At the beginning of this November, an Amazon Sponsored Product update, which offers Amazon merchants new advertising opportunities to target potential new customers. What and how the new "product targeting" functions work is explained in more detail below.
What are sponsored products and how did delivery work before the update?
You can find detailed instructions on how to place sponsored products here.
Sponsored Products campaigns are the primary advertising format for Amazon merchants to promote their product range on the Amazon marketplace.
This advertising format is basically available to every Amazon merchant with the help of the professional sales tariff, regardless of whether FBA or FBM is used.
When running advertising campaigns, you can either run automatic or manual advertising campaigns. With automatic advertising campaigns, you only define the products to be advertised and the standard bid that you are prepared to pay per click. Amazon itself decides for which search terms the advertised product is displayed with ads.
With manual advertising campaigns, on the other hand, we define the product range to be advertised as well as the keywords in order to determine when the ads for the selected products should be displayed.
The advertisements of Sponsored Products campaigns are displayed in the search results pages after entering search terms, as can be seen below.
In addition to displaying ads on the search results pages, the product targeting update has already displayed ads on product detail pages, as the following graphic shows:
In the past, Sponsored Products ads were only displayed via automatic advertising campaigns on Amazon.
The disadvantage of displaying ads on product detail pages via the automatic campaign was and still is the lack of advertiser control over the display of ads.
However, this changed at the beginning of November! Since the beginning of November, it is now also possible to select the "Product alignment" alignment type via manual advertising campaigns in order to advertise on selected product detail pages.
The following is a brief guide to running Sponsored Product campaigns with product targeting:
First, we select the menu item "Advertising" in the Seller Central account and then click on "Create campaign". In the next step, we then select the campaign type "Sponsored Products". We then select the "Manual alignment" alignment type.
We then determine the products we wish to advertise. Finally, we come to the new special feature of the Campaign playout.
We can now use the "Product orientation" determine on which product detail pages our advertisements should be displayed. Here we can choose whether our ads should be displayed on product detail pages of certain product categories or only on product detail pages of selected products. This allows us to select very specific product detail pages (e.g. from competitors) on which our ads are to be displayed.
Product category targeting:
Product targeting:
Recommended procedure for targeting products & categories:
But what is the perfect setup for product / category targeting? I currently place and recommend selecting both an ad group that targets specific product categories and an ad group that contains products on which the products to be advertised should definitely appear (e.g. competitor products). This means that in addition to the manual selection of products, an automatic selection is also made based on the selected categories. This ensures that no important product placements are neglected.
Following the regular evaluation of campaign performance, high-performance product placements can also be transferred from category targeting to product targeting.
Advertise exclusively on product detail pages of certain brands
If the alignment function "Categories", we also have the option of not only selecting specific product categories, but also selecting specific brands on which our ads are displayed.
Targeting can also be refined by specifying a certain price range or the average customer rating that a product must have in order for our ads to be displayed there.
So that we can make this refinement, we do not click on "Alignment" but on "Refine" for the categories.
The selection function for targeting refinement then opens
CPC bids on placements in product and category targeting
In the last steps, we defined the products to be advertised as well as the orientation of the advertisements. Now we need to define our CPC bids for the different placements. Let's start by defining the CPC bids for the product targeting.
As shown below, we define our CPC bid at product level. This can result in very different CPC bids between the individual products.
For this reason, the individual products should be examined again in order to remove product placements that may have a CPC bid that is too high.
With category targeting, on the other hand, we only define a CPC bid that applies to all ad placements on product detail pages.
If we only select certain brands as a targeting option, we define the respective CPC bid at brand level:
The final step in the placement of sponsored product campaigns is negative product targeting, which allows us to define the product detail pages on which we do not want to place our products. Here we can either filter out the individual products or define entire brand ranges so that our ads are not displayed there.
Once this step has been completed, all we have to do is click on "Start campaign" and our advertising campaign will be processed and can finally go live.
Conclusion on the alignment of sponsored product ads at product level
The ability to advertise specifically at product level now makes it much easier to scale sponsored products campaigns and probably takes pressure off the CPC bids for keyword targeting, which have risen sharply in the past.
In my opinion, this update is particularly interesting for products that do not have a particularly high search volume. This means that even unknown products can use push marketing instead of the previous pull marketing (keyword targeting) to reach a larger number of potential new customers.
Extra tip:
My In addition to placing advertisements on other product detail pages, we also recommend creating a campaign to advertise your own products on your own product detail pages. On the one hand, this leads to up- and cross-sales and also protects against competitors "stealing" sales and traffic on your own product detail pages.
