The Ultimate Guide to Amazon Category Targeting Campaigns

What is Amazon Category Targeting? Amazon Sponsored Ads have a vast range of targeting options to reach prospective customers on the Amazon marketplace. Selecting the most suited targeting options helps you to achieve your campaign objectives.

Manual Targeting offers marketers an advertising opportunity with a vast number of strategic possibilities available. Choosing multiple features of Manual Targeting campaigns and creating them can help you achieve your goals, such as increasing sales with low ACoS, visibility, and brand awareness.

One of the great ways to advertise your products is through Amazon Category Targeting campaigns. It’s a feature of Manual Targeting campaigns. However, they are not keyword-based. 

Amazon Category Targeting

Amazon Category Targeting campaigns can be created for any product type and are displayed on product detail pages which presents great potential for advertisers. Placing an ad directly on your competitor’s product page is a great way to increase your sales!

Advertisers can use these targeting capabilities to help shoppers find your products while browsing detail pages and categories on Amazon.

Amazon Category Targeting Benefits

Sponsored Products Category Targeting campaigns can help you achieve business goals such as:

• Category Growth - target relevant categories to grow your market share
• Consideration - target related or close categories to drive consideration
• Awareness - target several categories and subcategories to maximize reach strategy

Amazon Category Targeting allows advertisers to capitalize on the massive inventory of highly granular categories on Amazon. When creating this feature of Sponsored Products campaigns, Amazon will display all suggested categories based on the product you have chosen to advertise. If you want to add more relevant categories, you can manually search through all the categories Amazon offers and select them individually. Once you choose all categories that you want to target, you can adjust the bid for each individual targeted category. 

Amazon will provide you with a suggested bid range calculated from a group of winning bids for product ads similar to the one you’re promoting. It’s beneficial, especially if you don’t have any advertising experience in a specific category. After clicking on the refine button, there are plenty of options for you to adjust and select. It’s optional, and Amazon doesn’t require you to fill in everything, but it can help you with your advanced advertising strategy. 

In the image below, you can see all the options Amazon offers to create more precise campaigns. 

You have an option to refine your targeting by specific brands, price range, shipping, and star ratings. It means that you can target a particular brand with a particular number of stars and within the price range of your product. There is an option also to exclude certain brands or specific products that you don’t want your ad to appear on. 

Here are unique methods to maximize your control over the ad spend for these campaigns and make them more profitable!

Tips for a Successful Amazon Category Targeting Campaign

Most Amazon Category Targeting campaigns are created by selecting star ratings from 0 to 5. It means that with your product, you will target all competitors within the chosen category with star ratings from 0 to 5. Having a campaign that targets the whole category is hard to optimize, so it often happens that campaigns have a good number of sales but with really high ACoS. Decreasing bids, in this case, will also have a significant effect on sales, so with decreasing bids, we will reduce spend, as well as sales. It isn’t something that we’re looking for when creating campaigns. Despite this common issue, we have a perfect solution for you!

When creating Amazon Category Targeting campaigns, we always separate the star ratings into five new subcategories (0-1, 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 4-5), which we leave in the same ad group. By creating a Sponsored Product Category Targeting campaign in this way, we can control each subcategory individually and have more precise bidding optimization. Each subcategory will have its metric and performance, according to which we’ll increase or decrease bids if needed. In case one of those subcategories isn’t performing well, we can simply pause it. 

It’s better to have the other four performing well instead of none. 

With Amazon Category Targeting as a feature of Sponsored Products ads, you will be able to get more control by choosing your ad placement.

Except for targeting all competitor ASINs within the selected category, there is one more option available that can help you improve your campaigns even more. Amazon Category Targeting campaigns can help you find new competitors through which you achieved sales. The best practice is to use these campaigns for collecting new competitors for your ASIN Targeting campaigns. Amazon Category Targeting campaigns are fully supported with reporting. You should collect all converting competitors with good ACoS through positive harvesting, negate them in the Category Targeting campaign, and then target into ASIN Targeting campaigns with a bid that is a little higher than the CPC. By doing this, you will have even more control over your spend and bids.

One more way to optimize your Amazon Category Targeting campaign, except for bidding optimization, is through negative harvesting. By performing this type of optimization, you will find and collect all competitors that were only generating spend in the previous period and negate them to stop unnecessary spending.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we shared insights on optimizing Category Campaigns and getting more control over your ad spend and bids. Take a close look at the tips and see how you can conquer your competition and place your products in the spotlight. 

Amazon continues to enhance its advertising solutions, and brands must seize this opportunity to build a loyal customer base. When used effectively, Sponsored Product Ads help you to win your competitors’ traffic. Your goals and strategy dictate how to create and manage your campaign.

If you need help with managing your campaigns on Amazon, book a completely FREE audit, and we’ll point out what needs to be changed in your account to let your brand reach more customers and sales. 

About the author

Marija is a Junior PPC Specialist at Sellers Alley. Previous work in the client relations industry has given her precious insights to dive into the Amazon world with ease. She is a valuable team player and a great colleague. Sharp-minded and innovative, she’s always on the lookout for new industry knowledge!