Amazon Ads Console: A Full Walkthrough (2026)

A plain-English tour of the place you’ll actually do the work — how to get in, where everything lives, and what the rebuilt unified console changes.

01How to get into the console

There are two front doors. If you’re a seller, open Seller Central and choose Advertising → Campaign Manager. If you’re a vendor, it’s the same path inside Vendor Central. Either way you land in the same advertising workspace, and you can also sign in directly at advertising.amazon.com with the same credentials. The console itself is free — there’s no subscription and no fee to open it. You only ever pay for clicks and impressions once campaigns run. Before any of this unlocks fully, though, your account type matters, which is the subject of the next lesson on Seller vs Vendor vs Brand Registry.

02The big shift: the unified Campaign Manager

For years, search ads and programmatic lived in two separate tools — the Ads Console for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, and a completely separate interface for Amazon DSP. At its 2025 unBoxed conference Amazon announced a rebuilt Campaign Manager that collapses both into one command center, and it’s been rolling out to more advertisers through 2026.

What’s new inside it: an All View that shows every ad type together, a consolidated KPI bar, “smart search” for filtering campaigns in plain language, guidance cards that surface fixes, multi-account switching, and a universal “+” button to launch any campaign type. The commercial rules didn’t change — Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands still carry no extra platform fee, and DSP still has its own minimum spend. Don’t panic if your screen doesn’t match a tutorial you saw last year: the rollout is gradual, so you may still see the classic layout. The concepts below are the same in both.

03The dashboard and KPI bar

Your landing screen is a scoreboard. Across the top sits a KPI bar — impressions, clicks, spend, sales, and (once you have brand campaigns) brand searches and detail-page views. Below it is your list of campaigns, each with its own spend and performance. The single most useful habit here is setting the date range deliberately: a 7-day view is for spotting problems, a 30–90 day view is for judging real trends. Snap decisions off yesterday’s data are how beginners overreact to noise. The metrics guide covers what each number actually means.

04Creating a campaign

Campaign creation starts from the “Create campaign” (or universal “+”) button. You’ll pick an ad type — Sponsored Products is where beginners should start — then choose targeting, set a daily budget and bids, and launch. Amazon increasingly offers an AI-assisted “smart” mode that builds and optimizes for you, alongside a manual mode that gives you full control. Use manual while you’re learning; you can’t understand what to fix if the machine makes every choice. How you organize those campaigns — portfolios, ad groups, naming — is important enough to have its own lesson on campaign structure.

05Reporting

Reporting moved. In June 2026 Amazon made unified reporting generally available under Measurement & Reporting → Reporting in the left navigation, letting you build a single report across Sponsored Ads and DSP, multiple accounts, and countries. The older standalone Sponsored Ads and DSP reports are being retired by the end of 2026, so build new reports in the unified tool rather than the legacy ones. The report you’ll open most as a beginner is the search term report — it shows the exact phrases shoppers typed to trigger your ads, and it’s the engine of ongoing optimization.

06Budgets and recommendations

Budgets are set per campaign as a daily amount, with optional budget rules that raise spend during events like Prime Day. The console also pushes recommendations — suggested bids, keywords, and “guidance cards” flagging campaigns that are out of budget or underdelivering. Treat these as prompts, not orders. Amazon’s suggestions optimize for spend and sales volume; they don’t know your margins or cash flow. A recommendation to raise a bid is only good advice if the math works for your product.

07Billing, access and agencies

Payment and invoices live under Administration → Billing, where you set your card or invoicing details. User access — inviting a teammate or a VA — is handled in Access and Settings with standard or custom permissions. If you manage several brands or clients, a manager account lets you switch between them from one login with consolidated billing and reporting, which is exactly what agencies need. This is also where you’d import business details from an existing selling account when setting up a new advertiser.

08Where everything lives

A quick reference for the tasks you’ll hunt for most often. Labels shift slightly between the classic and unified layouts, but the homes are consistent:

Frequently asked questions

Or head back to the full Amazon Advertising course hub.