A product targeting campaign built to advertise your own product on your other own ASINs' listing pages, denying competitors a placement slot on your own listings.
The apparent cost — some clicks that might have converted organically anyway — is reframed as insurance rather than cannibalization: losing the slot to a competitor entirely is treated as the true (and much larger) cost, since a lost sale to a competitor is effectively infinite ACOS on that unit. Rawlings frames brand defense as a response to an adversarial default state ("people are doing this to you"), not a purely proactive tactic.
Built with the same mechanics as Manual Product Targeting (Category vs. Individual ASIN), but the target list is drawn from your own catalog instead of competitors'. Its mirror image is Offensive Competitor-Brand Targeting ("Sniping"), which targets a rival's ASINs instead.
Brand-defense campaigns — targeting your own ASINs — are worth running even when they generate zero sales, because their purpose is purely to occupy competitor ad space rather than to convert. Cover the surface broadly: keyword targeting, product targeting, and category targeting, run across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display simultaneously. One of four recurring campaign types in a lean, PPC-only launch that hit $100K revenue in 90 days at 14% average ACOS.
Beyond individual-ASIN product targeting, brand defense can be run as a full matrix: keyword targeting, product targeting, and category targeting, each launched across all three ad formats (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display). The goal is occupying ad space adjacent to your own listings so competitors can't buy in, not generating sales — "We would actually pay to have these ads live, even if they produced zero sales at all, solely for the purpose of pushing out the space for competitors to take our sales." Any resulting sales are a bonus, not the objective. Sellers who skip these campaigns out of fear of cannibalizing their own organic sales are dismissed as overly cautious: "Some people don't use these campaigns cuz they're afraid of cannibalization or whatever. That's totally ridiculous." See Self-Targeting Instant Retargeting Hack (Product Targeting) for the specific own-ASIN product-targeting setup, and Dynamic Bids Down Only (Default Steady-State Bidding Strategy) for the bidding default used across this matrix.
When a brand with pre-existing name recognition (e.g., decades-old offline/trade sellers moving onto Amazon, see Proven-Offline-Bestseller Amazon Transplant Launch) launches on Amazon, defense/shielding campaigns can be built on two layers: (1) branded Sponsored Products campaigns bidding on the company's own name, captured cheaply because there's little competing bid pressure on an owned brand term; (2) product/ASIN targeting extended across the entire catalog, not just flagship SKUs, so every listing carries its own defensive layer against competitors bidding on that ASIN. The seller frames both together as 'brand protection' rather than treating branded-name PPC and ASIN-targeting defense as separate line items.
Из тем: PPC Campaign Structure & Bidding