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Amazon PPC Product Targeting Strategies with Elizabeth Greene

Published on February 24, 2020

About this video

In this episode, my colleague Elizabeth Greene from Junglr agency shares the latest strategies for product targeting coming from her experience.

Topics we cover in this video:

1) comparison of results between category level and ASIN level targeting 2) how to run an auto campaign to discover whether product targeting or keyword targeting would work better for your product 3) learn the workaround way for negating products from product targeting campaigns 4) why is it recommended to target your own products? 5) how to decide which products to target 6) methods for targeting by brand and age range 7) selling complementary products through product targeting and unlocking the upsell potential for your product portfolio 8) methods for stealing market share from competitors 9) first results of using product targeting with sponsored brands campaigns

Have any questions? Contact Elizabeth at https://www.junglr.com/

Visit us here https://amazoniappc.com for more actionable advice tailored specifically to your business.

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Transcript

everyone this is Jelena from Amazonia PPC and today with me I have a very special guest Elizabeth green from jungler is here to talk to you about product targeting strategies and some methods that she uses in our everyday work Elizabeth thank you for being here with me today and welcome sure yeah thanks so much I'm really excited to do this this is actually my first time doing one of these things so I'm excited this will be a lot of fun me too I noticed that you were very active on Facebook groups especially for PPC consultants which is where I was drawn by some of your posts and I wanted to pick your brain around product targeting and maybe we can share some value to our community around that so you tell us a little bit more about yourself how you started about your agency and what the services that you provide yeah so um our agency's name is jungler we've honestly as far as like really getting into the business and starting like okay this is 100% we're doing we're relatively new to the game we've been around Amazon for a while actually it's my husband and I are the ones who co-founded it I'm still a little while ago we saw we've seen a huge need and been working with some sellers and there's a lot of people who just don't have time for PPC or maybe I mean it's a whole animal in itself as I'm sure you know and um it's really something that you can really get down and do and learn every single nut and bolt and the more we learn there's always new testing and things to do so we decided to just go full force on that and really provide value to clients and so we offer a full service Amazon PPC management so we also handle AMS we do all the EU markets as well and handling like sponsored brands and there's quite a few more that goes into it other than just sponsored products but so we offer all those services to the clients interesting so out of all the campaign's that you manage specifically our focus today's to be product targeting so can you tell us like generally speaking what's your experience with product targeting ever since you started it and versus all the other targeting types what the results are when they're compared to yeah it's a lot like keyword targeting in my experience as far as you'll see better conversions the more targeted you are with you know with these other listings that you're targeting so I I've you want to look on Amazon and see how the product appears look at the reviews relative to yourself as well as the price point relative to yourself because when the when the customers are seeing your listing like it's displayed at the bottom of the screen a lot of times you may have a more premium product but unless your first image really displays that or your reviews really display that the customer is not going to be able to see um you know your additional images or your branding content when you know when they're just seeing the first image so you want to make sure that you have a listing that really can stand out or will stand out against whoever that it is that you're targeting so we found a much better results if we get more specific with which listings is we're targeting and really analyzing how our product stacks up against that one so that being said you could say there are like for example Aysen level targeting to be more efficient compared to category level time yeah it's definitely more efficient you tend to have much better results the oh there's a lot of people who the autos definitely target other listings as well and those you may find ones that can convert so that's another thing a lot of people will put up an auto and then scrape any converting keywords and then retarget does in a manual you can also do that with asons and that's a great way if if you're not really sure which products to target and you you know you never dealt with product targeting before you can just go with what's working and retarget just kind of ease into it that way and that's a good way to do it but a lot of sellers and that's that's a big thing on the group says how do I make it have targeted asons in an auto because I have all these agents popping up and they're not converting that happens a bit with the category targeting if you are not refining it so in a lot of ways Amazon will just blast you out there but oftentimes they'll blast you to things that are not relevant they don't really convert there sometimes you're like why am I on this listing it doesn't even make any sense so that's it's definitely it's it's again a lot like keywords the more targeted than we're relevant you are oftentimes the better those metrics will be that you know the cost per clicks or the conversion rate which translates into better a cost so I agree that's exactly our approach as well so when you have like an entirely new account we start by running automated campaigns just to figure out which kind of approach whether keyword targeting with product targeting is going to work for this account unless we don't have like a general idea coming from client telling us what should we focus on but like for example if you let an automated campaign run and you see a lot of faces in the list and your search terms report then it that might be a good indication that part of targeting would be the logical next step especially for those agents that you already have the data for so it's definitely