ASIN Defense & Cross Promotion

Tired of seeing competitor’s ads on your listings? Kick them off! 

Updated june 2022

The majority of Amazon advertising impressions come from product pages, yet not all sellers leverage an ASIN Defense and Cross Promotion strategy. Here’s what defensive product targeting campaigns can accomplish: 

Sponsored Products ASIN Defense

With ASIN Defense and Cross Promotion Strategies, we are targeting our own products with ads from other products in our catalogue. This makes campaign creation pretty simple since you have a list of pre-determined targets. Here are a few different ad group strategies you may choose to leverage: 

Catch All Approach (All Products targeting All Products)

Typically bid lower than other ad groups. There are many product page placements, so this strategy can help fill more of the carousel with your own brand. If your products are highly similar, this may be the only ad group needed. 

Top Product Approach (Top Product targeting All Products)

Top products with high reviews and ratings provide strong offerings with good conversion rates. The purpose is to get your hero products in front of shoppers that may not commit to weaker offerings, while also pushing out competitors with strong offerings. This can also be used with a more direct substitute approach. 

Substitute Approach (Product Group 1 targeting Product Group 1)

This will be your go-to strategy when you have enough different listings of a consistent product type. Direct substitutes perform better than more diverse cross-category ads/targets. If you don’t have enough listings, think about other similarities, like color, audience, etc. 

Complementary Approach (Product Group 1 targeting Product Group 2)

Use this strategy to supplement the Substitute Approach. Often use Use this strategy to supplement the Substitute Approach. We often use this when there aren’t many substitutes and we can’t fill the carousel with same category products. This strategy increases awareness and units per order. 

Upsell Approach (High Cost Product targeting Low Cost Substitute)

Upsell cross promotion is effective when you have high-end offerings similar to low-price offerings. 

Example Products: Pens, Pencils, Pencil Sharpeners 

Sponsored Display ASIN Defense

One major opportunity that most sellers and agencies miss is to leverage Sponsored Display product targeting for ASIN defense/cross promotion. 

Leveraging Sponsored Display for cross-promotion is relatively simple: Mirror your Sponsored Products campaigns. Doing so provides two benefits: 1. Ease of creation – you’ve already designed the Sponsored Products campaigns, so you can reuse the same structure; 2. Integration of data – when Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display campaigns, ad groups, ads and targets align, performance can be evaluated as a series. 

Sponsored BRANDS ASIN Defense

There are fewer Sponsored Brands product targeting placements than with Sponsored Products, but Sponsored Brands cross promotion campaigns still tend to perform well. Much like Sponsored Display, we find that fewer sellers and agencies take advantage of Sponsored Brands Product Targeting. 

The most prominent SB product targeting placement appears under The most prominent SB product targeting placement appears under the “Brands related to this category on Amazon” heading on product pages. We recommend leveraging storefronts over product collection landing pages for cross promotion since storefronts allow more unique content that helps convert shoppers into buyers. 

Case Studies for ASIN Defense/Cross-Promotion

Targeting your own ASIN with product targeting often produces dramatic results. In one example, our ASIN Defense campaign produced $514k ad sales at just 11.3% ACoS in eight months. In this case, we leveraged a combination of Substitute, Top Product, and Upsell cross promotion tactics to dramatically increase conversion rates, which is a staggering 37% in this campaign. 

TL;DR