Amazon PPC Product Targeting Setup That Actually Works (Avoid This Default Setting)

Published on December 19, 2025

About this video

For personalized assistance with your Amazon Advertising strategy, visit https://amazoniappc.com

Learn how to avoid a costly mistake when setting up Amazon sponsored products campaigns with product targeting. This video reveals a hidden default setting that can waste your ad spend and mess up your targeting strategy.

When you create product targeting campaigns to compete against specific competitors, Amazon has a default expanded targeting option that automatically includes substitutes, complements, and other unrelated items. This means instead of targeting just your competitor's coffee maker, you end up targeting coffee filters, and potentially anything from cars to toilet seats.

I walk you through the exact steps to set up Amazon advertising campaigns correctly. First, select sponsored products campaign, choose manual targeting, then switch from keyword targeting to product targeting. The critical step is disabling the expanded targeting option before entering your competitor ASINs.

This Amazon ads tutorial covers proper campaign setup including selecting exact targeting instead of expanded, excluding your own brand, adding negative product targeting, starting with low bids, and using placement bid adjustments. If you want your ads to appear mainly on competitor product pages, boost your product pages bid by 50-100 percent while lowering the suggested bid to reduce appearance in search results.

The expanded targeting option does have one legitimate use case - when you want to run research campaigns to discover new products for targeting. However, for precise competitor targeting in your Amazon ppc campaigns, always disable expanded and use exact targeting.

This Amazon advertising strategy will help you control your ad spend and ensure your sponsored products campaigns target exactly what you intend. Proper Amazon ppc optimization starts with understanding these default settings that can derail your campaigns.

Contents: 0:00 The Problem with Default Amazon Targeting Settings 0:45 How to Set Up Sponsored Products Campaign Correctly 1:17 The Expanded Targeting Trap Explained 2:11 Why Expanded Targeting Wastes Your Ad Budget 2:51 Step by Step Fix for Exact Product Targeting 3:17 Bid Strategy for Competitor Product Pages 4:18 When to Actually Use Expanded Targeting

------------------------------------------------------ Some product links are affiliate links, which means that if you make a purchase, we'll receive a small commission.

💡 If you need a *Helium 10* tool, which we strongly recommend as the industry standard, you can use this link to signup and get 20% OFF for 6 months: https://i.helium10.com/K05Qo9

💡 Market Share and Marketplace Intelligence At Your Fingertips - nothing better than SmartScout - *25% OFF* discount coupon *for 3 months* ! Link: https://smartscout.com?fpr=amazonia

💡Sell more with real shopper insights from *ProductPinion* with a *10% OFF for a lifetime* use the following link: https://www.productpinion.com?_from=igor46

💡 If you're still not using *PickFu* you should definitely start! For a 50% OFF on your first PICKFU poll use the coupon AMAZONIA or visit this link: https://www.pickfu.com/#_r_amazonia

💡 Get *2 months* of Free Trial for *SellerBoard* using this link: https://sellerboard.com/?p=01820

Free offer

Get a Free Account Audit

Let our Amazon PPC experts review your account and show you exactly where you're leaving money on the table — no strings attached.

