Sponsored Products, Brands, Display — formats and targeting at a glance.

Every Sponsored Ads campaign starts with two choices: which ad format and which targeting type. Together they determine what the creative looks like, where the ad can render, who is eligible to see it, and which bidding rules Amazon will apply on top of your bid. Get the combination wrong and no amount of bid tuning will save the campaign.

The three formats

Sponsored Products (SP). The workhorse. Single-ASIN ads that look almost identical to organic listings, eligible on search results and on competitor detail pages. Every Amazon advertising plan starts here. SP carries the lowest creative requirements, the largest inventory, and the most mature reporting.

Sponsored Brands (SB). Brand Registry only. Banner-style ads at the top of search with a brand logo, custom headline and up to three ASINs — or a video creative — directing shoppers to a Store page, a custom landing page, or the product detail page. SB is the format that owns the very top of the SERP and is the workhorse of brand defence.

Sponsored Display (SD). Brand Registry strongly recommended. Display creatives that render on Amazon detail pages, on the homepage, and off-Amazon. SD is the only format with true audience targeting — viewed-but-not-purchased, lookalike, in-market, custom audiences — and the only format that runs remarketing.

The three targeting types

Automatic targeting (SP only). Amazon decides which queries to match against the ad based on the product page. Four match buckets: close match, loose match, substitutes, complements. Auto campaigns are the harvesting engine — they discover converting queries you would never have written down — but they are not a strategy. Every auto campaign needs a manual sibling to graduate winning terms into.

Manual keyword targeting (SP, SB). You supply the keywords and the match types. This is where bid control and harvested-winner campaigns live. Section 12 onwards in this module is essentially a deep dive into manual keyword targeting.

Manual product / category targeting (SP, SB, SD). You supply ASINs or categories instead of keywords. SP and SB ads then appear on those targeted detail pages. This is the second-most powerful manual lever after keywords, and the one most operators under-use.

The format-targeting matrix

Not every combination is offered. SP supports all three; SB supports manual keywords and manual product/category; SD supports product targeting, audience targeting, and contextual targeting. That matrix is the first filter we will apply when an episode talks about a specific strategy: half the time, the strategy is only available in one format.

The default order for new accounts

Almost every new advertising plan should start with three campaigns, in this order. (1) A Sponsored Products auto campaign with a conservative daily budget — pure harvesting. (2) A Sponsored Products manual exact-match campaign seeded with the obvious head terms — your conversion engine. (3) A Sponsored Brands brand-defence campaign on your own brand name — the cheapest win in the account.

That three-campaign skeleton is what we will build over the next several episodes. Everything else — category targeting, conquesting, Sponsored Display remarketing, bid rules — sits on top of that foundation.

Why we don't recommend starting with Sponsored Display

SD looks tempting because it is the only format with audience targeting and the only format that runs remarketing. But two things make it the wrong starting point. First, SD requires a baseline of detail-page traffic to feed the remarketing audience — and that traffic has to come from somewhere first, usually SP. Second, SD reporting is thinner; without a working SP foundation you will have no benchmark to judge SD against. Build SP and SB first; bring SD in once those two have a month of data.