Amazon Context Links – Review

I mentioned the beta of Amazon’s context ads a few weeks ago.
Before I could give it any form of review I wanted to let it run on a couple of sites to see how well it worked, so for the last couple of weeks it has been active both here and on IWF.
What I’ve found is that the code causes the pages to display a little oddly – it adds an extra couple of lines to the footer for some strange reason. That isn’t much of an issue, but it did surprise me at first.
What I was more interested in finding out was how well the system handled the ads ie. if they are truly contextual or not.
IWF has a lot of textual content, though it would not be as dense as this site, as you can easily have threads that are only one or two short messages long.
In general the ads served lacked context, as they seemed to be generated on one or two keywords in the text and not based on the whole corpus. I kept on seeing links to guide books about Ireland, for example, which would not fit with the site’s theme at all.
On this site, however, the ads seem to be more contextual, though again I get the feeling that it is only using one or two keywords to generate the advert.
A recent post on Eragon, for example, is currently displaying two ads related to the film and the original book, while the third is based on something totally unrelated.
In conclusion I can see that the system might work well with review sites or similar, where the textual content in the articles is keyword rich and densely focussed around particular themes, as the ads on review-like posts seem to be a lot better.
In terms of click through rates I can’t really draw any meaningful conclusions.