3 Steps to Beat Your Competitors with Amazon Product Targeting

Before you create a new campaign, you need to decide which ASINs you want to advertise on. You can choose to target your ads by specific products or categories. Detailed below are the 3 simple steps you need to follow to create a product targeting campaign for your competitor’s products:

Navigate to the Campaign Manager under “Advertising” and click the “Create campaign” button to start creating a new product targeting campaign.

When you create a new campaign, you have two options: sponsored products or sponsored brands. Select “Sponsored Products” to make your products visible to shoppers who search for related keywords or view similar products on Amazon.

As a final step, the buyer needs to include all relevant details of the campaign, including the following:

1. Campaign name : Be as specific as possible about your campaign name, for example, a probiotics for dogs campaign name could be: “Probiotics for dogs (product targeting)”. Keep in mind that you will be running multiple campaigns at the same time, so naming them correctly will help you easily find each campaign and optimize it.

2. Start and end date: Enter the date you want the campaign to start running and leave the end date blank. Sellers should allow the campaign to run continuously for Amazon's algorithm to better optimize. If the campaign does not perform as planned, you can end it at any time.

3. Daily budget : This is entirely up to you, but sellers should be aware that you need to have enough budget, otherwise the campaign will not run properly.

For example, if you have 10 ad groups targeting different products in your campaign, and each ad group bids $2 to show the product, then your advertising budget should be set to at least $20, otherwise your campaign will not be able to run effectively.

Also, note that only $20 will allow each ad group to show once or twice before the campaign runs out of budget. Therefore, it is recommended that sellers spend at least $10 per ad group so that it can show multiple times.

4. Targeting: Select “Manual targeting” to use product targeting options. Automatic targeting cannot target specific product ASINs or product categories.

5. Ad Group Name : Again, be specific. For example, if your goal is "Pet Ultimates' Probiotics for Dogs," your ad group name could include "Pet Ultimates."

6. Products : Search products by name, ASIN or SKU for advertising. Sellers should only include relevant products, otherwise the ads will be irrelevant and will only lead to wasted funds.

7. Positioning : You need to select the product positioning option to position your competitors. The main purpose of using this option is to help shoppers find your product when browsing detail pages and categories, or searching for products on Amazon.

8. Product Positioning : As mentioned above, there are two options when positioning a product. One is to position it in “Product Categories”, and the other is to position it in “Individual Products”, or the products of competitors.

To target a category, sellers need to determine the category their product belongs to. Amazon has pre-populated category options for you to choose from. Sellers can also try testing in other categories. For example, the dog probiotics product ad in the above example can target other categories including dog food, dog toys, and even creative gift categories.

*Tip : You can select the refine option. The refine option is a powerful tool that allows your products to appear in front of buyers who are searching for specific products that meet the following criteria:

• Brands in the category;

• Set the price range for your product;

• Set the star rating of the reviews you want to target.

To target a single product, you can select a product recommended by Amazon or enter the ASIN of the product you want to target.

*Tip: Choose products with high traffic to get more views and potential sales. Perform a search on Amazon using your primary keyword and select the first 10 products on page 1 to target. The reason these products are on the first page of the search results page is because they sell fast. In addition, sellers can even target their own products to cross-sell other products.

9. Target products : Once you’ve selected the products you want to target, you can set your bid amount as shown below. Similar to targeting keywords for Sponsored Products ads, you’ll want to start low and increase accordingly to avoid exhausting your budget too quickly before you have a chance to optimize your campaign.

10. Optional: Negative product targeting : You can choose to exclude brands or products in this section. For example, if you sell high-priced products, you can exclude low-priced products to avoid your product ads appearing near these products.

Product targeting is an exciting new feature for sellers using Amazon advertising. After multiple tests, I found that "product category" targeting usually costs more and has a lower conversion rate than "individual targeting", probably because specific product targeting is more targeted. Sellers can also test it themselves to see which positioning is suitable.

Text✎ Fang Xiaoling/