Amazon Rolling Out Improved Sponsored Ads Targeting
Digital marketers, rejoice! Amazon is rolling out a number of enhanced targeting features for Sponsored Ads. Read below for the full scoop on what’s coming out, and how to use these new features to grow your Amazon business.
More Targeting Control and Options for Sponsored Products on PDPs
Historically, Sponsored Ads have appeared on PDPs (Product Description Pages) with relevant product descriptions, with Amazon determining which pages met the criteria to be deemed relevant. Now, Amazon is rolling out the ability for advertisers to refine PDP targeting by price, brand, or rating. This puts more control over spend and ad placement in the hands of the advertiser. Moving forward, marketers can pursue more sophisticated targeting strategies by placing Sponsored Product ads on pages that have a better chance of converting. For example, advertisers could advertise their own 5-star rating product specifically on competitor pages with 3-star ratings.
Auto-Targeting: Negative Keyword Implementation
In current state with auto-targeting, an advertiser allows Amazon to target their ads to all searches that Amazon deems relevant based on product information. Essentially, it’s a “spray and play” tactic. The advertiser does not control which keywords are ultimately bid on, and more specifically, keywords that the advertiser does not want to bid on. Auto-targeting will continue to share ads to shoppers based on keywords and products, but will now allow advertisers to adjust these targeting options within campaign manager. Advertisers can now use the negative keyword targeting feature to prevent ads from appearing on specific search results or detail pages.
The two most relevant applications of the new auto-targeting capabilities are:
1.) The ability for advertisers to negative out keywords they are bidding on in other, non-auto targeted campaigns. For example, let’s say that the keyword “best running shoes” is consistently a top performing keyword for an advertiser. Employing search best practices, that advertiser should aim to maximize spend on that top performing keyword and understand the impression volume and demand. With the current targeting capabilities, both auto-targeted campaigns and the non-auto targeted campaigns could ultimately bid on that term, dividing the performance data between the two different campaigns. However, with this new feature, advertisers can proactively remove top performing keywords from auto-targeted campaigns so that they can have greater budget control, visibility into search volume, and ability to scale.
2.) The ability to negative out poor performing queries that do not meet advertisers’ performance goals. This will improve efficiency of the auto-targeted campaigns by giving advertisers the option to re-invest spend from poor performing auto-targeted keywords into the better performing keywords.
These are the first of a number of exciting updates Amazon will be rolling out starting November 2018. We will continue to provide updates on Amazon’s ad enhancements, and best practices to apply these new tools and drive results. If you’d like to learn more about how Rise can grow your Amazon advertising sales faster, contact us today.