Bulk operations for Sponsored Display campaigns

The display ad type with the audience-first targeting

Sponsored Display sits to the side of Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Its ads appear on product detail pages and across Amazon, plus on third-party sites and apps (through the Amazon DSP). Its targeting model is fundamentally different — instead of keywords or competitor ASINs, it targets audiences (shoppers who viewed your product, similar products, or specific categories) and product placements (similar to SP product targeting but with different bidding behavior).

This article covers how to manage SD via bulk operations: the Sponsored Display Campaigns worksheet, the unique targeting types, when SD bulk operations are worth the effort, and how SD differs from the SP and SB workflows you already know.

What Sponsored Display does

SD ads serve in three contexts:

• On Amazon product pages. Similar to SP product placements, but with different ad creative options and broader audience targeting.
• On Amazon's search results, browse pages, and "rest of Amazon." Smaller in volume than SP, but contextually placed.
• Off Amazon (via Amazon DSP). Display banners on third-party websites and apps in Amazon's network. This is the "retargeting" channel — your ad follows shoppers who viewed your product after they leave Amazon.

SD targeting comes in two main flavors:

• Audiences: Groups of shoppers based on their Amazon behavior. The two most common audience types are "Views remarketing" (shoppers who viewed your product but didn't buy) and "Purchase remarketing" (shoppers who bought your product, often used to cross-sell related items).
• Product/category targeting: Similar to SP product targeting — your ad shows on specific competitor ASINs or category pages. The difference is that SD's product targeting often has broader off-Amazon reach.

The Sponsored Display worksheet

SD campaigns live on the Sponsored Display Campaigns sheet in your bulk download — separate from both SP and SB. The columns overlap conceptually with SP but with SD-specific fields:

• Entity types unique to SD: Campaign, Ad Group, Product Ad, and Targeting (which can be audience-based or product-based, distinguished by other columns).
• Audience ID: References to predefined or custom audiences. Audiences are configured in the SD UI; the bulk sheet references them by ID.
• Shopper Cohort Percentage: For audience targeting, the percentage of the cohort to target (Amazon's audience sizing).
• Shopper Cohort Type: The audience category (views, purchases, etc.).
• Cost Type: Different from SP. SD can be CPC (cost per click) or vCPM (cost per thousand viewable impressions). Most performance-focused campaigns use CPC; brand awareness campaigns sometimes use vCPM.
• Bid Optimization Strategy: SD-specific options like "Optimize for Conversions," "Optimize for Page Visits," or "Optimize for Viewable Impressions."

What you can manage via SD bulk operations

For existing SD campaigns:

• Adjust daily budgets and overall campaign budgets
• Change state (enable, pause, archive)
• Update bid optimization strategy
• Adjust bids on targeting rows
• Add or remove product targets
• Add or remove audience targets (referencing existing audience IDs)
• Change ad creative associations (within limits — full creative work happens in the UI)

What you can't do via SD bulk:

• Define new audiences (custom audience configuration is UI-only)
• Upload custom creative assets (similar to SB, creative lives in the UI)
• Modify audience definitions (cohort percentages, behaviors)

The audience targeting concept

This is the conceptual leap that makes SD different. With SP, you target queries (keywords) or contexts (product pages, categories). With SD, you can target people based on their Amazon behavior.

The most common audience types:

• Views remarketing: Shoppers who viewed your product's detail page but didn't purchase, within a specific time window (default 30 days). Often the highest-converting SD audience.
• Purchase remarketing: Shoppers who bought your product, useful for cross-selling complementary products. Don't show the same product ad to someone who just bought it — show them the accessory or follow-on product instead.
• Amazon's predefined audiences: Categories like "Recently shopped for kitchen gadgets" or "Frequent buyers of small appliances." Amazon curates these.
• Custom audiences: Combinations of behaviors you define (e.g., "viewed competitor X in last 30 days AND has not viewed my product").

Audience targeting bids look different from keyword targeting bids — the volumes are smaller, the conversion windows are longer, and the placements are mostly off-Amazon or on product pages rather than search results.

When SD bulk operations are worth it

Honestly, less often than SP or even SB. SD has lower volume than SP for most categories, so managing it manually in the UI is feasible for most accounts. Bulk operations make sense when:

• You have 10+ SD campaigns and need to update bids systematically.
• You manage SD across multiple brands or accounts.
• You need to mass-pause SD campaigns (e.g., during budget freezes).
• You're harvesting product targets from SD performance reports.

