How to Launch a Product on Amazon in 2025 With Advertising (Part 1)

Launching a product on Amazon today looks very different than it did even just a few years ago.

Amazon has continued to push for compliance and clean data that has made some of the older and black hat strategies either ineffective or way too risky. At the same time, Amazon Ads has quietly become one of the most powerful retail media platforms out there.

Since launching its ad platform in 2012, Amazon has evolved from offering limited placements for vendors only to now giving sellers and brands full-funnel access through the Amazon Ads Console. By 2020, everything from Sponsored Products to DSP became accessible under one roof.

Today, if you’re looking to launch with real momentum and stay within Amazon’s terms, paid ads (especially PPC), are your most strategic and scalable option.

Unlike older tactics, PPC gives you:

• Control over your data and visibility
  
• Speed to rank for your highest-value keywords
  
• Scalability to grow based on actual performance
  

In this two-part series, I’m breaking down how to build and launch a product using Amazon Ads in 2025.

Part 1 covers:
A. Why advertising is the launch standard
B. What to have ready before your first campaign
C. How to structure a funnel that mirrors shopper behavior
D. Budgeting, bidding, and placements that make every dollar count

Retail-Ready: Pre-Launch Checklist Before Spending a Dime (Brief Overview)

Before you spend a single dollar on ads, your listing has to be ready to convert. Advertising will get shoppers to your page, but if the page doesn’t do its job, you’re just paying for traffic that won’t stick. Here’s what every product needs in place before launching.

1. Nail Your Listing Optimization

Your product listing is your storefront. And just like a real store, if it’s messy, confusing, or lacking key info, people will walk right out.

A fully optimized listing should:

• Use high-quality images that clearly show the product, packaging, use cases, and scale
  
• Highlight clear value props in your bullet points (focus on the benefits and not just features)
  
• Leverage strong keywords throughout the title, bullet points, and description
  
• Read like a real human wrote it (spammy, keyword-stuffed listings kill conversion)
  

Helium 10 can make this process easier by helping you balance keyword placement with character limits and conversion best practices.

2. Run Smart Keyword Research

The success of your listing and ads starts with knowing how people search. Most products don’t need hundreds of keywords, they need the RIGHT 10 to 20.

Here’s a proven process:

• Start with a seed keyword (what you think people call your product)
  
• Use tools like Cerebro to reverse-ASIN your top competitors and see what they actually rank for
  
• Use Magnet to expand your keyword list and find variations you might’ve missed
  
• Don’t overlook low-competition, long-tail keywords. They often convert better and cost less
  

Not every high-volume keyword is worth chasing. If the search results don’t reflect products like yours, it might hurt more than help, especially when optimizing your listing. Save those broader terms for ad campaigns with a clear goal behind them.

3. Align Your Creative to Your Customer Persona

Remember, you’re not selling to a demographic, you’re selling to a specific mindset. Your images, copy, and overall presentation should speak to why someone is buying, not just what the product is.

Ask yourself:

• Who is this product actually for?
  
• What are they hoping it solves?
  
• What kind of lifestyle or outcome are they picturing when they buy?
  

For example: If you’re launching a kitchen gadget, the creative might need to look very different depending on whether you’re targeting busy parents, health-focused meal preppers, or young adults furnishing their first apartment.

Before you launch, align your listing with the intent of your audience and not just their age group or income bracket.

4. Double-Check Indexing and Relevancy

Even if your listing looks good on the surface, Amazon’s algorithm needs to understand what your product is about in order to rank it properly. That’s where indexing and relevancy come in.

Here’s what that means:

• Indexing is whether Amazon recognizes your product as relevant for a specific keyword (you can check this with a “search + ASIN” test)
  
• Relevancy is how closely your listing matches the shopper’s query, based on keyword usage, click-throughs, and conversions over time
  

Some key tips here:

• Use your most important keywords in the title and bullet points
  
• Make sure your backend search terms are filled out (no repeats, no commas)
  
• Be realistic: You won’t rank for “standing desk” if you’re selling a side table
  

You can use tools like Listing Analyzer or even manual ASIN checks to see if your listing is actually indexed for the terms that matter.

