Amazon Advertising Category Targeting Tutorial - Complete Guide

Published on November 7, 2025

About this video

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Learn how to use Amazon category targeting to find and target your competition more effectively. This Amazon advertising strategy provides a shortcut for finding brands to target in your Amazon PPC campaigns, especially when you want to focus on competitors with lower ratings or specific characteristics.

In this Amazon ads tutorial, I show you how category targeting works within your Amazon advertising campaigns and why it's an underused but powerful feature. You'll see how to navigate through categories and subcategories, use the refine button to narrow down your targeting, and apply filters based on brand, price, ratings, and Prime eligibility.

Category targeting is particularly effective when you want to target competitors with three star ratings while showcasing your higher-rated products. I demonstrate using examples like musical instruments and painting categories, showing you how to estimate the number of products in each category and how to layer multiple targeting options.

The key is to use category targeting in separate campaigns rather than mixing it with other targeting methods. You can start broad and then isolate better-performing targets into their own campaigns for better Amazon PPC optimization.

This Amazon advertising strategy helps you identify low-hanging fruit competitors and create more focused Amazon ads campaigns. Whether you're targeting premium products or looking to compete with lower-priced alternatives, category targeting gives you the control to refine your Amazon marketing approach.

Contents: 0:00 Introduction to Amazon Category Targeting 0:33 How Category Targeting Works 1:17 Navigating Categories and Subcategories 1:44 Using the Refine Button 2:32 Filtering by Brand, Price and Ratings 3:22 Best Practices and Campaign Setup

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Transcript

Hi guys, and welcome to another short advertising tip. For today's video, I want to talk a little bit about category targeting on Amazon. I think it's not used that much, but it's actually pretty great because it it lets you have a shortcut in finding brands that you want to target and make them feel miserable. Or if you only want to target those lowhanging fruits uh where for example you want to target only competition who have three star ratings and are already struggling with that and then you can shine even more with your 4.4 stars. Uh it's pretty simple to navigate and it's a as I said it's a shortcut. Yeah, you can and I suggest that you go through hint blackbox and find the best uh product targeting uh um targets for competitors whatever. But here for example when you go to the category targeting in your new campaign or an an existing one but I strongly suggest that also you use category targeting in a separate cate uh separate campaign. So when you browse suggested campaigns, you will have something that Amazon is offering you. But you can also go through the search and find one. So if you want to go really wide and you can navigate, let's say whatever, let's do musical instruments here. Uh and then you want to go to string musical instruments. And then you can add whole categories or or subcategory, you know. So let's do whatever sitars and you can add the whole sitar um category and choose a specific bid say add to target and there there you go you will see an estimate of 38 to 63 total products that you can target in this subcategory but another good thing that you can do is for example go to this refine button. Now refine button will give you additional options to narrow it even more. But I wouldn't like to go it uh to use that button on a subcategory which is this low. So you for example you can go to string fen world instruments whatever. Click refine and here you can select to target. Yeah, here's only one. Um but usually it's a drop down. Let's find a a little bit better category. Let's do something big like painting. Yeah, I think this one has a bunch of them. So, when you select here uh on a brand, you can select specific brand that you want to target. Mandarin moose for example that it's going to show you how many products. So, um here also not too many of them in general in this subcategory. You can see 33 to 55 products. You can choose to target only uh products who are much more expensive than you or even you can go and target some uh less expensive than you but you have big prices you're premium product and you have good ratings. Then additional layer layer that you can use as I said in the beginning you can only target these guys who are miserable you know and aim for for them and and kill them completely. Then you can also check uh prime eligible or not you know and depending on the category you will see uh how many you narrow down like is it hundreds is it thousands and then when you select your um filters you can click add and again add some some kind of a CPC that you have and you can layer down many of them. Now don't overdo it. Don't put like 50 different um target decautions here. Yeah, you can do that as a beginning just to estimate what's going to work and what's not. And then if you see that some of these are performing much better than the others, then you can isolate them in the separate campaign. Um yeah, let me know if you use this or if you need any further assistance uh about it. If you liked it, forward this to your uh advertising manager and see you tomorrow in the next video.

Frequently asked questions

What is category targeting in Amazon Sponsored Products and how does it differ from ASIN targeting?

Category targeting lets you target an entire product category or subcategory rather than listing individual competitor ASINs. Your ad appears on product detail pages of all products within the selected category, giving you broad competitive coverage without having to research and input individual ASINs. It is faster to set up than ASIN targeting but less precise, since the category will include products of varying relevance to your own.

What filters are available when using the Refine option in category targeting, and how should they be used?

The Refine button lets you narrow a selected category by brand, price range, star rating, and Prime eligibility. A practical use case is filtering for competitors with 3-star ratings while your product holds 4 stars or higher, putting your ad in front of shoppers who are already on a weaker competitor's page and more likely to switch. Price filters allow you to target only similarly priced products or, conversely, to position a premium product against more expensive competitors where your price becomes an advantage.

Should category targeting be mixed with ASIN targeting in the same campaign?

No, keep them in separate campaigns. Mixing category and ASIN targeting in a single campaign blends performance data, making it impossible to evaluate each approach independently or apply placement adjustments that are suited to one but not the other. Start with a broader category targeting campaign to discover which segments or brands perform well, then isolate the best-performing targets into dedicated campaigns for more controlled optimization and individual bid management.