Last July, I wrote about how Amazon.com was breaking into contextual advertising with its Omakase program. Now they're at it again with another context-based advertising system.
This time though, they've taken a leaf right out of Kontera's books.
Instead of placing ads in ad units, they're linking to keywords in the text and serving floating ad balloons. You can see samples here and here.
The ads are attractive, the inventory, of course, is huge and there are enough formatting options to keep any publisher busy optimizing for a while. You can define the number of links, where they'll appear, which type of products you'll promote and even the type of underline to use on the text.
It sounds interesting. It's certainly worth testing. But I'd expect to find that most sites will do better using Kontera for their content links.
This goes back to the way you combine different types of ads. I talked about that in a recent post.
Amazon only offers affiliate ads. That means you only get paid if someone buys. The best way to encourage people to buy affiliate products is to recommend them personally -- and honestly.
If the affiliate ads are changing with your content though, you can't recommend them. Some users might click the links out of curiosity, but you won't get paid for those clicks, you'll only get paid for the sales.
You would get paid for them though if they were Cost-Per-Click (CPC) ads like those offered by Kontera.
Amazon's new ads might do well on very specific Web pages that talk about particular products, but on the whole I'd expect Kontera's CPC ads to earn more in the text and recommended, static Amazon affiliate ads to do well on the side of the page.
I installed Amazon ads on a site that gives non-commercial information on a particular type of home repair. In the ensuing week I'm seeing a drop of maybe 25% in Adsense revenue from that site.
My theory is that the new ads reduce the site's credibility, so I plan to reduce their number or possibly eliminate them altogether.
I'm not seeing any added revenue into my Amazon affiliate account to counteract this drop in Adsense.
If they are affiliate links as opposed to cost per click links, I'd expect revenue to be minimal.
When I implemented Kontera, my adsense revenue dipped, but overall revenues increased significantly. That is unlikely to be the case with Amazon.