Sponsored Display: Audience and Product Targeting Tactics
Two doors into Sponsored Display
Sponsored Display (SD) has no keywords. Every ad group is either audience-targeted or contextual (product) targeted, and the two cannot be mixed in one ad group.
Audience tactics use Amazon shopping signals: views remarketing (people who viewed your product or similar products), purchases remarketing (people who bought from your brand or a related category), and Amazon audiences such as in-market and lifestyle segments. Each audience has a fixed lookback window set by Amazon, so membership cannot be edited - you choose the audience, not the dates.
Contextual tactics target individual ASINs, categories, or categories refined by price, rating or brand. They are the SD equivalent of product targeting and suit conquesting, cross-sells and defensive placements.
Bidding and placements
SD bids are either CPC - optimized for page visits or conversions - or vCPM when optimizing for reach. Ads can appear on product detail pages, the Amazon home page, customer review pages and other surfaces, so placement-level reporting matters when costs look odd.
Eligibility
Brand-registered sellers and vendors, in-stock and buyable products, and a compliant creative asset (logo plus optional custom image and headline). Audiences built on brand data require brand ownership.
Traps
The classic trap is treating SD like a keyword channel and hunting for search terms; the report shows targets and audiences, not query-level intent. Another is assuming remarketing reaches everyone who ever viewed the product - the lookback window is finite. A third is choosing vCPM for a direct-response goal, which makes ACOS incomparable to CPC campaigns.
Rule of thumb
Start SD with a defensive ASIN target on your own listings plus one views-remarketing audience, then expand to category targeting only after CVR is stable.