I posted a couple of times about my experiments with Amazon’s contextual links program.
Yesterday I was about to remove them completely from the sites that were still running them, but before doing so I ran a revenue report. Much to my amazement they’d actually resulted in some sales. Admittedly the sales weren’t huge, but they were enough to make me think twice about removing them, so I’ve decided to leave them for the time being.
The feedback I’ve had from visitors to the sites where they are enabled seems to be fairly consistent – make sure that they are not confused with “normal” links.
I’d love to hear from people who are making “serious” money using the system, as I still think that certain types of sites could do really well with it (though I don’t run any of those sites personally!)
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
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I think they are annoying, confusing and from a usability standpoint, an absolute disaster.
Fair enough they may make you a few cents.But what is the price of loosing a loyal visitor?
I’ve always found the confusing too and sometimes the matching can be off. With the amazon ads, I find the popup quite distracting when you scroll down a page and your cursor runs over one.
I can say I’ve never clicked on one of these ads. And I wonder how effective they can really be.
Dave
It depends on the site. Popups, popunders etc., would all drive me mad, but a couple of double underlined links are hardly that intrusive?
Are you trying to tell me that you’ve never done anything similar on any of the sites you run?
Michele
What I find unusable is the context. For example, if you are writing an article and you mention the name of a friend who helped you with your gardening and someone famous with the same name has a book on amazon, it links/popsup to that link on amazon. It is completely irrelevant and it looks like you are linking to more information on the person who did your garden.
I guess this comes back the the whole “As long as it doesn’t look like a link” thing.
Dave
I’d already mentioned that earlier as well. The targetting is a bit odd.
I put them on another site yesterday where the keywords are a lot more specific ie. the entire site deals with one topic only, and the links to date have been 100% relevant
Michele