A Beginner’s Guide to Manual Targeting Amazon PPC Campaign

In December 2018 Amazon announced roll out of new targeting tools for Sponsored Products which allow you to reach shoppers when they go to detail pages or search results looking for products like yours. You can use manual targeting to aim your ads towards specific ASINs, product categories, and search keywords. And when you use automatic targeting, you can control your default bid settings and Amazon will automatically adjust targets based on your ad's performance.

In other words, in addition to targeting by keywords, you can now target by products. With product targeting you can efficiently target single ASINs or categories. You can narrow down by brand, star rating and categories. In this guide I will walk you through this process step by step and explain how to set up you Product / Category Targeting Manual Sponsored Ads Campaign in Amazon.

Step 1 – Choose Your Campaign type: Select Sponsored Products Campaign .

Step 2 – Create Your Campaign

• If you created portfolios, you can assign your campaign to existing Portfolio.
• Select Start and End date for you campaign
• Set Daily Budget
• Choose Manual Targeting

Step 3 – Select Your Product: You can select your entire catalog or specific ASIN. Amazon will automatically provide you with the product list

Step 4 – Choose your Bidding Strategy: You can select Dynamic bids - down only, Dynamic bids - up and down or Fixed bids. If you selected Dynamic Bids options, Amazon will lower / raise your bids in real time when your ad is more/less likely to convert to sale.

Step 5 – Choose Targeting:  I recommend testing out all 3 types of manual campaigns. If you have a list of best performing keywords, you can chose Keyword Targeting. If you want to target specific category or ASINs, select Product Targeting. 

Within Product Targeting you have two options – Categories and Individual Products. You can also set up one campaign that will target both Categories and Specific ASINs. Usually you will have a list of categories suggested to you. But you can also search for best category manually. 

Once you select the category, you need to refine your choices by Brand, Price and Star Rating. 

If you would like to target specific ASINs, you can either use suggested ASINs or search for specific ASINs. Finally, you can exclude specific brands and ASINs from your campaign. 

I recommend running any campaign at least for a week before making any changes.