Being a successful Amazon seller means staying on tops of all the latest rollouts offered by Amazon, the likes of which are designed to help you reach more audiences and higher sales. One of the latest features — in their Campaign Manager — is Product Targeting Ads. RepricerExpress always has your best interests at heart, so let’s get started on how you can make this work for you.
What Product Targeting Ads Are and How They Work
You’re no doubt familiar with Sponsored Product Ads, and Product Targeting Ads are essentially a specialisation of that. They allow you to reach potential buyers in a more precise way by getting your ads to exactly the audience you want, using category, ASIN, reviews, price and brand to achieve your goals.
If you run auto Sponsored Products (SP) campaigns, then you’ll be able to make use of Enhanced Auto Targeting. Within that are four targeting options: loose match or close match, and substitutes or complements. The former means your ads will be shown in search results if they’re a close or loose match for what shoppers are looking for, while the latter means your ads will be shown on product detail pages that either substitute or complement your own ad products.
For those who run manual SP campaigns, Product Attribute Targeting will be your route. This method allows you to use category, ASIN, reviews, price and brand to narrow your scope. For example, if you decide to focus on category Product Attribute Targeting, you can select relevant categories that relate to what you’re selling, then further choose other attributes to get you even closer to your target audience. A neat feature is you can choose to exclude specific brands, too.
How to Best Use Product Targeting Ads
Category Selection
- Don’t stop at selecting entire categories. This is too broad and defeats the purpose of Product Targeting Ads. Instead, refine each category as you select. This serves two purposes: one, it helps you select only the brands, prices, reviews and more that will your ads reach their audiences, and two, it forces you to think about whether or not that category will actually help you.
- Play around with different combinations when refining category selections. For example, shoppers will generally pay more for better quality products, so try filtering selections with higher star ratings and prices to get better-quality buyers.
- Try to avoid products with generic keywords, as that usually means stiffer competition. Think of the difference between ‘t-shirt’ and ‘merino wool women’s long-sleeved shirt’. Plus, generic words are generally more expensive.
Campaigns and Ad Groups
- With other campaigns, you might toss a few products in together for the benefit of less differentiation, but you should avoid that with Product Targeting Ads. Make it so that one product equals one campaign.
- Organising your campaigns this way makes it easier to monitor metrics for the exact combination of filters you select, helping you target audiences in the specific way that these ads were designed.
- Top-performing ASINs should be targeted manually, i.e. those with the highest conversion rates and lowest Advertising Cost of Sale, so they bring you even more money.
- Low- or non-performing ASINs can go in an automatic campaign marked as Negative so you can help streamline ad costs and increase margins.
ASINs
- Negative targeting, where you block your ad from being shown for low-performing competitors, can help you avoid being lumped in with that group.
- You can add negative keywords to your ASIN targeting campaigns.
- Conversely, you can target your ads to show with comparable or superior products in the aim of appealing to those buyers, especially if you have an advantage like better or more reviews or more competitive pricing.
- To combine both, search for superior ASINs and use negative keywords to prevent your ads from being shown there. This can help cut down on unnecessary spending when you know you have little to no chance of nabbing those buyers.
- An interesting way of crowding out competitors from your product pages is to target your own ASINs. Analyse your sales to see which items have frequently been purchased together, then target those ASINs so ads appear on respective pages as a way of upselling or cross-selling.
- If you truly can’t upsell or cross-sell your own items, imagine which of your products could be upsold or cross-sold with other products and then target those ASINs so your items appear there.
Final Thoughts
We here at RepricerExpress are really excited with Amazon Product Targeting Ads because it puts even more choice and control in your hands as the seller. Allowing more flexibility naturally means a higher learning curve, but for those willing to take on the work, it can lead to greater profits by uncovering sales from previously unknown areas.
One of the neatest ways of making Product Targeting Ads work as efficiently as possible for you is to use them in conjunction with competitive pricing so your ads have the best of all worlds: specific reach and attractive pricing. We can help a lot with the competitive pricing, so sign up today and get started with a 15-day free trial.
