The e-Comas quick guide to Amazon Ads targeting strategies

You have never sold in a more competitive environment than Amazon in the year 2025. 

With thousands of sellers wielding increasingly impressive tools to capture shoppers, your strategy for targeting ads towards your audience plays a major part in your Amazon success. 

Luckily, you have a high level of control over who sees your ads, and where: by using data combined with clever tactics, you can make every penny of your ad spend work harder.

Here’s our quick guide to Amazon Ads targeting strategies: the main strategies, their benefits, and how to use the data available to get more out of your ads targeting. 

What is targeting in Amazon Ads? 

Targeting in Amazon Ads involves selecting who sees your ads (for example, shoppers searching specific keywords, browsing categories, or viewing products) and where (eg. search results and product pages). 

It’s about placing your product in front of high-intent Amazon shoppers to drive sales while controlling costs.

The benefits are manifold: 

• High intent shoppers, often ready to buy 
• Control of ad spend
• You can optimise ads depending on your goals - eg. for a low Advertising Cost of Sales (ACOS), or a higher Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). 
• Brand growth and market share (you can increase visibility on competitive products, for example, by using relevant generic keywords).

e-Comas insight: Targeting competitor ASINs in Sponsored Display generates +15% conversions in average, which is often missed with a keyword-only strategy.

Different types of Amazon Ads targeting 

Targeting on Amazon broadly falls under two types: automatic and manual. 

Automatic targeting is algorithmically controlled by Amazon. Keywords are chosen based on both products similar to yours, and shopper searches related to your product information.

The benefit is that it’s quick, and especially useful for beginners: you can set it up in a few clicks. We recommend it for launching new ad campaigns with no historical data, as it will help you find an audience and create data for you to fine-tune your targeting later. 

On the other hand, automatic targeting gives you less control over your ad spend, which is the great benefit of manual targeting.

Manual targeting is for more advanced sellers with more experience of targeting. It allows you to choose different match types for keywords, and choose categories, products, brands, or features related to your product.

Manual targeting gives you more control over both your ad spend, and your Share of Voice - that is, the percentage of visibility your product has in a specific keyword or category compared to your competitors.

On the other hand, manual targeting can limit queries if your targeting is too narrow; for example, if you’re using long-tail keywords. But in that case, you can tweak your campaign: that’s the beauty of manual targeting.

How to optimise your targeting 

Once you’ve got the basics right, there are many ways you can start to tweak your bids to optimise your campaigns, and manage your ad spend effectively. 

Try these:

• Bid by placement. Prioritising top-of-search, for example, usually brings better results in terms of ROAS.
• Bid by keyword. We recommend a slightly-but-often approach to increasing or decreasing your keyword bids, to get the balance right between ad spend and objective (eg. ROAS). 
• Analyse Share of Voice. If your SOV is high, there’s no need to increase bids as demand is already captured.
• Dynamic bidding. Start with ‘up’ and ‘down’ at campaign level, then when achieving a level of maturity, move to ‘down only’ to have better control over your cost-per-click (CPC).
• Seasonal adjustments. During events, such as Black Friday and Prime Day, CPCs are usually higher. We suggest increasing by at least 20%, and monitoring multiple times a day during the event, to make sure you generate visibility, at least on performing targetings.

How to use negative keywords

Negative keywords make adverts even more finely targeted, preventing wasted spend. 

We often see 70-80% of the search terms generating 0 conversions, which represents, on average, 35-40% of the ad spend.

To prevent that waste, use negative keywords. They work like this: you add them to your campaign to prevent shoppers searching for those keywords from seeing your ad.

For example, if you’re selling bluetooth headphones, you might include ‘wired headphones’ in your negative keywords to ensure you’re not wasting ad spend on a shopper who is very unlikely to buy your product. 

How to leverage search term reports

At e-Comas we make great use of Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to analyse our clients’ audience data and fine-tune campaigns. But even without AMC, Amazon provides plenty of useful data and reports to help you. 

One of the most useful is the search term report, which is a great place to start if you’re new to Amazon Ads targeting. 

These reports break down the performance of each search term by both targeting ASINs and keywords. They should indicate the right CPC to start with: we don’t recommend relying on suggested bids from Amazon. 

Use search term reports to find new performing keywords to add to your manual targeting, as well as irrelevant search terms to add as negative keywords. 

As always, if you need any help selling and advertising on Amazon, the experts at e-Comas are ready for your call!

With thanks to Tiffany Lemprière, e-Comas’s Head of Performance Marketing, who co-wrote this blog.