Features
Navigating Amazon Advertising can seem quite overwhelming with all the diverse features it offers–but it’s so worthwhile! One of the simplest campaigns to set up, though, is a Sponsored Display ad with automatic targeting, so even if you’re a beginner, you can benefit from trying it out.
Ready to find out more about how you can effectively use Amazon automatic targeting to build your ads? In our MerchJar guide, we’re going to share our best advice to help you make the most out of this useful feature.
Automatic targeting is an ad feature that allows Amazon to decide where and when to display a product ad. With this ad targeting type, Amazon’s algorithm focuses on keywords that are relevant to various elements of a product listing, such as the title and description.
When you’re using automatic targeting, you won’t have to worry about optimizing your ads yourself. Amazon will take care of it by collecting data from customers’ purchases and adjusting the ads accordingly to make sure you increase your conversions and click-through rates. This makes it more appealing to PPC beginners compared to manual targeting, where you’ll need a more extensive background in using online ads. However, automated targeting doesn’t give you as much control over your advertising performance as manual targeting does.
A superior benefit of automatic targeting, though, is that you can get insights into new relevant keywords and search terms that generated clicks in your running ads to include in your future ad campaigns.
Amazon sellers can choose from four different match types when creating Sponsored Product campaigns with automatic targeting:
With Close Match, your products are shown to customers who use search terms that are very closely related to your products. For example, if you sell gel nail polish, close match terms could be ‘red gel nail polish’ or ‘gel nail polish kit’.
With Loose Match your products are shown to customers who use search terms that are loosely related to your products. For example, if you sell manicure sets, loose match terms could be ‘UV nail lamp’ or ‘nail files’.
Substitutes show ads to customers who visit product pages of products similar to yours. This would usually be the same type of product, just sold by a different brand. For example, Nike tennis shoes instead of Adidas tennis shoes.
Complements show your ads to customers who are visiting product pages of items that complement yours. For example, if you sell dog beds, the complementary product could be a dog bowl.
A fortunate part about this structure is that you can individually enable or disable each target group. You can also place separate bids and get individual reports of impressions, clicks, sales, ACoS, and more.
Now that we’ve covered the basics and benefits of Amazon automatic targeting, let’s look at the ways you can effectively use it for your campaigns.
When setting up your automatic campaign from your Amazon ads dashboard–as we mentioned–it’s relatively simple. The first thing you’ll need to do is input your campaign name, portfolio, start and end date, daily budget, and select automatic targeting.
Now, you can set your bids. For automatic ads, you’ll get two options for this:
You’d benefit from selecting “Set bids by targeting group” because you’ll find that as your campaign runs, your bids can vary widely between each of the four target groups.
Next, you’ll need to choose your bidding strategy. For automatic campaigns, you’ll get to choose from three bidding options:
To maintain your ad spend budget, we recommend you select ‘Dynamic Bids: Down Only’ as your default setting. Once you’ve had some time to collect data from your automatic campaign and see good performance, then you can try out ‘Dynamic Bids; Up & Down’.
You can boost your bidding strategy further by using an effective Amazon ad automation tool like MerchJar. It includes a powerful feature called Smart Bids that will help you with daily bid adjustments, based on your criteria, so that you can always meet your ACoS targets.
The final step to building your customized automatic campaign is to include negative keywords so that you won’t waste any of your initial ad spend on placement for keywords that don’t match your goals.
If any previous campaigns of yours have shown that certain keywords take a large chunk of your budget without converting, consider adding those as negative keywords for your next campaign.
After you’ve launched your campaign and it’s been running for at least a week, you can start to monitor your performance. If you’re a brand-registered seller on Amazon, you’ll have access to the Brand Analytics Dashboard where you can see an overview of your campaign performance.
Using Amazon automatic targeting for your campaigns is clearly a great strategy if you’re just starting out with your ad campaigns. We hope our guide has given you a great formula to help you get the best ROI for your Amazon marketing efforts.
If you want to spend more time perfecting your product listings, you can consider using powerful Amazon ad automation software like MerchJar. It’s a perfect tool if you have a lot of products to sell and a lot of ads to create. Your advertising efforts will be on autopilot, and your bid adjustments will be perfectly optimized to make sure you get the ROI you deserve. Try the 30-day free trial today!