agree to person the task so when do you use a query targeting and going back to category targeting are there any cases in which you would like to test that out and see what kind of conclusions can you draw from attempting that's using category targeting yeah so we have used category targeting most times when we have a seller who's looking to get a very aggressive launch a lot of times people we use a sponsored brands and they say oh we're creating brand awareness at category targeting we'll just blast you out there but it will blast you to say a subsection on so you have a little bit a tiny bit more control possibly then an auto and you and also you might you know you might have a couple subcategories that your product can fit into and you can target say both of those so you can get yourself really cast a really wide net however without any control over where your product is showing up a lot of times you may show up under a top competitor who has a much better price and they might have a little bit higher view count and you're just not gonna convert as well on those products unfortunately but it is something we use when we're looking to just we know we want to go hard and fast and we just want to they are good to say gather the data so if you put like a decently high bid and you just blast it out there you can come back with what works and then you know keep refining that or perhaps takes those and then stick them in a more targeted Aysen um category or Aysen campaign um so that is a technique if we were just we just need to pay for the data we want to get out there or just you know we want to go full force that is something that can be done and you can at least scrape a lot of those asons quicker but you're gonna have to pay for that so if you're okay with doing that and that's you know that's something that you want to do that's fine um but just you know realize what comes along with that another thing we will do is if we would just want to garner some more asons we're not worried so much about doing it hard and fast what we can do is you can set parameters on the category targeting you can refine their by review count and you can also refine by a price point if depending on where your price point is sitting and where your star rating is sitting oftentimes it will severely restrict how many asons you show up under so even when you're creating the campaign and you put those refinements on there it'll say you know if you put these refinements you're not going your impressions they're not going to be that high especially if you're at the higher end of the pricing scale in your category the number of products that are perhaps above your price point is going to be much less however if you're not worried so much about just you getting a lot of eyes in your products you want eyes that are going to convert those tend to do pretty well and it it also depends on how many products are in your category so if you have a lot of products and in that category you will have you know many more asons for amazon to choose from to show you up under versus if it's a you know very small category there's not as much competition you know there's there's less of those especially if you start you know really refining it so that that's something to take into consideration it that technique does work better or I should say you have much more for Amazon to choose from if you're in a very high competition niche so this is something to to note well when we look back at the last six months everything that all the features that Amazon recently rolled out majority of them oriented towards competitive strategies competitive targeting well basically probably because they have limited amount of placements and the competition's becoming more and more fierce so we have to develop those strategies to fight it the fighter competition all starts of course with a good product with quality product in a good offer in general so customers can choose us when it comes to category targeting we've also seen that it works really well but it's also expensive it works really well against that aggressive aggressive approach to entering a new market everything works really well when you have a product that isn't you know entirely covered through keyword targeting meaning if it's a new product market that customers don't know it exists yet and it becomes like a blend of two different products that this is like a third version of something that of two things that already existed those are the cases where we see it's it's pretty effective in the category targeting works even better than automated campaigns for some reason so as long as you have that kind of tolerance the thoughts the cost it generates then it might work when it comes to exclusions that's you met something you mentioned you know how do we negate something that when we have a nation that's unprofitable in your search terms reports you have any specific approach and he advised for people who want to exclude those aces make sure that they don't show up anymore you mean from the autos yes unfortunately there's really no direct way to do that Amazon gave it to us for a second and then they took it away I wish there was something we could do because that would solve a lot of problems the best way so asons typically are pulled through compliments and let's see it's closed my solution budge compliments and substitutes so they're there they're pulled through those compliments and the substitutes see you can lower those you know those bids if you click into your autos and then if you click on targeting you'll see those for you know it amazon has given us a little more control over autos now um that we can set individual bids for the specific targeting types so if you lower those bids until you're profitable on the yeah complements and substitutes then you can kind you can at least bring down what you're bidding on those asons you know you'll bring down everything as a whole so there is that there is a technique out there that people have tried on possibly going to the searching that Aysen on amazon and you can go to the listing and perhaps say the brand name or anything that is any words that are very specific to that Aysen people have negative phrase match that inside of the autos i don't really prefer that technique so much first off you're clearing quite a bit it doesn't always work 100% and so there there's some speculation as to whether you know how amazon is pulling those asons if there if they're looking at you know the wording in the listing or how exactly they choose what to show you under