The Ad Project

Key Takeaways

• Conquesting ad strategy is an offensive advertising strategy used on Amazon to target your competitors’ brand or product using either keywords or product targets. 
• Conquesting is a viable strategy if you have an advantage over your competitor.
• One way to select which competitors to target is through product research and development by knowing your main competitors.
• Another way to select your targets is by reviewing your auto campaigns and going through your search term report to identify ASINs leading to conversions.
• Brand analytics reports highlight solid substitutes and product compliments which is another great way to identify which competitors to target.
• Conquesting strategies can be implemented in all Sponsored Ads types.
• Other niche strategies to increase market share include catch-all campaigns and seeding campaigns.
• Catch-all campaigns can be used for auto and manual campaigns where all of your products are consolidated in a single ad group at a very low bid.
• Seeding campaigns are specific to manual campaigns where your products are grouped into different ad groups using keyword targeting to increase market share and discover new search terms at a low bid.

Overview

Outside of offering good quality, high value, and lowering your price, how do you really beat your competitors on Amazon and increase your market share? In this episode, we share our approach to offensive advertising strategies to help target your competitors and increase your market share. We also talk through other niche strategies like implementing catch-all and seeding campaigns to help capture more sales and find new targets.

Target Your Competitors on Amazon using Conquesting

To put it simply: Conquesting is when you target your competitors’ brands, keywords, or products to expand your market share. Conquesting can be done by targeting specific keywords that allow you to show up on the search results page, or by product targets which show your ads on product detail pages. Top of search is a great way to target your competitors’ brand because it is one of the highest converting placements overall. 

How To Find Competitors To Target? 

1. Product Research and Development: During the product research and development stage, you should have already identified your top competitors, assessed their products, and made fair comparisons with the product you are launching. Once you’ve got an advantage, whether this is price, reviews, or overall better listing quality, then you are in a great position to start utilizing conquesting strategies. 
2. Auto Campaigns (search term reports): Auto campaigns highlight different products that Amazon determines you should target. You can pull the ASINs that are converting into sales from your search term report and use those to help determine which competitors make the most sense.
3. Brand Analytics Report: This report breaks out potential ASINs or products to conquest into three different report types (market basket analysis, item comparison, and alternate purchase). This shows which products people are frequently comparing to your products. By analyzing the products’ relevancy, you’ll be able to identify which competitors you should target to increase market share. 

Other Niche Strategies Discussed

Catch-All Campaigns: This is where you set up auto and manual campaigns with super low bids. These campaigns include the full product catalog consolidated into a single ad group. We find that these campaigns, even at low bids, can still pick up volume and some clicks.

Seeding Campaigns: Seeding campaigns are very similar to catch-all campaigns where you’re using low bids. The difference is that you are grouping products together in a manual campaign using a single keyword relevant to your products, typically with phrase match at super low bids. This is another excellent way to increase market share but also to discover new search terms that shoppers are using to find your products.

Episode Highlights:

What is a conquesting ad strategy on Amazon? [01:37]

Ways to implement conquesting [02:37]

How to figure out which competitors to target? [06:10]

Implementing conquesting with all Sponsored Ad types [10:51]

Smaller Niche Strategies: Catch-All Campaigns [15:47]

Smaller Niche Strategies: Seeding Campaigns [21:03]