What is Product Targeting?

Product targeting buys placement against products instead of against queries. You name the ASINs you want to appear alongside, and your ad becomes eligible on those detail pages and on results pages where those products appear.

How the targeting is expressed

A product target is an expression rather than a phrase, which is why it reads differently in reports. The common forms are a specific ASIN, and an expanded form that lets Amazon extend to products it considers similar. In a reporting grid these arrive as a target expression and a match type, not as keyword text, so rows are labelled by their targeting type rather than by a name. Shurq's ad manager labels them this way deliberately, and its segment classifier separates product targets from category targets, auto clauses and keyword rows so that each is judged on its own terms.

Why it behaves differently from keywords

A keyword captures a shopper who has stated an intent. A product target captures a shopper who is already looking at a specific answer to that intent. The consequences are practical:

• Intent is high but attention is already committed, so conversion behaviour differs from search placements and should be compared like-for-like, not against your keyword average.
• The comparison the shopper makes is direct. Price, rating, review count and the main image do more work here than copy does.
• Reach is bounded by the target list, so scale comes from adding targets rather than from raising bids.

Worked example

Suppose you target a competitor ASIN and, over a month, it delivers £200 of ad sales from 100 clicks. Revenue per click is £2. At a target ACoS of 25% the target CPC is £2 × 0.25, or 50p. A second ASIN on the same list delivers half the revenue per click and therefore earns half the bid. Product targets are priced individually because they are individually different, in a way that a keyword's close variants usually are not.

Exclusions

Product targeting has its own negatives. You can exclude specific ASINs and, in the formats that support it, whole brands, which is how you stop paying for detail pages that never convert without abandoning the tactic. As with keywords, exclusion is for irrelevance. A target that converts at a poor ACoS is a bid problem.

Sequencing

Product targeting is normally a separate campaign in the stack, not a line inside a keyword campaign, because its economics and placement behaviour diverge from search. Mixing the two produces blended figures that hide both.