some people have reported that work some people said it doesn't work at all and then you are potentially clearing a lot of stuff and you want to be super careful with which keywords you're pulling from that that listing to negative phrase match because you know you could clear a bunch of stuff and you just end up getting rid of a bunch of sales so Ottomans are great and they I mean they definitely give you a lot of placements you can you know we always keep autos running oftentimes we might even keep a couple of autos running for a specific product but you want to make sure you're adjusting those autos towards profitability because you want to start getting more and more targeted with your manuals as you learn what works and you can you know you can spend your money there so I would just keep adjusting those bids those targeting bids until you can get that um you can get that targeting type profitable as that's how I would approach that yeah it's a it's a little different approach but what you just mentioned like negating the brand name was something that we also do but only cases right when it really repeats a couple of times you see a certain brands is giving you bad sales in terms of very expensive sales or no sales at all just generating cost and usually you can see like a pattern within the last days that certain brands just stands out that's the case when we exclude it otherwise if it's not really causing a lot of damage we just approach with the base adjustments that's that's like yeah combination of two things do you ever target your own products your product targeting yes yes so there's um there's a couple things you can do with that you can depending on how competitive your niche is and how you want to approach it you especially if you have say a product that has variations um you might just stick another one of those variations own they're just a try and because your competitors are going to show up there you have competition showing up there you might as well be showing up there and yes you'll pay for that click but they would have clicked off on a competitor so at least they're being redirected to your product so that that's a technique another thing you can do is cross sell products so perhaps you have one product that's very complementary to another a lot of times you're rebuilding a brand you have like you know a whole suite of products that are very complementary to each other you can actually target your own asons with that especially products that are often bought together that would be a good one to target I mean you could if you wanted to go crazy with it and say I don't want anyone to show up under my listing you know I want to you know I want to own this space you could do very high bids they even target the variations plus the complementary product and really just try and push out competition there it depends if you're willing to pay for those clicks but that's definitely something that's not a bad idea if you just want to own your listing yeah that's that's also what we do we try to protect the listings from the competition as much as possible because you have a couple of layers of competitors products below your on your on your own product detail page which is sometimes very annoying that's one of the conversion rates tax that we also advise and advertisers to do is to target their own products especially if you have like a complementary portfolio where something would be a good upsell or when I grandfather would be a good upsell for another product so when you choose products to target on an Asian level targeting do you have any methods how do you the favorite things favorite the protest how do you choose which aces to target it depends on what I'm looking to do with that specific product so say I have a client that says ok I want to I want to get out there we're going to be aggressive we're willing to spend well I I will be much more lenient with the products that I'm looking to target versus a client that says I'm really worried about a cause I'm worried about possibility I want to get out there but I want to be I am not willing to spend so much I'll be much more judicious with into a sense that I'm looking to target and actually what I do I find super helpful is when I'm doing keyword research for my product I always any keyword research I always look at the front page I use multiple keyword research tools but there's really no substitute for seeing what the buyers see when they're looking at your product so that's one thing I look for I might type in a keyword always use an incognito window when possible if you're just you know say you're clicking the link off of Helium 10 it's a lot easier you know just to click it and see what happens the main keywords I always search in incognito window and one thing I'm looking for I'm gonna looking at the competition is okay so what are their price points what are the star ratings for this how does the listings show up and if I see any asons and I'm like okay you know it makes sense I fit here if I see anything I always keep a notepad open and I'll click over and I'll create like say subsections so okay this one has you know I might say like better you know our listings better on this one well you know okay so the price points the same okay maybe the price points a little higher but our star rating and because when you put asons inside of a category targeting campaign you don't it will just show up as a nason you don't get to see what that Aysen actually is amazon just updated their search term tab which is really awesome you can see what the products look like so that's very helpful but that only shows you what got clicked on it doesn't show you anything that's maybe not getting any impressions so I might say okay well I'm not getting impressions on this Aysen but is it worth it for me to bump up this bid to try and get impressions how relevant am i really am i targeting if you just you know say you just scrape a bunch of aces and you throw them in a camp well maybe you targeted complementary products those are harder to get impressions for that's a really good technique to do so not only using your own complementary products on your own listings but going on and seeing I'm selling bath salts maybe you know so maybe it's bath salts that are really good for like foot scrubs or something like that well I might go and target foot baths because somebody who's looking for like a foot spa probably gonna buy my product but so it makes sense to cross-reference those but those are much harder to get Amazon to say okay you're relevant for this