Earlier this year, Amazon quietly unveiled some new bidding and targeting options for sponsored products, including one exciting but seemingly little-known feature that we believe many advertisers may want to take advantage of today: product targeting.
Product targeting allows advertisers to target campaigns based on specific attributes, as broad as an entire category but with a high level of granularity and numerous parameters for refining the targeting. This function unlocks new strategic possibilities for ad campaigns and provides the potential to reach a larger and/or more strategically segmented audience — but from what we’ve seen, few advertisers are taking advantage of it yet.
Full disclosure: My company is an integrator of Amazon’s application programming interface and builds marketing automation software to help agencies and brands optimize their advertising budget and strategy on Amazon. As a former 10-year Amazonian, I was an early team member on the Amazon Advertising team and built a number of early ad products. Many of my current colleagues also came from both the retail and advertising side of Amazon.
Understanding Targeting Options For Sponsored Products
In our experience, Amazon’s sponsored products are arguably the most important placements for advertisers looking to increase search performance. Sponsored products ads appear as the first results in a shopper’s search (with additional placements further down the search results landing page and on product detail pages), and we’ve found that they can have an immediate impact on product discoverability and on-page traffic.
With sponsored products, you can use either keywords or the new product targeting to determine when your ad may be shown to shoppers. Keyword targeting allows you to bid on your chosen keywords, and the winner is determined by a real-time auction. To qualify for the auction, ads must meet Amazon’s minimum relevance criteria, and the winners are ranked and displayed based on a combination of the bid value and the relevance score.
At its broadest, product targeting allows you to target entire product categories or Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASINs) at once, as opposed to targeting with keywords. By targeting by category, you can gain visibility across an entire consumer segment with much more breadth than keyword targeting and can narrow your campaign to the most detailed subcategories.
The additional parameters (or refinements) available for product targeting campaigns are perhaps the most useful feature. Once you’ve specified your target category, you can introduce refinements such as price, star rating and brand. For example, you could target items that have both a sales price above $40 and an average star rating below 3.0. This allows you to target an entire category at scale while narrowing the audience to a more relevant subset of shoppers.
Additionally, product targeting allows negative targeting at both the brand and ASIN level. This means that you can specify brands and ASINs that your ad won’t be matched to.
The versatile parameters of product targeting — breadth of taxonomy, price, star rating and negative matches — allow you to be very strategic and granular about how and where your products appear in sponsored placements.
Getting Started
When launching your first product targeting campaign, Amazon will provide a number of suggested categories based on product data from the items for which you are creating a campaign. Consider choosing a category (multiple categories can be targeted within one campaign) in which your presence is limited to help increase your visibility there.
Once launched, you’ll need to wait a few weeks to get an accurate reading on campaign performance due to Amazon’s 14-day sales attribution window for sponsored products and brands. After measuring initial results, test out a variety of different product targeting refinements in order to identify strategies that improve engagement and eliminate strategies that have proven ineffective. Over time, you can develop highly detailed targeting parameters with strong returns.
Once you’ve collected data from multiple campaigns, assess product targeting’s contribution to your total advertising results and compare the performance to your keyword targeting campaigns. This will allow you to identify how and where product targeting can be most effectively deployed and for which brands/products it is most valuable. By regularly monitoring and quantifying results, you can adjust your Amazon Advertising strategy incrementally and optimize performance over time.
