AMS - Keyword targeting versus product targeting

[notthatamanda]

Does anyone have an explanation for the difference in these?  The descriptions are the same when you click on Keyword targeting or product targeting.  It I put one of my books in it suggests "Contemporary Romance" as a category.  How is this different than if I did "Contemporary Romance" in a keyword campaign?  The learn more button takes you to a blank page on each.  If no one knows I'll ask them and post here if anyone else is interested.  Sorry for the crappy format below.

What AMS says:

Keyword targeting
Choose keywords to help your products appear in shopper searches.Learn more
Use this strategy when you know the search terms that customers use to search products similar to yours.

Product targetingbeta
Choose specific products, categories, brands, or other product features to target your ads. Learn more
Use this strategy to help shoppers find your product when browsing detail pages and categories or searching products on Amazon.

[123mlh]

With product targeting you should be able to target a specific book. So with keyword, for example, if you used "Dark Night" you'd get any book that was called Dark Night in part of the title. With product targeting you can actually target to Dark Night by Joe M. Smith, paperback version.

[notthatamanda]

Okay, that makes sense.  That's for the individual products option, within the product targeting.

If you choose categories within product targeting it says this:

Categories are products that are grouped by similarities, like women's running shoes.

So what does AMS do if you run a product targeting category on "Contemporary Romance" versus running a keyword targeted "Contemporary Romance".    I realize no one may know exactly, but I'm trying to puzzle it out.  Or I will ask them.   Thanks.

[123mlh]

Once you choose to target by category that way it gives you some more refined options, like targeting by star rating within that category, for example. And I believe it lets you exclude titles within a category as well. I've only played with it a bit.

[notthatamanda]

Ah - the little refine button, which I was blind to until now.  That gives you this (see below again, sorry for the formatting).    Thank you 123mlh.  I still have to puzzle this out, but I have some more clues now.

Brand
No brands available

Price range

Review star ratings
012345
0 - 5 stars

Products targeted: 56,726 - 94,544

Edit:  Double thanks actually.  This wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but being able to only advertise on a specific price range, that's like a dream come true, except I didn't know about the dream until now.   

[123mlh]

Glad you asked the question. It reminded me that I haven't experimented with that type of ad enough.

[LilyBLily]

These new ideas sound interesting, but today I couldn't even find the column on my AMS ads that said how much I was paying for clicks per keyword. Is that info missing? Or am I just not seeing it? I'm not inclined to take a flyer on something new when I don't know how something tried and true is behaving.

And speaking of that, for the past several days Amazon has announced in the early evening that one of my ads has used up all its budget and suggested I add a lot to it. This hasn't happened in months. I wonder why it's happening now? Long ago I decided it was a sucker move, but I did raise it yesterday. Not today, though. Nice to know my ad is NOT delivering most of tonight. *Sigh.*

[notthatamanda]

My columns are okay but if you are missing one hit the column button on the top right of the list of campaigns and you should be able to reset them.

I also got two campaigns out of budget yesterday, it happens to me sporadically, I usually raise them, but I didn't yesterday because over the past week I've been increasingly dissatisfied with performance.

[LilyBLily]

My columns are okay but if you are missing one hit the column button on the top right of the list of campaigns and you should be able to reset them.

I also got two campaigns out of budget yesterday, it happens to me sporadically, I usually raise them, but I didn't yesterday because over the past week I've been increasingly dissatisfied with performance.

Yeah, me, too. Can't see throwing down more money when nothing much is happening sales-wise. To me, this is just like doubling down at the casino.

[notthatamanda]

Is there anyway to get to that refine button on an existing campaign?  I just paged through all the tabs and couldn't see it, but maybe I just missed it.  Thanks.

Edit:  Nope, nevermind, that's for product not keywords.  I was confused, sorry.