Amazon advertising has a vocabulary problem. The same idea has three names depending on which screen you are on, and a few terms mean something different from what they sound like.

This is the vocabulary the rest of the training assumes. Learn it once and every later article gets easier.

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-ppc-terms-explainer-v2-63e64238.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? One hundred and seventeen seconds on the four campaign types, the three match types, and the two attribution windows that decide how everything reads.*

![Create campaign: the ad type you pick first](/kb-assets/shot-amz-create-type-bae355.png)

## **The campaign types**

Amazon's campaign chooser offers four self-service types, plus one in beta. Three of them account for nearly all of most sellers' spend.

**Sponsored Products (SP)** — a single product, shown in search results and on product pages, looking much like an organic result. This is the one that most directly moves organic rank for a keyword, and for most sellers it is the majority of spend. It now also offers **Amazon Business** and **Across retailers** variants, which place the same ads in front of business buyers and beyond Amazon respectively.

**Sponsored Brands (SB)** — a banner with your logo, a headline and several products, at the top of search. It sells the brand rather than one item. **Sponsored Brands Video** is a format inside SB, not a separate type.

**Display (SD)** — targets *people* rather than searches, on and off Amazon. Retargeting and audience work lives here. Amazon labels it simply **Display** in the chooser, though it is still Sponsored Display everywhere else.

**Streaming TV** — video ads on premium streaming such as Prime Video, sold self-service with no minimum spend. It is a brand-awareness buy, and it is the newest of the four.

**Full-Funnel Campaigns**, currently in beta, is not a fifth ad type so much as an orchestrator: it runs display, video and sponsored formats together and decides the mix for you.

**A note on what this training covers.** SP, SB and SD are what the rest of these articles mean by "the three ad types" — they share the sponsored-ads reporting, and they are what **TrackIQ** ingests under **Amazon Ads**. Streaming TV is bought and measured more like Amazon DSP than like a sponsored campaign, so it is judged on reach and new-to-brand rather than ACoS.

## **Targeting, and why match types matter**

Sponsored Products has two targeting modes, and the distinction runs through everything else.

**Automatic targeting** — Amazon decides what to show you against, in four buckets: **close match**, **loose match**, **substitutes** and **complements**. Cheap to launch, useful for discovery, imprecise.

**Manual targeting** — you decide, either by keyword or by product.

Manual keyword targeting has three match types:

| Match type | Triggers on | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| **Exact** | that phrase, near enough | your proven winners |
| **Phrase** | the phrase inside a longer search | controlled expansion |
| **Broad** | the words in any order, plus related | discovery |

Manual product targeting comes in two shapes: **exact** (a specific ASIN, or a category) and **expanded**, which reaches out to products Amazon judges similar.

**Do not mix match types in one campaign.** It is the single most common structural mistake. Once broad and exact share a campaign you can no longer tell which one earned the sale, and you cannot bid them differently, which was the entire point of separating them.

## **Where the ad appears: placements**

**Top of Search** — the first row of results. Converts best, costs most.

**Rest of Search** — further down. Cheaper, usually most of your impressions.

**Product Pages** — on someone else's detail page. A different intent entirely: the shopper was looking at something else.

Amazon lets you bid these differently with placement multipliers. See [**Placements: Top of Search vs Rest of Search**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/placements-top-of-search).

## **Bidding strategies**

Three, and the names undersell the risk.

**Dynamic bids — up and down.** Amazon may raise your bid by as much as 100% when it predicts a conversion. That is Amazon deciding how much of your money to spend.

**Dynamic bids — down only.** Amazon lowers the bid when a conversion looks unlikely, never raises it. The safe default.

**Fixed bids.** Your bid, always. Useful when you are deliberately gathering clean data.

**Start on down-only** unless you have a specific reason not to. Up-and-down can work on proven exact-match campaigns; it is a poor place to begin.

## **The metrics, and the two that get confused**

![The metric columns as TrackIQ reports them](/kb-assets/shot-adv-campaigns-view-77ace2.png)

| Term | Is | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| **Impressions** | times shown | not a goal |
| **Clicks / CTR** | clicks, and clicks ÷ impressions | low CTR is usually the image or price |
| **CPC** | spend ÷ clicks | rises with competition |
| **Orders / CVR** | orders, and orders ÷ clicks | low CVR is the listing, not the ad |
| **Spend / Sales** | money out, ad-attributed money in | |
| **ACoS** | spend ÷ ad sales | judges the *advertising* |
| **TACoS** | spend ÷ **total** sales | judges the *business* |
| **ROAS** | ad sales ÷ spend | the inverse of ACoS |

**ACoS and TACoS are the pair people mix up.** ACoS asks whether the ads are efficient. TACoS asks how dependent the business has become on them. A campaign can hold a fine ACoS while TACoS climbs, which means advertising is buying a larger share of a shrinking organic base.

Full definitions in [**Glossary: ACoS, TACoS, ROAS, NTB and Every Other Column**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/glossary-of-trackiq-and-amazon-metrics) and [**Understanding ROAS and Key Amazon Advertising Metrics**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/understanding-roas-and-key-amazon-advertising-metrics).

## **Attribution: why nothing adds up**

A click today can produce a sale days later, and Amazon credits it backwards to the click.

**Sponsored Products: 7 days. Sponsored Brands, Display and DSP: 14 days.**

Two consequences you will meet constantly:

**Recent days always look worse than they were.** Attribution has not finished landing. Judge nothing on the last few days.

**The sponsored ad types cannot simply be added together.** They use different windows and one shopper can touch several ads. See [**Why Sponsored Products, Brands and Display Numbers Do Not Simply Add Up**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/why-sp-sb-and-sd-numbers-dont-add-up).

## **Keyword or search term?**

Worth separating now, because it causes trouble later.

**A keyword** is what you chose to bid on.

**A search term** is what a shopper actually typed.

Under broad and auto targeting they are frequently different phrases. Everything you learn about harvesting depends on that gap. See [**Search Terms and Aggregated Search Terms**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/search-terms-and-aggregated-search-terms).

## **Where to see all of this**

Campaigns are built in Amazon's Ads console. They are *read* in TrackIQ, which pulls every ad type into one place with the same columns and date controls:

**Amazon Ads → Campaigns** for the top level, then **Ad Groups**, **Keywords**, **Targets**, **Product Ads**, **Search Terms**, **Placements** and **Audiences** beneath it.

See [**Monitoring Your Sponsored Ads Performance**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/monitoring-your-sponsored-ads-performance).

## **Related**

- [**Keywords and Match Types**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/keywords-and-match-types) — match types in depth.
- [**Understanding ROAS and Key Amazon Advertising Metrics**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/understanding-roas-and-key-amazon-advertising-metrics) — the metrics in depth.
- [**Time to Conversion: Checking Your Attribution Window**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/time-to-conversion) — measuring your real window.
- [**What Amazon PPC Is Actually For**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/what-amazon-ppc-is-actually-for) — why any of this matters to profit.
- [**Profit Campaigns and Ranking Campaigns**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/profit-campaigns-and-ranking-campaigns) — the two jobs a campaign can have.