For most single-brand sellers with 1–5 SD campaigns, the UI is faster. The bulk approach pays off at scale, not at small scale.

Building an SD campaign via bulk: when to bother

Creating SD campaigns from scratch via bulk is uncommon. The reasons:

• SD has more configuration choices than SP (audience type, bid optimization, cost type, creative options). The UI's guided form makes these choices clearer than filling in cells in a spreadsheet.
• You typically only have a few SD campaigns per brand, so the per-campaign creation cost in the UI isn't significant.
• Once one SD campaign is set up, you can copy its row in a bulk sheet to create variations — but for the first one, the UI is usually faster.

The realistic pattern is: create your first 1–3 SD campaigns in the UI, then use bulk operations for ongoing management (bid changes, target updates, pausing/enabling).

The targeting bid strategy for SD

SD bids have different dynamics than SP:

• CPC bids for SD product targeting often need to be higher than SP to win impressions. The competition pool for SD product-page impressions includes both SP and SD advertisers.
• CPC bids for SD audience targeting are typically lower because the auction is less crowded (fewer advertisers use SD audiences than SP keywords). But conversion windows are longer (view-through attribution can extend to days).
• vCPM bids are denominated in "cost per 1000 viewable impressions" rather than per click. Comparing to CPC requires knowing your CTR. Most performance-focused sellers stick with CPC.

Typical starting bids:

• SD Product Targeting (ASIN): $0.50–$1.50
• SD Product Targeting (Category): $0.30–$0.80
• SD Views Remarketing: $0.40–$1.00
• SD Purchase Remarketing: $0.20–$0.60

These are starting points; your actual right bid depends on category competition and conversion economics.

Common SD bulk mistakes

• Wrong Audience ID. Audience IDs are specific Amazon strings. Get them from your downloaded bulk sheet (where existing campaigns reference them) rather than constructing them.
• Mixing audience and product targeting in the same row. A targeting row is either audience-based or product-based, not both. Use separate rows.
• Wrong Cost Type. CPC and vCPM use different bid scales. A bid of $5 in vCPM (cost per 1000 viewable impressions) is dramatically different from $5 in CPC. Make sure the bid matches the cost type.
• Trying to define new audiences in bulk. Audiences are configured in the UI. The bulk sheet only references them by existing ID.
• Expecting SD performance signals to look like SP. SD attribution is different — view-through conversions are a bigger factor, longer attribution windows are common. The same ACoS-based decisions you make on SP keywords might not work the same way on SD audiences.

SD optimization workflow

A typical SD optimization cycle, in bulk:

1. Pull a fresh bulk download with SD performance data.
2. For each targeting row, calculate effective ACoS (including any view-through conversions Amazon attributes).
3. Adjust bids per the same formulas as SP bid adjustment, but with looser tolerances (SD volume is lower, so single-cycle noise is higher).
4. Pause low-performing audiences/targets.
5. Add new product targets harvested from your SD search term or placement reports.
6. Upload.

The cadence is typically monthly for SD (vs. weekly/biweekly for SP). Lower volume means slower data accumulation; faster adjustment cycles often whip on noise.

When to skip SD entirely

SD isn't right for every account. Consider skipping if:

• Your category has low search volume to begin with — SD adds even less volume.
• You're early stage and your SP campaigns aren't yet optimized — focus on SP first.
• Your margins are tight and you can't tolerate the higher experimentation cost of SD's longer attribution windows.
• You don't have brand-registry status, which limits SD's audience targeting options.

SD complements a mature SP strategy. If SP is still being built out, prioritize there.

Next steps

Related articles:

• Sponsored Brands bulk operations — the previous article, similar pattern of having its own worksheet.
• SP Product Target campaigns — conceptually related to SD's product targeting, but with different bidding dynamics.
• The monthly workflow — ties together SP, SB, and SD into a single optimization cycle.

Sponsored Display is the most niche of the three ad types. Most accounts get 80% of their advertising value from SP, 15% from SB, and 5% from SD. The bulk-operations tooling for SD is fully supported, but the volume rarely justifies deep optimization investment. BulkSheet Pro covers all three ad types in one workflow — the bulk SP, SB, and SD changes go through the same upload cycle. Try it free →