Amazon Ads
Connect your Amazon Ads account to turn royalties into profit — what is imported, how spend is attributed to books, and what the first backfill looks like.
Why connect it
Without Amazon Ads, TrueRoyalties shows what you earn. With it, it shows what you keep. Ad spend is the other half of the subtraction.
Connecting
Go to Platforms → Amazon Ads and authorize access. You are sent to Amazon, you approve, and you come back to the page you left. Access is read-only — campaigns, bids and budgets are never touched.
Your ad accounts are detected automatically, across every marketplace you advertise in.
Reconnecting
If TrueRoyalties says Amazon wants you to reconnect, your authorization expired or was revoked on Amazon's side. Connect again from the same place.
Connecting is not a sync — it restores the permission to read your spend. A sync starts straight after, on its own, and the card tells you it is running. Your spend is up to date when that finishes, not when the connection succeeds.
The first import
The first sync backfills your ad history. On long histories it runs in segments and can take a while — sometimes hours.
While it runs, ad spend on the dashboard may look low or missing for older periods. That is the backfill still walking backwards, not lost data. It settles by itself.
How spend is attributed
Ad spend is grouped into three buckets, which the dashboard shows separately:
| Bucket | What it is |
|---|---|
| Your ASINs | Sponsored Products on books in your KDP catalog — matched to the book |
| ASINs outside your KDP catalog | Sponsored Products on ASINs we cannot match to your catalog |
| Sponsored Brands | Brand campaigns, which Amazon does not report per ASIN |
Only the first bucket can be attributed to a specific book. The other two still count against your total net profit — they are real money — but cannot appear in a per-book line.
What is imported
- Ad spend, per day, per marketplace
- Ad-attributed units and sales
- Kindle Unlimited pages read and KU royalties generated by ads
- Impressions and clicks — how many times Amazon showed your ads, and how many times readers clicked. Together they give your average cost per click. See Comparison.
VAT on ad spend
Amazon invoices ads with VAT or GST in many countries, and its reports show amounts before tax. Set your rate per marketplace in Settings → Taxes so spend is counted at what it really costs you. See Taxes and currencies.
Disconnecting
Platforms lets you disconnect Amazon Ads, and delete the imported ad data if you want. Your KDP royalties are unaffected.