Product targeting (ASIN targeting)

Instead of a search term you bid on a target: one ASIN, or a browse-node category refined by brand, price, rating or Prime eligibility. The bulksheet grammar is strict — an expression carries an asin predicate or a category predicate, never both, and the brand, price, rating and prime-shipping refinements are legal only alongside category. Amazon documents the ads as eligible on the targeted product's detail page "as well as search result pages where the targeted product appears among the top search results" — eligible, not guaranteed, and Amazon names no specific detail-page slot. Do not read Sponsored Display across from this — Amazon's June 2022 release note has SD product targeting evolving into contextual targeting and expanding off Amazon onto web pages and apps: same vocabulary, different inventory.

So the hand-picked ASIN list most operators treat as their precision instrument is the blunt one — it cannot express "competitors rated under 4.0 and priced above me", and it goes stale the day a target fixes its reviews. A refined category target can, and it re-qualifies itself as prices and ratings drift. The other trap is discovery: Amazon documents the category route as the one whose search-terms report hands back the individual ASINs that drew clicks and conversions, ready to be refined into explicit targets, while an explicit ASIN target has nothing new to report. Run refined categories as the harvester, keep a small high-conviction ASIN layer beneath, and judge defensive self-targeting on incrementality, not the ACoS the console prints.