Expanded product targeting: cheaper clicks, far fewer buyers
In a Sponsored Products campaign you can target product pages instead of searches. You give Amazon an ASIN, and your ad shows on that product's page and in its search results. When you add an individual product, the console offers two options:
- Exact: your ad targets that one product.
- Expanded: your ad targets that product and products Amazon considers similar to it.
Expanded sounds like the same thing with more reach. On the accounts we measured, it brought cheaper clicks and far fewer buyers.
The measured numbers below come from real accounts: 10 advertiser accounts in Europe and the US with product targets, Sponsored Products targeting report from March 28 to October 1, 2026. We left out the last 7 days because ad-attributed sales are not final yet. We compared ratios only inside one currency, and account by account inside one account and currency.
Product targets are a quarter of the money
In the euro accounts product targets took 23.6% of Sponsored Products spend. Exact product targets sold at 37.9% ACOS, which is close to automatic campaigns (37.2%) and keywords (40.4%) in the same accounts. So product targeting is not a side experiment. It is a real part of the budget.
Compared account by account: there were 10 account and currency pairs where exact product targets had at least 50 clicks. In 7 of them, exact product targets had a lower ACOS than the keywords of the same account. In 3, keywords did better.
Exact against expanded
In the euro accounts:
- An exact product target click cost 0.59 euros, an expanded one 0.34 euros.
- 8.2% of exact clicks became an order. Of expanded clicks, 1.9% did.
- Exact sold at 37.9% ACOS, expanded at 45.5%.
There were 7 account and currency pairs where both exact and expanded targets had at least 50 clicks. In all 7, exact converted clicks to orders at a higher rate. In 3 of the 7, expanded targets brought no sale at all.
An example from one account: exact product targets had 3,068 clicks and 381 orders, at 0.61 euros per click and 38.6% ACOS. Expanded targets had 380 clicks and 6 orders, at 0.25 euros per click and 94.4% ACOS. The expanded click cost less than half as much. But about one in 8 exact clicks became an order, against one in 63 expanded clicks.
Most of the spend on expanded targets did not sell
We looked at each target on its own (one ASIN in one ad group), in the euro accounts:
- 352 exact targets spent money. 97 of them brought at least one sale. Targets without any sale took 16.1% of exact spend.
- 298 expanded targets spent money. 27 of them brought at least one sale. Targets without any sale took 42.1% of expanded spend.
The sales are also concentrated on the exact side. The 35 exact targets with the most orders (one in ten) brought 83.7% of exact product target orders.
The same product, both ways
The cleaner test is the same ASIN in the same account, targeted both exact and expanded. We found 162 such pairs. 12 of them had at least 20 clicks on both sides, in 3 accounts. Here the gap was smaller: exact converted better in 7, expanded in 4, and one pair had no sale on either side.
So part of the gap above is not the switch itself, but which products went into each form. The data does not show why the advertisers chose them that way. The practical result is the same: an expanded target needs its own check, it does not inherit the numbers of the product you typed in.
What we could not see
The targeting report does not show which similar product an expanded click came from. It also does not show the bid behind each target, so we cannot say how much of the cheaper click is the lower bid. We did not test what happens to sales if you switch a target from expanded to exact. Category targets were too few to judge: 23 clicks, no sale. And the purchases in the report are counted for 7 days after the click.
Thirty minutes for your product targets
- Open the Sponsored Products targeting report for the last 60 days, ending 7 days ago. The targeting text of a product target starts with "asin=" (exact) or "asin-expanded=" (expanded). Filter for these two.
- Sum both groups separately: clicks, spend, orders. Compare the conversion rate (orders divided by clicks) before you compare cost per click.
- List the expanded targets that spent money and never sold. Add up their spend. If it is a large part of your expanded spend, the cheap click is not saving you money.
- For a product that sells as an expanded target, add it as an exact target too, and watch the two side by side for a few weeks.
- Pause expanded targets that have spent twice your product price without a sale. Judge the ones that sell by their ACOS.
The expanded option reaches more product pages for less per click. It also reaches products you did not choose, so judge it by its own orders.