A seller who publishes books through Amazon KDP and runs Sponsored Products alongside them posted a report he had never run before. Like most advertisers, he says, he had only ever looked at ACOS at campaign level. This time he broke spend, clicks and purchases out by automatic targeting group across the whole account, 31 campaigns worth.
The strategy
Automatic Sponsored Products campaigns split delivery across four targeting groups: close match, loose match, substitutes and complements. Amazon reports on them separately, but only if you ask, and the campaign level numbers most people check roll all four together.
According to the post, the split was not close. Substitutes did almost all the work. Loose match produced a handful of sales. Close match produced barely anything. Complements had never converted a single time, not a low conversion rate but zero, across dozens of campaigns and real spend, and it had been quietly burning budget the entire time.
The part worth noting is why he never caught it. Campaign ACOS looked acceptable overall, so nothing prompted him to dig. The losing group was subsidised by the winning one inside the same number. He is upfront that this may be category specific and asks whether complements works better for other sellers, so treat the split as the method rather than the answer.
Why it works
Every ad platform now bundles several delivery mechanisms behind one campaign, and the blended metric on the surface is an average of things that behave nothing alike. An average stays healthy for a long time while one component contributes nothing, because the component that works keeps paying for the one that does not. Any dimension the platform will report on separately is a dimension where that subsidy can hide, and targeting group is the cheapest one to check on Amazon.
How to see which Amazon targeting type is wasting spend
In the advertising console, run the Sponsored Products targeting report over at least 90 days, then group by targeting group rather than by campaign. Put spend, clicks, orders and sales side by side for close match, loose match, substitutes and complements across the whole account, not one campaign at a time, so small campaigns aggregate into a readable sample. A group with meaningful spend and zero orders can be turned off in the automatic campaign settings or bid down to the floor. Then repeat the exercise with the other dimensions Amazon reports separately, placement and search term, before you touch bids anywhere.
Credit: u/ibeZargo on Reddit