New Sponsored Display product targeting features for US and CA vendors

Updated July 30, 2020

By Rich McMahon
Sr Program Manager

We’ve released new Sponsored Display (beta) product targeting capabilities for US and CA vendors. These features, now available in the ad console and Amazon Ads API, give you new options for promoting product discovery, including additional campaign controls, targeting settings, and reporting metrics to help make your performance advertising strategies even more efficient.

For those new to Sponsored Display, product targeting can help you reach more customers and increase loyalty among shoppers considering similar or complementary products and categories with ad placements that appear on product pages, alongside customer reviews, or on shopping results pages. Product targeting ads also display deals and savings badges to help shoppers easily spot special offers. For an ad to be eligible to serve, the advertised product must be the Featured Offer.

Sponsored Display Ads

What does this mean for you? Here are seven ways that these new Sponsored Display product targeting features can help you grow your business:

1. Advertise multiple products in one campaign

Previously, Sponsored Display product targeting only supported the promotion of one product per campaign. Now you can promote as many ASINs as you wish (up to 10K) in the same campaign. This opens up new options for structuring your campaigns and reduces account complexity by allowing you to create one campaign promoting multiple products, versus individual campaigns for each product.

2. Access detailed reporting for advertised ASINs, targeted ASINs, and targeted categories

Sponsored Display product targeting performance reporting was previously only available at the campaign level. Now you can view the performance of each advertised ASIN and each of your product targets separately.

For example, while browsing you notice that there are some new products on Amazon that are complementary to yours. You decide you’d like to target their detail pages with your promoted products to increase the potential for your audience to purchase both. With this update, you can now see how many clicks or orders your ads on each target product is delivering, giving you greater insight to support optimization decisions.

3. Set separate bids on each target product or target category

Sponsored Display product targeting now supports separate bids for each of your targeted products or categories. This will allow you to modify each bid depending on how your targets are performing against your advertising goals.

Perhaps you notice that a particular product is performing very well and delivering high order numbers at an ACOS (advertising cost of sales) which is below your target. To maximize traffic for the product, you can submit a higher bid to help increase your likelihood of winning the ad placement on its product detail page.

4. Improvements in category targeting relevancy

We’ve improved the category selection process, providing you with greater flexibility in your product category selections. You can now select any category to promote your products within, and relevancy to product detail pages in that category will be evaluated at ad serving time using machine learning models.

5. Negative targeting options added

You can now use negative targeting to prevent your ads from showing on product detail pages from specific brands. For example, if you also own a partner brand which is managed from a separate advertising account and want to ensure that there is no overlap, you can add that brand’s name to the negative targeting list.

You can also add a list of products from which you would like to exclude your ads. This may be useful if you notice that a particular product you have targeted is not performing well, and you’d like to exclude it when using category targeting.

6. Upgraded out-of-stock awareness

Upgrades to out-of-stock awareness mean that ads will immediately stop serving for advertised products if they are no longer available to purchase.

Now you can add products to your campaigns even when they have low inventory or are currently out of stock, confident that you will not generate clicks on ads that cannot immediately lead to an order.

7. Featured Offer awareness

Sponsored Display product targeting is now aware of which supplier is the Featured Offer for each ASIN. If you’re a vendor, this means that your ads will no longer serve if Amazon is not the Featured Offer when using Sponsored Display. This will ensure that your dollars are only spent on the promotion and direct sale of your brand's products.

If you wish to advertise any products you supply to customers directly, or any products where you are the supplier but the orders are Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), you must create Sponsored Display campaigns in your Seller account instead.

Add to cart and Buy now

With this launch, vendors will no longer be able to create legacy product- or category-targeted campaigns through Sponsored Display; however, these ads will continue to serve with no loss of functionality. To take advantage of the new functionality, you can create a copy of these legacy campaigns. Simply use the “Copy” button next to your old campaign’s name in the advertising console to create a new campaign with any old settings automatically applied. Once you are comfortable with the performance of the new campaign, you can archive your old campaign.

Sponsored Display product targeting is also available in the Amazon Ads API, enabling programmatic access for campaign creation, management and reporting. Learn more here.

Learn more about how product targeting within Sponsored Display can help you to promote product discovery and optimize your campaigns.

For more resources, please visit our support center.