because they're just looking at the keywords and going and it's kind of relevant but it's not so sometimes you need to really push those push those bids to get any eyes on the product and get eyes on that placement but if I'm looking through and I just see everything thrown in a single campaign okay so this one doesn't have any impressions doesn't is that is that because it's a complementary product that I really need to push or is that because you know there might be some other reason there or maybe I just accidentally scraped another ace and that doesn't make any sense and I just want to pause it well I'm gonna have to click on that go search on Amazon and see what the product is there's really no way for me to see that versus if I segment everything um into categories like say oh so I'll have a separate campaign or you can even do ad groups um we do campaigns but um for complementary products versus you know ones that I really really want to target no these are ones that I have much better offer on so I'm willing to pay much more for these because ideally the conversion should be better versus ones or another technique you can do it's it's expensive but if you really want you know you say there's a keyword that I really want to go after a hundred percent like this is my main keyword I'm willing to pay for it one thing you can do is to go search that pace or search that keyword on Amazon incognito window again because you don't want any skewed data in there and you can scrape all of the asons from the first page you can throw those in a campaign doubt you know I can get expensive because there's obviously gonna be a lot of asons or a lot of listings there that may have a better price point they may have a better star rating so you know you're gonna pay more for those but you're gonna show up on everybody's page for somebody who's clicking it I mean you could even do the second page but those I would also want to segment into their own campaign because I realize these are something I'm going after but it's going to be you know I'm gonna spend more for this but because I have those asons segmented into their own group I know I'm willing you know I'm much more tolerant of saying what the bids are what the budget is what the a cost is in this versus if I just threw it all together well then you know I might be adjusting bids and I wouldn't really be able to really understand what it is that I'm looking at okay is that structured like one product per campaign or you put them all together you mean as far as the individual the asons that you yourself are advertising I mean yes like for example when you have like product that you really really want to go after we're gonna show up in their product detail page would you recommend separating them in their own campaign so we have more control over how much budget you allocate to them yes so I like um yeah I like some segmenting everything I personally have been building out um using and this is across pretty much everything one campaign one AD group there's nothing wrong with ad groups a groups are fine on I I got turned on to it by another really good in management I'm sure you've heard of her um destiny but um the reason for that is because when I go into the the account I can see everything top-level so if you have multiple multiple ad groups and you have to click down as a campaigner or come to which ad group right and because of the sheer volume that I'm managing it makes my life much simpler and then the other reason is I can set specific um campaign budgets and if later on I want to go in or do percentage adjustments or certain you know bidding strategy um I know that that's only going to affect whatever keywords I've put in there versus you know just having one I've seen it whether you have one campaign with multiple ad groups and I get that gets tricky to scale from my experience um it much easier to segment so for management purposes you would recommend this structure one campaign one ad group only in it but when it comes to targeting options would you recommend just start getting one Aysen and that one campaign where you know campaign that's something you could do your the impressions in the sales volume would not be as high typically Aysen targeted because the way they are in their placements they don't have as high of an impressions some categories you'll end up with quite a few sales from Aysen targeting um sometimes the sales volume oftentimes is going to be a bit lower just due to the nature of the targeting so I can't what I have done you might have a product that's very well right but they might have like a million different variations what I have done is I've gone in there and I've scraped the essence for every single one of their variations and I'm like I want to show up everywhere you know any time a customer clicks on any addition variations every time they're browsing this I want to show up and you know so then they say hey this thing keep you know they're more likely to click on my product the impressions you know aren't gonna be that high for that especially you know some variations people just don't really click on um but that is something I've done and send me segmenting that into its own campaign just gives me for me as a man you know back-end management perspective I'm able to see exactly what that is and I know this is something I'm going after and I'm able to quickly just identify that and say okay how is this going I'm even getting impressions on this thing does a man don't even think I'm realizing I'm relevant you know to this product so from just a structure you know a management perspective to me that makes sense structurally you know you could give it its own ad group um or you you could just throw it all in together um I don't really think that makes much of a difference but it does help you identify things much quicker it saves a lot of time so yeah um I just wanted also to add a quick tip like for example when you are just specifically chasing for that one competitors a scent that you're after sometimes it will make sense to advertise just your cheapest variant or the ones that's best selling this like the strongest variant because that's really ate the biggest window for new customers through to get familiarized with your brand which is something that makes a lot of sense when you're going after specific brands so talking about going after specific brands in which cases would you advise using brand targeting or maybe age range marketing options the me may for the leg the category with the branding targeting yes like when