I opened up a campaign last audit that was named non-branded, went into the targ
By Elizabeth Greene · October 2, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I opened up a campaign last audit that was named non-branded, went into the targeting, and half of what was active in there was ASIN targeting on the brand's own products.
Their own catalog.
A campaign named "non-branded" can still be full of branded targeting.
So when I'm bucketing branded versus non-branded, I don't look at campaign names at all.
I look at the keywords that are active, and then I look at the products being targeted.
Both.
Because a brand-name keyword is the easy one to catch, everybody catches that one.
The branded ASIN target sitting quietly in a product targeting campaign is the one that survives every cleanup, and it's usually been converting fine for months, so nobody flags it.
Product targeting on your own ASINs and product targeting on competitor ASINs look identical in a report.
Same campaign type, same kind of ACoS.
Targeting your own ASINs means paying to show up next to a shopper who already found you.
The rank hijack move is where you go target the products already ranked top five on the keyword you're pushing, and siphon traffic off their detail pages.
We gave that to a brand stuck mid page and about a month later they were sitting top two.
Mixed into one bucket, you can't tell which one is doing the work.
How much of your product targeting is pointed at your own ASINs right now?