8 Amazon Advertising Campaigns For a Superior Ad Strategy

Your Amazon ad campaigns can vary massively depending on your keyword types, targeting types, and the variety of SKUs available. Here are the eight most common types of Sponsored Products campaigns to run if you would like a pinch more of granularity beyond your Auto, Research, and Performance campaigns.

You can add campaigns in Adtomic, our Amazon FBA PPC tool, by clicking on the “Add Campaign” button in the top-right corner of your screen!

Research campaigns are the best for finding new relevant keywords as the market on Amazon evolves and shopper behavior changes. It helps with staying up to date with the latest and best-performing keywords, helping to inform future advertising decisions. Within your Research campaigns, it will typically include Auto campaigns & Broad Match Keyword campaigns.

In an Auto campaign, Amazon will target keywords and products that are similar to the product in your ad based on what they recognize as relevant within their own algorithm. Essentially, Amazon automatically finds relevant keywords and competitor ASINs that perform well for you.

You can create an Auto campaign in Adtomic by choosing “Quick” for your campaign builder type! It will quickly create Sponsored Product campaigns leveraging the Auto campaign to find targets. However, if you want to create several campaign types at once — We suggest you use the Guided campaign builder.

In a Broad Keyword campaign, keyword targeting is huge. YOU choose a set of keywords to target customer searches from, in which Amazon will only assist in targeting keywords that are specifically relevant to the keywords you have chosen. 

You would choose the Guided campaign builder if you were to build out several types of campaigns, including an Auto campaign!

This allows you to establish guardrails for your campaign, not Amazon. Broad match keywords do not target relevant ASINs similar to Auto though, it is strictly keywords. Based on your chosen keywords, it will target all of the keywords in any order which also includes plurals, variations, and any other related keywords.

Performance Campaigns will be where you house campaigns with keywords that are converting super well for you and add incremental sales to your business. You will typically house your Exact match keywords here.

These advertising campaigns will likely be your most important ones since these keywords will be where you house your most relevant, non-branded, category keywords that you specifically would like to target or have converted for in the past based on whatever criteria you have set. As these campaigns employ exact-match targeting, these keywords will only target customer searches that exactly match the keyword or sequence of keywords you choose.

Now, it’s time to get into our Market Share campaigns. I call them Market Share campaigns because these types of campaigns are specifically geared towards capturing more market share from your competitors by offering a better product! It’s an opportunity to show customers that there are other options like your products available. Within our Market Share campaigns, we have Product Targeting, Competitor Targeting, & Category Targeting campaigns.

Campaigns with Product Targeting will go after individual competitor ASINs that are relevant and/or similar to your product. This is done at the ASIN level. These campaigns will house any competitors that you’re directly competing with within your category and specific target market.

What is super nice about the Guided campaign builder is that it can set up your Auto, Broad, Exact, and Product Campaigns all at the same time!

To create a Competitor Targeting campaign, you’ll have to do that in Seller Central via the Amazon Advertising Console. To access the Advertising Console, you can either go to advertising.amazon.com or you can go to your Seller Central homepage, click into Advertising in the top bar of your screen and then click on Campaign Manager.

From there, creating an Amazon ad campaign is very simple. You click on the orange “Create Campaign” button.

Now, on to our Competitor Targeting campaigns! These campaigns should target branded keywords that belong to competitors within your category. It’s recommended to utilize phrase targeting for these keywords. Phrase targeting will target all keywords that contain the exact phrase or sequence of keywords based on the ones you have chosen. Example: If I am selling Nike Shoes, I would target  “Adidas shoes”, “Reebok shoes”, “Jordan shoes”.

Next, we have Category Targeting campaigns! These campaigns should target categories that are highly relevant to your product. Make sure to opt into “Product Targeting” when creating this kind of Amazon ad campaign in the Amazon Advertising Console since that’s where the category targets are available!

This method utilizes more of a blanket approach versus a product targeting campaign which is why it’s recommended that you refine the selection of products that you target within a category so that you can maximize your campaign’s effectiveness!

You can refine it by clicking into “Refine” within your selected category target!

From there, refine the products that your ad will be targeting within your category based on these criteria and your goals.

Finally, we have our Protective Campaigns. These are campaigns that are set up to protect your sacred market share as well as ensure that competitors do not have an opportunity to entice your customers away from your products. These will typically include Brand Targeting campaigns and Defensive Product Targeting campaigns.

Brand campaigns target branded keywords that belong to you within your category. It’s recommended to utilize phrase targeting for these keywords. Phrase targeting will target all keywords that contain the exact phrase or sequence of keywords based on the ones you have chosen. These campaigns will typically have the highest ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and lowest ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales) based on your customers’ search intent for your keywords. However, despite it not being very incremental in terms of sales, it is important to do so in order to not allow competitors to easily target your brand name and take away market share.

For example, if I am still selling all sorts of Nike Shoes, I would target “Nike shoes”, “Nike basketball shoes”, “Nike running shoes”, “Nike athletic shoes”, etc.

Lastly, Defensive Targeting campaigns employ Product Targeting but for your own ASINs. This helps take away advertising real estate from your competitors as well as an opportunity to offer different products to a customer that may be interested in your brand.

For example, I am on a Burt’s Bees Lip Balm Product Listing in the screenshot below… Take a look at how many of the Sponsored Products Ads that appear underneath the listing are of other Burt’s Bees products!

To recap, you can set up your Auto, Broad, Exact, and Product campaigns through Adtomic’s super easy Guided campaign builder and you can also go on to create your Competitor, Category, Branded, and Defensive campaigns within the Amazon Advertising Console for a robust advertising strategy!

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