you have a yeah built around your specific brands have you tested it out it'll work for you I've mostly gone after asons to be honest I haven't tested that as much just because some of the brands are pretty broad um you know brands that offer quite a few products to be honest I haven't done that as much I have targeted a brand in a way but being much more specific like like I shared before with like going in and targeting every single variation and then they might have quite a few products in that specific brand I would go and pull out whatever a sins are relevant to the product and you know put those in their own campaigns it kind of segment and target them there to be honest I haven't played with brand targeting as much to me it's a bit more of a shotgun blast um so with category targeting I can have some refinements brand targeting I suppose you can as well but it I guess you would get a little more I guess the short answer is no I haven't test I haven't tested as much but yeah we have tested it's not very like you write about some brands having a very wide product portfolio so you can't really justify which products are relevant for product targeting which aren't which is one of the main downsides of brand marketing but when it comes to age range it ranges that's something that can come in handy especially if you know who your audience is like the only yeah in my opinion the only currently available audience targeting feature that we currently have I think that they will roll it out yes in the future but you know if we know specifically that your product is targeting baby boomers then you can you know just build throughout the rest of the people out of the targeting just to make it more effective but still you need to spend some money to test things and really figure out what works what does it all comes down to that yeah I suppose delving into brain analytics you would get some of those metrics as far as the audience you're looking to target range you also mentioned up selling your own products with product targeting so what are the ways in which someone can really ensure that you give us like a couple of examples when it's worked really well for you for your brands yeah mostly we've seen the best upselling win so you might have a compliment a product that goes very well with another one but may not necessarily be something that somebody needs to purchase with the other product um I'm trying to think of a an example that's not exactly what it is that we're dealing with um okay so maybe like weights like say you're selling like hand weights with ankle weights okay well technically those are complimentary but somebody who's looking for you know just the typical one that you know they might be using with their hand may or may not want something for their ankles they might say oh yeah I forgot you know I can do this other exercise with this or perhaps hand weights with the resistance bands yes they're complimentary yes it's possible to get conversions but it might not actually be something that um the the you know the customer or the buyer may or may not be looking to purchase those two items together um not a bad idea to do that however like I said the numbers may or may not be there um one thing that would be very complimentary I'm trying to think um so if you are selling like backdrops but you had like those backdrop or like photo props those are very complementary most likely somebody who's looking for a photo especially if it's for an event is definitely looking for something you know oftentimes to go along with that foot cuz those are very popular so you would tend to see much better upsells on that type of product something that the buyer is definitely looking to purchase with you know that item we tend to see better than er numbers on those that's definitely great we also look at the frequently bought together section if there's any clues there as to what Amazon's you know suggesting that we that that customers are buying together they obviously have the data and are sharing it with us yeah but at the same time also look at for customers for clients will have their own e-commerce websites you know just historically the customers what they're buying together it might be a good clue what's to put together at autotargeting Amazon as well because if you don't have like already a general idea what works best together so that's a good idea for like an upsell when it comes to using sponsor brands campaigns targeting product targeting with sponsor Brides campaigns and you shared some ideas what has worked for you and your your experience coming from that yeah so um we've used those and to be honest I'm not a hundred percent sure where the where they show up um I've looked into it kind of tried to research it's very interesting because you have the option to put a headline however from what I've seen or at least the ones that I've run and you know to try and look at those asons and see where it's showing up um it it looks like they might be showing up under that what is it four stars are above but those are the sponsored I've seen our show up there which doesn't include the headline you've you know you've specified so that's a little strange um I know yeah the the impressions tend to be you know relatively low for those just do two placements a night I think um the placement options are just less like with the ACE and targeting you have several carousels at the bottom of the listings now but it's a good just additional like if you're if you're really trying to go hard after a certain Aysen or perhaps you know a certain group of asons it's just another one to throw up there just to get you know just get every single placement possible yeah and while typically with sponsor price you get those premium placements that's one of the main advantages of these company types have you compared the performance of sponsor brands versus sponsor products for product targeting I have not I need to I I did quite a few um recently and I'm waiting for you know to really be able to look at the numbers because right now I think they're a bit too new for me to really do a cross comparison well I found some interesting conclusions when we did test out the comparison between the two and really works well for for accounts where you want to take away market share from competitors and then have some very specific cases that you want to target and you do that through sponsor prints campaigns they generate usually a good amount of new to brand sales which comes really yeah relevant for brands that have world customers that have