Overview
Amazon PPC has a variety of different ad types, each with its own campaigns. There are Sponsored Brands (SB), Sponsored Products (SP), and Sponsored Display (SD) campaigns. Out of these, one incredibly useful type of campaign is unique to the Sponsored Products ad type. This is the Amazon PPC SP Product Targeting campaign, which allows sellers to target ASINs instead of keywords. ASIN targeting comes in handy in a number of ways, and we highly recommend all Amazon FBA sellers to run a few SP Product Targeting campaigns.
We will provide an overview of product targeting campaigns and how they can be useful to help sellers get started with product targeting on Amazon.
What is a Sponsored Product Ad?
Sponsored Product ads, or SP ads are the most common type of ad you will see on Amazon search results pages. These are the products that show up at the top of your page with the “Sponsored” symbol (circled).
Sponsored Product ads also appear in the middle of the page at times, but the top of the page is the most desired ad placement. Sponsored Product ads also have one more placement on the product detail page of a product. Specifically the product carousel at the bottom of the page labelled “Sponsored products related to this item.”
Why run Sponsored Product campaigns?
Sponsored Products are the type of ad that drive the most revenue for products, especially newly launched ones.
Sellers without an established brand should run SP campaigns, because these ads provide high visibility for your products. The key advantage of SP is the top of search page ad placement, this placement generates the most sales. Rarely do shoppers go to the 2nd page, and most will trust products “sponsored” by Amazon.
In contrast, Sponsored Brands ads are useful for established brands or those with enough products in their catalog to advertise their entire store. This is why we believe Sponsored Products ads are more useful to a new seller. Getting your products to top of search using SP campaigns makes a sale more likely, and once you get sales, you receive reviews & ratings. These then contribute to your products organic ranking.
After you’ve established your footprint, you can start running SB campaigns promoting your entire brand. But note, one thing SB campaigns do NOT provide is product targeting!
What is Product Targeting?
Product targeting is an option available in Sponsored Product campaigns at the ad group level. All Amazon Sellers run SP keyword targeting campaigns, but not all run SP product targeting campaigns. So what exactly is product targeting?
Product targeting lets you target specific products, categories or brands instead of keywords. One example of this is ASIN targeting – you can target any ASIN in your SP ad campaign instead of a keyword. In this case, you will be targeting specific products.
You can also target categories, for example – if you sell sleeping bags you can target the “Sports & Outdoors” category. This means your product will show up on search results and/or product detail pages in that category. For brand targeting, you can target another brand that sells similar products to show up on search results for that brand and even their product detail page to sway consumers and “steal” sales from competitors.
You can also target product ‘features.’ For example, you can target a certain price range, or variation of a similar product.
Important note- “Product targeting” does not have it’s own ad placement! Your ad can show up on a competitor’s detail page, but that doesn’t mean it’s another type of ad. It’s still a sponsored product ad placement, but you are just targeting a product instead of a keyword at the ad group level.
Why use Product Targeting?
So why use product targeting? Why should you put your daily budget dollars into anything other than the traditional keyword targeting?
Take sales from your competitors! This is the premier advantage of ASIN targeting, specifically. You can use a web scraping tool to get a list of competitor ASINs for your most high-performing keywords. After that, you can refine them by relevancy and add all those competitor ASINs into an ad group in an SP campaign that is using product targeting.
This campaign will place YOUR product on the detail pages of your competitors ASINs. If your product is cheaper, has more reviews, and is generally more attractive, it will catch the eye of a consumer who was about to buy that competitor product. You can essentially steal that sale from your competitor!
Of course, it’s not guaranteed to work, but if you optimize your listing and make it attractive enough, it will yield results during ASIN targeting. According to Amazon, you cannot depend on brand loyalty. There’s a 30% probability an Amazon customer will switch to another brand if the product is more attractive. This is good news for those who use ASIN targeting campaigns, because this means customers are likely to swap to YOUR product, if they see it on your competitor’s detail page and find it more attractive.
How to Set Up ASIN Targeting Campaigns
Setting up an ASIN targeting campaign is quite easy. You just do the regular steps of setting up a campaign, but when it comes to adding ad groups, you select product targeting instead of keyword targeting.
Carefully research your competitors, you can use reverse ASIN lookup tools or you can use a web scraper tool to compile a list of ASINs that show up for a particular search term. We recommend doing this for your top 5 keywords, and compiling the list of competitors together. There will of course be duplicates, so put that list into an excel file, remove duplicates and then filter out your own ASINs because you don’t want to be targeting those.
You can further go through the list manually to remove any irrelevant competitor products. After you have this list, simply input it into the product targeting field in your ad campaign.
As there is no historical CPC data for ASINs like there is for keywords, you can start off running an automatic SP product targeting campaign. Or you can set a default bid that you check frequently and update. Once you start getting some conversions, you can optimize these bids further, but this is of course time intensive.
Campaign Optimization for Product Targeting
When it comes to targeting products and ASINs in ad campaigns, it is harder to decide how much to bid, when to update your bids, and how frequently. Not only that, unlike keyword targeting where most relevant keywords will remain the same over time… Competitors come and go, so every so often you need to find new ASINs to target, and remove old ones. Like we mentioned in the previous section this is a time-consuming process… which is why Amazon Sellers use Amazon PPC Management Software like ours.
Amazon PPC tools and Amazon PPC Software can cut your work in half. You can automate bids, set rules and research your competitors deeply to refine your ASIN targets. We recommend using PPC tools like our own if you are new to product targeting campaigns.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, we highly recommend Amazon Sellers to use SP product targeting campaigns! These serve as a very good “backup” to your keyword targeting campaigns, and can get you very good conversions if properly optimized. We hope our guide helped you understand how product and ASIN targeting work, and how you can implement it for your own Amazon stores!
We are SellerMetrics, our Amazon PPC Software helps Amazon sellers, brands, KDP Authors and agencies navigate Amazon Advertising PPC via bid automation, bulk manual bid changes, and analytics.