Building Your Amazon PPC Funnel for Launch

Now, when prepping for launch, don’t go into it just targeting keywords and hoping for conversions. Your main focus should be building a funnel that mirrors how real shoppers discover, evaluate, and purchase products. Especially when launching, your goal should be to support each stage of that buyer journey through intentional campaign structure, not just chase bottom-of-the-funnel clicks.

Most brands start by targeting shoppers who are already searching for their product, and that’s a smart place to begin. But stopping there means you’re only capturing demand, not creating it. And when every other brand is showing up at that same moment, you’re being compared directly on price, reviews, and delivery time, all things that are tough to control in a competitive category.

That’s why your launch strategy should include campaigns that reach customers before they start their search, guide them through the research phase, and give them a clear path to purchase.

Awareness: Introducing Your Product to New Shoppers

At the top of the funnel, the goal isn’t immediate conversion. It’s exposure. You want to put your product in front of people who may not know it exists yet, but who are likely to be a good fit. Think of this as priming the market.

Sponsored Brands video ads and Sponsored Display campaigns are great entry points here. Video ads are especially valuable at launch because they stand out on the search results page, tell a story in a few seconds, and leave a stronger impression than a static image. Sponsored Display, on the other hand, gives you placement across product detail pages and category-based targeting, making it easier to reach shoppers browsing related or complementary products.

Even if your brand is just launching, starting with light awareness campaigns can increase brand recall, improve CTRs on your future ads, and warm up the audience before they ever search for your product.

More advanced tools like Amazon DSP or Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) take this to another level by allowing you to build hyper-targeted audiences and generate awareness at scale. But for now, just know these options exist and can become powerful additions later on.

Consideration: Showing Up With Substance

Once a shopper becomes aware of your product, they’ll start to compare. This is the middle of the funnel, where your job is to stay visible and credible.

This is where Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands (with headline search placements) start to play a larger role. Your keywords should shift from broader category terms to more specific, high-intent phrases that indicate active research. If you’re launching a whey protein, for example, terms like “best whey protein for women” or “whey protein isolate” are more valuable at this stage than just “protein powder.”

You should also be targeting competitor ASINs to show up on relevant product detail pages. If shoppers are browsing your competitors, this is your moment to insert your offer into the conversation. But visibility only works if it’s paired with strong creative. This is where video, brand story, and a well-optimized listing start to really make a difference.

Purchase Intent: Capturing the Conversion

At the bottom of the funnel, you’re no longer introducing or persuading. You’re closing. The shopper has searched for a specific phrase or visited a product page because they’re ready to buy.

Your Sponsored Product ads here should be tightly focused on your highest-converting search terms, which are usually the top 10 to 15 keywords uncovered during your keyword research process. Bid more aggressively on these terms, especially for top-of-search placements, where visibility is highest and conversion rates tend to peak.

At this point, the performance of your listing becomes just as important as your ads. If your main image is weak, your price isn’t competitive, or your reviews are lacking, your CPC spend won’t go far. A strong listing doesn’t just convert better but also helps you afford more aggressive bids, because your CVR is strong enough to justify the cost.

Budget, Bids, and Placement

When launching a new product on Amazon, one of the most common questions is: How much should I spend on ads?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Your product, goals, and category will all shape the right number. But what matters more than the budget itself is how you use it. A successful launch does not look like dumping dollars into one campaign. You need to focus on intentionally distributing spend across a strategy that supports every stage of the funnel.

Launch With Structure, Not Just Spend

We use a launch framework built around some core campaign types: Awareness, Rank, Efficiency, Branded, and Auto. Each campaign serves a different purpose and plays a specific role in your funnel.

We don’t share this to say it’s the only way to launch, but we’ve found that when you diversify your strategy like this, you get stronger data, faster learning, and a better shot at long-term growth.

Here’s a high-level look at how each one works:

• Awareness campaigns introduce your product to shoppers who aren’t searching for it yet. These aren’t built for ROAS. They’re built to prime the market and build recognition before the shopper even types a keyword.
  
