 questions.

Some basics of Amazon Ads

When you set up an ad on Amazon, you’ve got to choose a daily budget and a bid.

A daily budget is the amount of money that you choose not to exceed in a day. In my example, I chose $5. It means Amazon Advertising will stop showing my ad campaign if it reaches a $5 spend in the same day, and will start showing it again the next day.

Be careful that it works specifically for one ad. So if you’ve got multiple ad campaigns running at the same time, that daily budget may be exceeded. That issue can be solved by creating a portfolio and setting up a budget cap for the group of ad campaigns.

That can be done by clicking on the “Modify portfolio” text on the right hand side of your portfolio dashboard. You can then choose a specific date range or monthly.

So to avoid spending too much money because you’ve created too many ad campaigns, you can still add a budget cap so you don’t exceed the amount of money you’re ready to spend for your ads.

A bid is the amount of money that you’re ready to spend per click on your ad. In my example, I chose 0.30 cents, but also selected the dynamic bid - down only. It means Amazon Advertising will charge me 0.30 cents or below for each click on my ad.

How much did Amazon charge me?

Now that you know what a daily budget and a bid are, how does Amazon Advertising charge you?

No, Amazon doesn’t charge you via your royalties at the end of the month. Even though you are using the same credentials for your KDP and your advertising accounts, those accounts are separate.

Before setting up any ads, you’ve got to enter your credit card number. It can be added on “Billing and Payments”, then “Payments Settings”.

Once your ad is up and running, you’ll be able to see how much you spent each day by looking at your dashboard. That way, you can monitor how much you’ll be charged.

Amazon Advertising will charge you at the end of the month for the amount of money that you spent, through your credit card. In my experience, Amazon does so on the 2nd of every month (if you had ad campaigns activated of course). It also does it in the middle of the month, whether or not your ad campaign is over.