Does your Amazon brand have a strategy to attract new customers and increase sales on the platform profitably? Amazon advertising can be complex, yet it plays a significant role in your brand’s growth. In fact, Amazon Advertising is projected to be 13% of digital advertising spend in 2022, and brands will spend $25B on Amazon advertising (per eMarketer). We continue to see more and more of page one of search results pages being taken up by paid advertising, and we expect that trend will continue.  

Here is a breakdown of the three ways to target ads on Amazon:

1)Keyword Targeting: 

Keyword Targeting is similar to Google search targeting. This targeting includes broad phrase, exact match, and negative match, keyword-level bids. How you structure the campaign and ad group architecture matters, and the ads are sold via a second-price auction. Brands (or their partners like Amify) need to do extensive keyword research to determine which terms they have a right to win on and which terms they can win on profitably based on average cost-per-click pricing. 

2)Product and Category Targeting: 

Product and Category Targeting allows your brand’s products to appear on specific product pages (your pages or your competition’s pages). You can also reach shoppers browsing similar products to yours or products that could serve as a substitute. The ads for this targeting will show up in the “Sponsored products related to this item” or “4 stars and above” sections of the product detail page. 

3)Automatic Targeting: 

Automatic Targeting puts Amazon in control and decides when and where your ad appears based on keywords in your listing and shopper behavior. This targeting setup takes minutes and is an excellent way to harvest keywords for manual campaigns. You must also monitor it closely and add negative match keywords on terms where you don’t want to bid. Amazon’s algorithm has trillions of data points and can help you uncover pockets of performance you otherwise would not have been able to identify through traditional research.  

To learn more about Amazon advertising methods, check out our webinar “How to Create an Effective Amazon Advertising Strategy.”