• Rank campaigns focus on visibility for your highest-priority keywords. This is where you might push spend more aggressively to secure top-of-search placements and improve organic rank.
  
• Efficiency campaigns are where the bulk of your early conversions happen. These are built for ROAS, and they target proven, high-converting terms.
  
• Branded campaigns defend your name. Whether people saw a video, visited your PDP, or typed your brand into search, these campaigns ensure you show up and convert the traffic you’ve already paid to attract.
  
• Auto campaigns do the discovery work. They help surface new keywords, ASINs, and search behaviors that you may not have caught during manual research.
  

We don’t use the same percentages across every account, but this framework keeps us grounded. Instead of reacting to daily performance or chasing whatever keyword looks good that week, it keeps the full funnel moving.

Let the Tools Do Some of the Heavy Lifting

If you’re not sure how to distribute your budget or where to start, that’s where a tool like Helium 10 Ads AI can step in.

It allows you to enter your daily budget and ACoS target, and then uses machine learning to allocate spend across campaign types like broad match, exact match, auto, and product targeting. It doesn’t just recommend bids but instead adjusts them based on what’s actually performing. And during a launch, that flexibility can be a huge advantage.

Whether you follow a structure like ours or not, Ads AI helps ensure your campaigns aren’t running blind. It connects your budget to your goals and gives you the insights to pivot when needed.

Don’t Panic When CVR Is Low

During the first few weeks of launch, your conversion rate may be lower than what you’re used to seeing. You may not have reviews. Your offer might not be fine-tuned yet. And shoppers are just now learning who you are.

That’s normal.

The goal early on is to build momentum, not to be profitable right out of the gate. Use the time to gather data, test keywords, and see what messaging sticks. Your cost per order might look high on the surface, but what you’re buying is learning. And that learning will pay off as you start scaling and optimizing.

Bidding: Where You Show Up Matters

Top-of-search placements are the most competitive, but also the most effective when launching. They drive higher click-through rates and stronger purchase intent. If your goal is to rank quickly on a term, this is where you lean in.

But that doesn’t mean you should ignore rest-of-search or product page placements. They tend to be less expensive and are often a great way to fill the middle of the funnel or test messaging without blowing through your budget.

This is where placement modifiers and bidding strategies come into play:

• Use fixed bids when testing or when you want full control.
  
• Use dynamic – down only if you want to protect your spend when CVR is low.
  
• Use dynamic – up and down when you have strong signals and want to scale faster.
  

Helium 10 Ads AI helps here too by optimizing these settings based on performance in real-time, so you’re not constantly logging in and adjusting bids manually.

Stay Flexible and Follow the Signals

The best launch strategies are laid out and structured. As you start getting results, shift spend toward what’s working. If a ranking campaign starts gaining traction, lean in. If branded terms are converting at a low cost, protect them.

And if something isn’t working, don’t force it. Launching a product on Amazon is a mix of art, science, and responsiveness. You don’t need a massive budget, you just need one that’s structured and intentional.

Wrapping Up Part 1

Launching a product on Amazon in 2025 takes structure, intentional planning, and a clear understanding of how shoppers move through the funnel.

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve got the foundational pieces:

• A fully optimized, retail-ready listing
  
• A clear PPC structure that mirrors the buyer journey
  
• A smart approach to budgeting, bidding, and placements
  
• The right tools to support your decisions from day one
  

But this is only the beginning. The real work starts after your product is live. That’s when the data comes in, the testing starts, and optimization begins. In Part 2, we’ll break down how to use that data to refine your strategy, improve efficiency, and scale what’s working.

We’ll cover things like:

• How to use search term data to improve performance
  
• What to do with campaigns that aren’t converting
  
• How to shift spend toward winning keywords
  
• And how to balance ACoS and TACoS for long-term growth

Ready to improve and automate your Amazon Ads strategy? Helium 10 Ads has advanced automation tools to help you scale your profits efficiently.