Do you sell Amazon books or merchandise on your web site? Amazon recently introduced two new ways to make it easier for associates to promote Amazon products – Omakase Links (contextual advertising) and the aStore ™ store builder. We took them both for a spin…
(Note: At present, Omakase and aStore are still in Beta, i.e. available or use but still pending some final pre-production testing)
Omikase Links
Want to offer Amazon’s huge product inventory with a “no-brainer” solution like Adsense? Omikase Links are Amazon’s new contextual advertising solution. Similar to Adsense, you set up the ad block size, placement and configuration and it automatically displays products based on the content of your page. Omikase is not a “PPC” offering – in order to earn commission your visitors must click through one of the links AND buy something.
Omikase’s attractive and versatile link groups, available in 8 popular banner sizes, can contain product images or plain text, an Amazon logo or a discreet text link, borders or no borders. You set the background, link, text, price and border colors to blend or contrast with your web site.Great idea, but in practice we were disappointed. The ads LOOK great, but we had problems with the products displayed not matching the page content, even after several days and multiple page loads. According to Amazon the ads “optimize product offerings based on what the Associate has been successful with in the past; what that user has been interested in as well as what the site is about”. That first can be a major showstopper for associates publishing multiple sites on a variety of topics , especially when launching a new and unrelated site. In our test, Omikase kept stubbornly displaying ads on a completely different subject!
Omikase links are still in Beta testing – we hope Amazon irons out this serious shortcoming in what otherwise looks to be a very promising solution.
If you only have one site, or a group of related sites, Omikase is extremely simple to use and may be a perfect fit for you.
Important note to Adsense publishers: DO NOT put Omikase and Adsense together on the same page(s)! Google’s TOS forbid you to run competing contextual ads on the same page as Adsense and you risk having your account banned!
In part 2: A look at aStore(tm) – Amazon’s new product store builder interface.
[tags]affiliate, contextual advertising, amazon, online marketing, web, website[/tags]