Amazon lists four Sponsored Display targeting categories in the UI, but Rawlings collapses them into three real types:
The defining constraint: Sponsored Display is the only one of Amazon's three major ad types (alongside Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands) that cannot target keywords — targeting is limited to categories, products, and audiences.
See Sponsored Display Prefilled Targeting Suggestions (Clear & Manually Reselect) for a setup pitfall in this targeting flow.
Remarketing has three variants: ads to people who viewed your listing, people who purchased it, and people who viewed similar/competitor listings. The 'views' and 'purchases' modes each pair with a selectable look-back window; see Sponsored Display Remarketing Look-Back Window Testing for how to pick one.
Audiences splits into two subtypes: in-market audiences are dynamic segments built from actual purchase/shopping activity, while interest & lifestyle audiences are static interest-based segments. Some of Amazon's suggested interest segments are irrelevant ("wacky") — browsing categories like "Shopping Behavior" surfaces the genuinely useful ones instead of taking the defaults.
Rollout order: start new Sponsored Display efforts with contextual targeting and remarketing; only layer in-market/interest audiences once a campaign is already performing well.
Structural rule: keep each targeting/audience type in its own campaign rather than mixing types together, for cleaner tracking and optimization — this compounds with the prefilled-suggestion trap in Sponsored Display Prefilled Targeting Suggestions (Clear & Manually Reselect).
Unlike Sponsored Products/Brands, Sponsored Display has no keyword targeting at all — only categories, audiences, and products.
"sponsor display is the only ad type out of the three major ad types where you can't Target keywords it's only about targeting categories audiences and products"
Category targeting advertises against an entire product category using Amazon's suggested categories in the targeting setup. Rawlings flags category targeting as a standout tactic heading into 2025 — a trend he sees across all three major Amazon ad types (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display), not unique to SD. Amazon prefills a set of suggested categories by default; leaving them unreviewed risks silently advertising against categories you never intended to target, so always clear the prefill and manually reselect only the categories that fit (see Sponsored Display Prefilled Targeting Suggestions (Clear & Manually Reselect)).
Product targeting aims contextual ads at specific individual listings — your own or a competitor's — the SD analog of product targeting in Manual Product Targeting (Category vs. Individual ASIN). A standout sub-tactic: target competitor listings with a lower star rating than yours, effectively conquesting shoppers already primed to switch. Rawlings cites a 10% ACOS from this tactic in his own account.
Because Sponsored Display has no keyword targeting at all, contextual targeting (category + product) plus remarketing and audiences is the entire targeting vocabulary — a structurally different logic from Sponsored Products/Brands.
Remarketing targets shoppers by past behavior, selectable via a views/purchases dropdown: shoppers who viewed or purchased your listing, or shoppers who viewed a listing similar to yours (including competitor listings).
Counterintuitive finding from Rawlings's account: remarketing to viewers of similar products (not your own advertised product) sometimes outperforms remarketing to viewers of the advertised product itself — he calls this result 'weird,' but it held up well enough that he tests both as separate targets rather than assuming the intuitive own-listing audience wins. See also Sponsored Display Remarketing Look-Back Window Testing for the look-back window dimension of remarketing setup.