Amazon Ads Product Targeting Campaigns - Stop Wasting Money on This!

Published on April 15, 2025

About this video

Amazon Ads Product Targeting Campaigns - Stop Wasting Money on This! - When running Amazon product targeting campaigns to specifically target competitor ASINs or your own listings, you might notice your ads appearing in search results instead of just on product pages. This common issue frustrates many Amazon advertisers, but there's a simple solution that many sellers aren't aware of.

## Understanding the Problem

When you set up a product targeting campaign on Amazon, your intention is typically to have your ads appear only on specific product detail pages that you've selected. However, what often happens is that your ads end up showing for search terms related to those products as well. This means you're spending your budget on keyword-based placements rather than just the product page placements you intended.

In the campaign shown in the video, there are solid results from product targeting, but the search terms report reveals that the ads are appearing for various search queries despite only having product targets selected. While some of these search term placements might perform well (like the example with a 1% ACOS), this isn't the intended strategy for a product targeting campaign.

## The Targeting Configuration Issue

The key points about product targeting to understand:

1. When adding product targets, be careful to select "exact product targeting" rather than "expanded targeting" (which is the default option) 2. Expanded targeting will show your ads on similar products to the ones you've selected 3. Even with exact targeting, your ads can still appear in search results

## The Solution: Campaign-Level Negative Keywords

The fix for this issue is surprisingly simple but not obvious to many sellers:

1. You cannot add negative search terms at the ad group level in a product targeting campaign 2. Instead, go to the campaign level settings 3. Look for the "Negative keywords" option at the campaign level 4. Add any search terms you want to exclude as negative keywords here

This approach allows you to: - Keep your product targeting focused only on the specific ASINs you want to target - Prevent your ads from showing up in search results - Maintain better control over where your advertising budget is spent

## Best Practices for Product Targeting

For effective product targeting campaigns:

1. Target competitors where you have a competitive advantage in terms of: - Better ratings and reviews - Superior product design - More competitive pricing

2. Always select "exact product targeting" instead of "expanded" when adding ASINs to ensure you're only targeting the specific products you want

3. Use campaign-level negative keywords to prevent your ads from appearing in search results

4. Remember that negative product targets should be added at the ad group level, while negative search terms must be added at the campaign level

This approach gives you complete control over your product targeting strategy, ensuring your ads appear exactly where you want them to and nowhere else.

## Contents: 0:00 - Introduction to the product targeting issue 0:53 - Example of a product targeting campaign 1:20 - Explanation of exact vs. expanded targeting 1:31 - Viewing the search terms report 2:46 - The problem with search terms in product targeting 3:05 - The solution: campaign-level negative keywords 3:27 - How to add negative keywords at the campaign level 3:37 - Final explanation of the proper campaign structure

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Transcript

Hi guys, in this video I would like to cover a situation where you have a product targeting campaign and you're hoping to target only your competitors or your own listings. And what you end up having is that actually you're spending not only targeting product pages of your competitors, but actually the keywords that they are ranked. And it can seem like there's no way out of this, but watch me explain how to do it. And by the end of this video, you'll be surprised how it's an easy fix. And I keep seeing people getting surprised that there's actually a solution to this. So bear with me. Here you can see a classic product targeting campaign where we're targeting competitors over we have some kind of a compet competitive advantage being the ratings, the reviews or just the quality of our product display pages. And it's uh we have a solid results. So these are all products in exact product targeting. So not expanded exact because we want to target these specific products. When you opt in, when you se new products to target and select expanded which is by default be careful. Then you will actually target all the similar products to the ones that you added. But if you want to target specific products, specific asens of your competitors, be sure to select exact product targeting. Now uh what we will end up having is that I will show you how the actual search term look like. So here we are in the search terms tab and what you can see here is that even though that we have product targets selected over here we can see the match product are actually okay and that aligns with what we want to target but there are plenty of search terms appearing over here which is not ideal. Even though that if we end up having good results on the on it, I mean, here's the sale after one click and it ended up with an a cost of 1% which is cool, but we don't want this. We want to target specific specifically product targets. We don't want to appear on search terms. And if you, for example, want to add this as a negative search term, you cannot do that. You can only select it and add it as a product target or as a native product target because this is product targeting campaign which is obvious that would make sense if I would if I want to exclude a certain product target and add it as a negative product. I think it was added this year no sorry not this year the 2024 last year and still I get surprised but by how many people are still not aware that there's an easy fix to this. So bear with me how we're going to do it. In negative targeting, you can see that we can only add certain asins here that we don't want to target. And there's no option to add negative search terms. But solution to this is just go one step higher and go to the campaign level negative keywords and you will see that there's actually that option available over there. I stepped away to the campaign level, as you can see, we are outside of the ad groups, but on on the campaign level, there's an option to add negative keywords. We already have one added here. So, just click add negative keywords. Add your negative keywords. And there you go. You will have your campaign structured correctly and excluded whatever you don't want to be there. So every such term needs to be excluded on a campaign level and every product target needs to be excluded product targeting level and that is ad group level. I hope you found this information useful. Pass it on to everybody and help them save a ton of money. I hope you enjoyed and see you next video. Bye-bye, guys.