we'd be the purchases all the time that people where they come back and purchase again organically them even without PCC so using sponsored brands campaign generally is a very good campaign type for new to brand sales so that's also like a twist to product targeting as well like implementing that competitive strategy but with with the branding elements that also sponsor price gifts yeah who said like you mentioned like you don't really know for sure any time where they're showing trigger right if you use a scent targeting does it mean that your sponsor grant sets are going to show up in the search results page detail pages where the specific placements that's something that we yeah the only one I've seen for sure that's shown up is that the product it's above four stars products and that is the first care so um so I did see one that I was I was using targeting I saw that show up there which I don't remember if I've been able to get that placement before with ace and targeting mm-hmm I couldn't say one way or the other I'm trying to remember because I've seen that placement before that one is premium and it's if you're above four stars it looks good um it does say you know they have that little grayed out that's a sponsored but most times you know buyers don't know when we we know we see it we see everything we notice all the little okay this is sponsored this is sponsored how do I get there but most buyers they just you know they just see the page they're not looking for that um so I did see one of mine show up there I keep looking at you know as okay you know where where am i showing um I have seen that um what is it it's sponsor sponsor display but through AMS where you can put any of the little thing I've seen I've seen that pop up once or twice on through a nascent targeting on on a listing but that's not that's not a guarantee and then I was like oh great we have this placement and then it went away like the very next refresh so um that's something I've seen with ace and targeting but it's it's not controlled unless you have access to AMS there's there's no guaranteed way to get that get that placement unfortunately well that's how it works right now but I'm hoping that they will transfer a lot of things seller central so that it becomes accessible to more people okay do you have any tips or any specific you know case studies maybe examples that you would like to share additionally with our audience hmm I think hasted is in just in general or yes not necessarily for product targeting like number one tip if someone asks you what's the one thing that they should not want the one mistake that they should not make with their Amazon advertising where would it be hmm my main my main thing is um relevancy when you are I'm hanging a lot of product launches aren't here I'm kind of weird spot where I've got a lot of things churning really good and then I'm also doing launches so I have less of the in between you know still navigating so with the launches I've you know been doing a lot of keyword research looking okay where does this product fit Amazon PPC it's a lot simpler than say a Facebook ad because you have less creatives um but that doesn't mean that buyer psychology doesn't come into play um so I'm a big believer preached a lot on looking at the front page and what the shopper sees when they're looking at that specific keyword I'm so really getting trying to get it into the head of buyers on does my product fit on this page and if it does where would it fit um and then also recognizing the more varied the products are on that page it doesn't mean it's not a place that you can't show up but your conversion rate typically is going to be much lower than if you have a page that really makes sense for your product so in the beginning as far as keywords that I would target aggressively I would look for the the most relevant keywords to the product is something I definitely focus on um the main my first when I first get a new product client since been this okay we're gonna launch this my first objective is to say what is the most high-volume relevant keyword that's where I start and once I figure out that I kind of build out around that um so for me it's okay let's do a couple of reverse asons let's look at the main keywords okay what's in competitor's listing let's throw that into a keyword tool look at search form search volume isn't everything none of the keyword tools the numbers are not exact but you can get it relevant to the other keywords you're looking at so i wanna i want to do as much as i can search by social and look at a couple lists and then go down that list and say what what is most relevant to my product and i look in that page sometimes that keyword it's gonna be a much lower search volume then you might want to look into you know sometimes a lot of people are worried about search volumes so if you're saying cutting board you know so say you're selling a cutting board and obviously cutting board that's the highest you know so okay I want to be on cutting board because look how many sales I can make there's plastic cutting boards there's wood cutting boards there's ones with accessories there's ones without it I mean that is so varied and often times for cutting board the people who are up there at the top most times you look at the price point is like how do you make money selling that but you know they're they're up at the top you can't compete with that um so if it was a bamboo wood cutting board that might be your you know your highest relevant main you know main keyword the highest volume with the most relevancy um that's something I would I would find that and I would say okay let's look at the ecosystem around this and then let's start you know where do I fit this is this is my market you know that's this is the buyers that are looking for my product I want to get in front of the buyer that wants to buy mine you know not oh I want a cutting board no I want you know this is what I want let's show it to those buyers um and most times your numbers will be much better for those then if you just you know you try to blast it out there I agree I've seen it so many times and it counts that it's it's a yeah honestly a little bit thank you for being a guest on our show today and if anyone wants to reach Elizabeth for any advice our consultation I will share a link to their website and video description and I hope you had a lot of value from this video and we'll make sure to post it as soon as it's as soon as we can okay great thank you so much it's been a lot of fun I've enjoyed it me too

