One of the most stressful activity that you will face with AMS, is getting Headline search and Product display ads approved. If Sponsored Products ads are approved automatically by the system as soon as you launch them, these other two go through a review process where an Amazon team manually approves/disapproves them.

Most of the times, HSA and PDA get disapproved because the team/the person that happens to review them at the time, decides that the headline title doesn’t follow the Amazon guidelines. Sometimes they are right, but sometimes, the person reviewing your campaign has their own guidelines regarding which titles to approve and which not to.
For example, you might have added your brand name in ALL CAPS in the ad copy, while all the other words are in small caps. This is an approved practice in Amazon’s guidelines, but sometimes your campaign still gets disapproved because the person reviewing the ad might not be as knowledgeable as you’d wish. If it already happened to you, then you know how frustrating this is. If it didn’t happen to you…well… you are quite lucky and you should consider playing the lottery.

Tip: If your campaign gets disapproved wrongfully, contact directly your Amazon Account Manager and ask him/her to investigate and to approve your campaign (some Account Managers have the tools to approve a campaign). You can also try contacting the Amazon team directly by replying to the automatic email that you’ve received (the email saying that your campaign was disapproved because…). Unfortunately, most of the times you won’t get an answer to your email. I recommend you still try it.

UPDATE September 2018 – Headline Search ads are now called Sponsored Brands