Amazon Marketing from A to Z — the course intro.

Welcome to the AMALYZE Amazon Marketing course. Over the next 60+ episodes we'll walk through everything a Seller or Vendor needs to actively market a product on Amazon — from the very first promotional coupon you ever create, through hourly PPC bid optimisation, through harvesting the long-tail keywords that turn a profitable account into a market-leading one.

The course is the English companion to our original German "Amazon Marketing Kurs von A bis Z" — three video playlists totalling more than ten hours of walkthroughs recorded inside Seller and Vendor Central. Each written article summarises the theory and the steps you need; the original German episode is embedded at the bottom whenever you want the full walkthrough.

Why marketing on Amazon is its own discipline

If you've come to Amazon from Google Ads or Meta, the first thing to internalise is that Amazon is not a traffic platform — it's a marketplace with a built-in search engine. That difference reshapes everything downstream.

On Google or Meta, the platform's job ends when a user clicks. On Amazon, the click is just the start of a chain Amazon controls end to end: the search algorithm decides whether your listing even shows up, the Buy Box decides whether you are the offer the click goes to, the listing decides whether the visit converts, Amazon handles fulfilment and returns, and the post-purchase rating then feeds back into the search algorithm for the next shopper. Every marketing action you take has to account for that closed loop.

The practical implication is that "marketing" on Amazon isn't a single discipline. It's the intersection of three things that, on other platforms, would sit in separate teams:

• Retail merchandising. Choosing what to discount, when, by how much, and which mechanic to use — the same decisions a category buyer at a brick-and-mortar retailer would make, only the shelf is infinite and the price tag can change every hour.
• Paid search. Bidding on keywords inside an auction that looks like Google but behaves differently, because the auction sits inside the conversion funnel rather than before it.
• SEO. Engineering the organic rank of your ASINs, because organic positions on Amazon convert at dramatically higher rates than the sponsored slots above them and you stop paying per click for them.

That's why this course is structured around two halves of the work, not around individual ad types or tactics. Once you see how the halves connect, the individual tactics become much easier to choose between.

The two halves of Amazon marketing

Promotions (Werbeaktionen)

Promotions are the price-driven mechanics Amazon built into Seller and Vendor Central. They include coupons, Lightning Deals, 7-Day Deals, Prime Exclusive Discounts, Subscribe & Save, sale prices, BOGO and the Outlet. Each one has its own placement, its own eligibility rules, its own discount mechanics, and its own shopper psychology.

What promotions have in common is that they win the click on a busy search results page. A 20% coupon badge under your listing is doing the same job as a strike-through price on a high street shelf — it interrupts a shopper who was scanning and gives them a reason to stop on your tile rather than the seven others on the same row. Promotions also move units fast, which is exactly the signal Amazon's ranking algorithm uses to decide which products deserve more visibility tomorrow.

The risk is that promotions are easy to run badly. Pick the wrong reference price and the discount won't show up. Stack the wrong two mechanics and you give away 40% to a customer who would have paid full price. Run a Lightning Deal with insufficient inventory and Amazon cancels it mid-stream, taking your search rank with it. Module 1 of this course is dedicated entirely to getting those decisions right.

Sponsored Ads / PPC (Werbekampagnen)

Sponsored Ads — what most operators still call PPC — are the paid placements that appear above, below and within Amazon search results, on product detail pages, and increasingly off Amazon entirely. There are three ad types you'll work with: Sponsored Products (the single-listing ads that look like organic results), Sponsored Brands (the headline banners that anchor a brand to the top of a search), and Sponsored Display (audience-based ads that follow shoppers around the wider Amazon ecosystem).

Sponsored Ads do two jobs at once. The obvious one is generating sales today: every click you pay for can convert into an order. The less obvious one — and the one that compounds — is feeding Amazon's ranking signals. Every impression, click and conversion on a paid placement teaches Amazon that your ASIN is relevant for that search term. After a few weeks of paid clicks at decent conversion rates, your listing starts moving up the organic results for the same keyword. The ads stop being a cost and start being an investment in tomorrow's free traffic.

Why the two halves need each other

Run promotions without ads and your discount only reaches the shoppers who were already going to find you organically. Run ads without promotions and your conversion rate stays mediocre, which makes your ACoS worse and forces you to bid lower, which means fewer clicks, which means slower organic ranking. The operators who win on Amazon use both:

• A coupon or Subscribe & Save offer lifts the conversion rate on the ASIN, which makes the same Sponsored Products campaign more profitable at the same bid.
• A Sponsored Brands placement pushes a Lightning Deal in front of shoppers searching the category, instead of leaving discovery to whoever happens to scroll through the Deals page.
• A Prime Exclusive Discount during Prime Day, supported by an aggressive PPC plan, can move enough units to shift an ASIN's organic rank for months afterwards.