Transcript

So, imagine this. There's a competitor that you want to really target with your super cool products with high reviews and really good price. And you go ahead and you create your product targeting campaign. And guess what? After a week or so, you go into your campaign and see that you're not targeting the specific competitor, but your targeting is all over the place. So, what's happening? There's a one little default setting from Amazon that actually selects completely different targeting option that you would like to have when thinking about product targeting individual products. So stay with me. Now, I went into sponsored product campaign and after the usual setup of where I want my um ads to appear on Amazon or Amazon business, you select your products and navigate down there. Select manual targeting for product targeting to work properly and then from manual targeting for sorry from keyword targeting select product targeting. Now what happens is that by default you will see your category suggested here or not uh when you navigate to individual products take a look at this. So by default it's selected expanded. So if you're not careful or if you're in a hurry you may go ahead and search for your products or just enter a list that you already prepare like these are the five or 10 or 100 products uh from my competitor that I want to target. uh and you paste those uh some ridiculous things are going to happen. First, you're going to uh inflate your ad spend significantly and second your targeting is going to be all over the place. So, uh see what Amazon is defining these expanded like. So they say, for example, if you're targeting a coffee m maker to promote your own item against, this feature like expanded uh targeting enables you to target items that include substitutes, compliments, and other items. So that's almost like an auto campaign. So you're deciding to have um you decide to have a product targeting campaign and you end up having an auto campaign because substitutes is the other coffee makers which may sound okay but still it's not an individual product or as that you want to target then compliments like coffee filters or even who knows what you know regarding uh related to to coffee makers and other items that shoppers may browse for along with the targeted coffee maker. Now, this can be anything from cars to toilet seats, you know. It can really go crazy with the with the targeting. Uh, so it's easy to fix it, you know, just um ex disable the expanded, hit exact, paste your asins, and you're you're good to go. I really don't know why Amazon ads team did this that by default it it's on expanded. it. I'm sure that many people lost a lot of money uh after setting this up. Uh when you do that, then exclude your your own brand. Uh add some negative product targeting if you like. I suggest if you if this is a new campaign, start with Fix Bits. And also um nice nice tip would be that if you're aiming to target your product display pages of your competitors that you just entered, you can boost your product pages bid. For example, you can start with 50% or even 100% but then have that in mind and lower the suggested bit because then uh you will lower the appearance on top of search and rest of search. Therefore, this campaign is not going to be um showing up for many keyword related targets, but mostly on product pages. So, that's uh that's something you can do to influence the algorithm to show your product more on product pages of your competitors. And uh the rest is the same. Just make sure that you select uh everything by the book and disable increase bits for high traffic days. Uh we don't like that. Uh so I owe you still the use case for expanded expanded expanded one can be used when you want to to find new products you know it's going to be like a research campaign for product targeting and that's fine you know but if you have intention to do that then that can be u pretty useful you know yes it's going to be um a lot of targets out there who are not going to be that relevant but that's life but by proper proper um target management and adding products and and keywords into negative uh ones, you're going to save that money in the long run. Let me know if this is clear and if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments and see you on Monday on another

Frequently asked questions

What is Amazon's expanded product targeting and why is it enabled by default in Sponsored Products campaigns?

Expanded product targeting automatically extends your targeting beyond the specific ASINs you enter to include substitutes, complementary products, and other items shoppers browse alongside your target. Amazon enables it by default when you add individual product targets in a manual product targeting campaign. While Amazon's intent is to broaden reach without extra setup effort, the practical result is that a campaign you built to target specific competitor listings ends up showing ads across a much wider and less relevant set of product pages, similar in behavior to an auto campaign rather than a precise ASIN-level campaign.

How do you fix the expanded targeting default when setting up competitor ASIN targeting in Amazon Sponsored Products?

After selecting manual targeting and product targeting in the campaign builder, before entering your competitor ASINs, switch the targeting type from "Expanded" to "Exact." This restricts your ads to the specific ASINs you enter and nothing else. Additional recommended steps include adding your own brand as a negative keyword in phrase match to avoid cannibalization, applying negative product targeting for your own ASINs, starting with fixed bids for a new campaign, and boosting the product pages placement adjustment by 50 to 100% while lowering the base bid to concentrate impressions on competitor detail pages rather than search results.

When does it actually make sense to use expanded product targeting?

Expanded targeting has a legitimate use as a research campaign. If you want to discover new product ASINs to add to your targeting list without knowing exactly which competitors to go after, running a campaign with expanded targeting enabled surfaces related products that shoppers engage with alongside your targets. Over time you can review which of those expanded placements convert, then migrate the best performers into a precise exact-targeting campaign and add the rest as negative product targets to stop spending on them.