Close match is one of the four targeting groups in an Amazon Sponsored Products auto campaign. It shows your ad to shoppers whose search terms closely describe your product, such as steel water bottle 1 litre for a one-litre steel bottle. It is the group that behaves most like an exact keyword, and it usually has the best conversion rate of the four.
When Amazon builds an auto campaign, it takes the words in your title, bullet points, and category and looks for shopper searches that match them tightly. Those searches fall into the close match group. A search such as insulated steel bottle 1l for a listing titled insulated stainless steel water bottle 1 litre is close match; a search for gym accessories is loose match. You do not see the rule Amazon uses, only the search terms it produces in the search term report.
Each group has its own bid in the targeting tab of the auto campaign. Worked example: you bid ₹8 on close match and ₹4 on loose match. Close match takes 200 clicks and ₹1,600 of spend in a week and returns 20 orders at ₹599, an ACoS of ₹1,600 / ₹11,980 = 13.4%. Loose match takes 150 clicks for ₹600 and returns 2 orders, an ACoS of 50%. The bids should move further apart.
Close match is the Amazon term; Flipkart's automatic PLA campaigns do not expose targeting groups, so there is no direct equivalent.
It is the part of an auto campaign that most resembles what you would have targeted manually, so it converts best and its search terms are the first candidates for harvesting into exact match keywords. If close match is not converting, the problem is usually the listing itself, since the shoppers were looking for exactly this kind of product.
Splitting the bid by group also turns a blunt auto campaign into something you can tune. Many sellers keep close match and substitutes live at full bids and run loose match and complements at a fraction, or pause them once the account has enough keywords.
The broader auto group for loosely related searches.
Learn more →The two product-page groups in an auto campaign.
Learn more →How automatic targeting works overall.
Learn more →Create auto and manual campaigns with keywords, match types and bids from one CSV.
Learn more →It is the auto campaign targeting group for shopper searches that closely match your product, based on your listing's title, attributes and category. It is one of four groups alongside loose match, substitutes and complements.
Close match covers searches that describe your product specifically; loose match covers searches that are only broadly related. Close match usually converts better and deserves a higher bid.
No. Auto campaign groups have no keywords; Amazon decides what matches. You can only change the group's bid, pause it, or add negative keywords to stop particular searches.
Usually yes. It reaches the most relevant shoppers, so a higher bid there and lower bids on loose match and complements is the common starting point.
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