NEW AMAZON PPC TARGETING (UPDATE)
Over the last 5 years, both Meta (Facebook) and Google (incl. Youtube) have made a major shift in how they allow advertisers to target.
The old game of targeting was to select customer demographics (like age, gender, geography), interests (like 'digital marketing' or 'golf') and classifications (like 'homeowners' 'high income earners').
But over the course of the last 5 years, the major ad platforms have wound down or completely shut down this type of targeting. In its place, the platforms shifted to auto-targeting based on conversion events (like purchasing a product or submitting a form).
Amazon launched their ad platform much later than the other big players, and has followed predictably a lot of the same evolutions the other platforms have. This move to more auto targeting options being the latest.
Amazon has always had "automatic targeting" from the very first launch of Amazon PPC. But it has mostly been used by sellers as a form of real world keyword research. Not as a source of profitable sales. Exact keyword targeting, ASIN targeting, and category targeting is where most sellers make profitable sales.
But over the last 18 months though Amazon has begun going deeper on different forms of automatic targeting and conversion based targeting. Expanded ASIN targeting was one example of this, where Amazon allows you to input a seed ASIN to target based on what is already converting well, which it then uses to predict new ASIN targets.
In this latest update, first spotted by Sophie Senior Strategist Kevin Rodriguez, Amazon is now allowing us to target "keywords related to your product category". Seems to be similar to auto targeting but more restricted just to category related searches.
When expanded product targeting first came out just over a year ago, it worked really well. Still works well but since being widely adopted you don't get as crazy results as you did in the early days of the feature.
I wonder if this new targeting will be similar... thoughts?
We'll be testing.