Why we teach Promotions first

Most Amazon courses lead with PPC because it's flashier and the terminology sounds harder. We do the opposite for three reasons.

Promotions are simpler to set up. You configure a deal once, Amazon runs it on a schedule, and the result is visible in your sales chart the next day. PPC requires a functioning account structure, daily bid management, and weeks of data before the picture clears.

Promotions teach you the conversion side of the business. Every promotion forces you to think about price elasticity, contribution margin, and inventory cover. Those are exactly the constraints that determine whether a PPC campaign will ever be profitable. Operators who skip this step tend to build PPC campaigns that win the click and lose the quarter.

Promotions improve PPC ROI directly. A coupon running on an ASIN before you turn on a Sponsored Products campaign reliably lifts the campaign's conversion rate by 15–30%. That changes the bid you can afford to pay, which changes the keywords you can compete on. Module 1 isn't a warm-up — it's the foundation Modules 2 and 3 build on.

What the three modules cover

Module 1 — Promotions on Amazon (13 episodes)

Module 1 walks through every promotion type Amazon offers, episode by episode. We start with the ground rules that apply to all promos — eligibility, reference pricing, margin floors, inventory cover — and then take each mechanic in turn: Preisnachlass (price discount), BOGO, Prime Exclusive Discounts, Lightning Deals and 7-Day Deals, Coupons, Subscribe & Save, sale price, the Outlet. For each one you'll learn the placement, the eligibility, the maths, and the most common mistakes we see operators make.

Module 2 — Sponsored Ads: PPC Fundamentals (24 episodes)

Module 2 is the theory layer. Before you build a single campaign, you need a working mental model of how Amazon's auction actually works: how the cost-per-click is calculated, what each match type does to your reach, how Amazon's bidding strategies (dynamic up-and-down, dynamic down-only, fixed) interact with placement modifiers, how budgets are paced through the day, and which metrics (ACoS, TACoS, ROAS, CPO) actually tell you whether the account is healthy. By the end of Module 2 you can read any campaign report and explain what's happening, even if you didn't build the campaign yourself.

Module 3 — Sponsored Ads: Setup & Execution (24 episodes)

Module 3 is hands-on. We build an account from scratch in Seller Central — naming conventions, portfolio structure, launching auto campaigns to seed keyword research, promoting high-performing search terms into manual campaigns, layering broad / phrase / exact, adding negatives to stop budget leaks, setting up brand defence, applying dayparting to cut spend when nobody is buying, and finally scaling the campaigns that actually convert. By the end of Module 3 you have a complete workflow you can apply to any product in any category.

Who this course is for

This course assumes you have a live Seller or Vendor Central account and at least one product listed. It does not assume any previous Amazon advertising experience — Module 1 starts with zero prior knowledge, and Modules 2 and 3 each build from first principles inside their topic.

It's written for the operator who actually has to do the work: Amazon managers inside brand teams, in-house e-commerce leads, agency account managers, and founder-operators of growing private-label brands. If you're already running a profitable seven-figure PPC account, Module 1 will still be useful — most mature accounts under-use promotions and over-rely on bids — and you can skim Module 2 to fill any conceptual gaps before using Module 3 as a reference for specific tactics.

How to get the most out of this series

Each article is short enough to read on a coffee break and structured so you can apply it the same day. The pattern we recommend:

1. Read the article first to get the framework and the vocabulary.
2. Open Seller or Vendor Central in a second taband walk through the relevant screen as you read. Most episodes are short enough to do this in a single sitting.
3. Watch the embedded German video at the bottom of the article when you want a recorded walkthrough or when the written summary leaves a step unclear.
4. Use AMALYZE to do the parts that don't scale by hand — harvesting search terms across an entire account, auditing campaigns for the failure modes Module 2 teaches you to spot, monitoring promo eligibility, and tracking the metrics from Module 3 over time.

What's next

Module 1 starts with the ground rules every Amazon promotion should follow — the half-dozen settings and habits that decide whether a promo drives real incremental volume or quietly burns margin. From there we take each promotion type in turn until you can choose between coupons, Lightning Deals, Prime Exclusive Discounts and the rest as confidently as a buyer at a brick-and-mortar chain chooses between end-cap displays and shelf talkers.

Let's go.