Frequently asked questions

How do I decide which competitor ASINs to target in a product targeting campaign?

Start by searching your main keywords in an incognito browser window to see exactly what the shopper sees on page one. Go through the results and note which competitor listings have a higher price than yours, fewer or lower-quality reviews, or a weaker listing overall. Those are your strongest targets because a shopper already on that page has a reason to switch when they see your product appear alongside it. Separate the ASINs you are highly confident about from the ones you are less sure about and put them in different campaigns so you can apply different budgets and tolerance levels for each group.

What is the best way to discover new ASINs to target if I am starting from scratch?

Let an automatic campaign run for several weeks and review the search term report. Any ASIN that has already converted for you is a confirmed target worth moving to a dedicated manual product targeting campaign. This approach removes the guesswork because Amazon has already told you which product pages are producing sales for your listing. It is a lower-risk way to enter product targeting compared to manually selecting ASINs before you have any conversion data.

Can I negate unprofitable ASINs from an automatic campaign?

Amazon now provides a negative product targeting tab when setting up automatic campaigns, which allows you to add ASINs you want to block directly. Before this feature existed, the workaround was to lower the bids on the specific automatic targeting sub-types, such as complements and substitutes, that were generating the unwanted ASIN traffic. The older workaround of negating phrase-match keywords pulled from a competitor's listing title was inconsistent and risked blocking relevant traffic, so using the native negative ASIN targeting feature is the cleaner approach when it is available in your account.

Why does relevance matter more than high search volume when choosing keywords for a new product launch?

A high-volume keyword like a broad category term will show your product alongside dozens of different product types at different price points and quality levels, which produces a low and unpredictable conversion rate. A highly relevant keyword with lower search volume shows your product to shoppers who are looking for exactly what you sell, which produces much stronger conversion rates and a more manageable ACoS. Starting with the most relevant keywords, even if their search volume is modest, builds a reliable sales foundation. Once that is established you can expand into broader terms from a position of strength.

How can I use product targeting to upsell other products in my catalog?

Target your own ASINs with ads for complementary products, then check the frequently bought together section on your product pages for clues about what customers naturally pair with your product. Products that are genuinely functional complements, meaning a customer who buys one would logically want the other, produce much better upsell conversion rates than loosely related products. If you sell on your own ecommerce site as well, look at your historical order data to see which products your customers actually buy together, and use that information to prioritize which combinations to test on Amazon.

Should product targeting campaigns use one campaign per ad group or can I group multiple ASINs together?

For management clarity and budget control, keeping campaigns segmented by targeting objective works better than grouping everything together. Competitors you are highly confident about belong in one campaign with higher bids and budget. Complementary products go in a separate campaign with different expectations. ASINs from a specific competitor's full variation range can be grouped in their own campaign. This structure means you can evaluate each group on its own terms rather than trying to read blended performance data that mixes very different targeting intentions.