Product Attribute Targeting for Sponsored Products

Amazon’s new targeting mechanism for Sponsored Products — Product Attribute Targeting (PAT) — allows you to expand your targeting reach beyond the use of keywords. As a reminder, keyword targeting allows you to choose keywords to show your products in customer searches, a strategy that you likely utilize when you know the search terms that consumers use to find items similar to yours.

With PAT, you can express the product pages where you want your ads to appear. For example, PAT offers granular targeting down to the level of specific product features, such as category (i.e. “women’s running shoes”), brand, price, star rating, or a set of ASINs similar to your advertised product. These granular attributes that can be targeted are known as “targeting clauses” and are identified by a target ID.

Essentially, with Product Attribute Targeting, you can express intent for where you want your ads to appear based on the attributes of the product you are able to specify. With more in-depth product targeting capabilities, it is easier to reach consumers as they search through results pages and product detail pages for specific products similar to yours. PAT ads, like Sponsored Product ads, can appear in the following locations:

• Search results pages
• Product detail pages
• Add-to-cart pages
• Checkout pages

Auto-Targeting Options With Product Attribute Targeting

All Sponsored Product campaigns using automatic targeting now come with enhanced targeting options, which are as follows:

• Close-match: Your ads will be matched closely to the search term.
• Loose-match: Your ads will be matched broadly to the search term.
• Substitutes: Your ads will be shown along with the substitutable products.
• Complements: Your ads will be shown along with affiliated products.

Final Thoughts

While Product Attribute Targeting has the potential to be extremely impactful, your products still need to be relevant to the search the user is performing. Be sure to use PAT on brands and products that are in the same category and have similar descriptions as the products you are advertising. With price and rating, Amazon will make sure to show your ads only when they are relevant to the search.

While an application of PAT that will be relevant to many sellers and vendors is capturing market share from competitors, you can also experiment with the mechanism to fulfill other advertising goals such as new product launches, profit generation, or brand awareness.