Competitor Conquesting: How We Target Competitor Products and Build COMP Campaigns

Competitor conquesting is an Amazon advertising strategy in which we target relevant competitor ASINs directly inside our Sponsored Products campaigns. In the example above, our product would appear on or near the competitor's product page, in the “Sponsored” carousel a shopper sees while comparing options.

Amazon Ads describes product targeting as a way to reach shoppers by specific products, categories, brands or product features, and lists conquesting targeting a competitor's products as one way to use it. Because Sponsored Products supports manual product targeting, we can choose exactly which ASINs and categories to bid on, rather than relying on keyword matching alone.

The goal is to put our product in front of a shopper who has already shown intent for this type of product they're on a competitor's listing, actively comparing features, price and reviews. That's a very different, more qualified moment than a cold keyword search.

We start by building a shortlist of products that are realistic alternatives to ours, not just anything in the same category. A product makes the shortlist when it is:

Every shortlisted competitor is then reviewed against the same set of factors, so we can compare candidates fairly:

We don't simply go after the biggest competitor by review count. A market leader with 5,000 reviews may be a poor target if there's no realistic way for a shopper to prefer our listing once they land on it we look for targets that are relevant and commercially sensible.

Before a competitor ASIN goes into a campaign, we weigh it against a consistent set of questions:

B0COMP005 gets an aggressive test despite a lower rating than ours, because a 3.8★ competitor with meaningful reviews is exactly the kind of gap a stronger listing can exploit. B0COMP006, on the other hand, has a high rating but low category relevance and a high price gap enough reasons to start it at lower priority rather than rule it out completely.

Once targets are selected, the campaign build follows the same structured path every time:

Keeping competitor targets in their own, clearly named campaigns makes it easy to see exactly which ASINs are generating impressions, clicks, orders, sales and spend without that data blending into keyword or category performance. Amazon Ads recommends structuring campaigns so monitoring and optimization stay clear, and advises against mixing different targeting strategies in ways that make KPIs harder to read.

Not every competitor ASIN earns the same treatment after launch. Once a target has collected enough data, we place it into one of three groups:

These calls are made on enough data to be meaningful not by reacting to a handful of clicks in the first few days.

Competitor conquesting can't be copied blindly from one marketplace to another. A target that performs well in one country can behave very differently in the next, because competition, pricing, shopper behavior, listing language, availability and auction conditions all vary.

These aren't universal rules they're the practical checks our team runs through whenever a campaign is being localized to a new marketplace.

Before an ASIN goes live in a COMP campaign, it needs to clear this list: