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.
Amazon Context Links – Review
Hiya – I’ve been using the German context links from Amazon for some time and agree that they can be a bit annoying. Any page on Ireland will seemingly feature travel guides very high up. This will, however, change once you write a few sentences on Ireland’s Finest (An Garda) … which will cause Amazon to flood your site with ads for the Lake Garda travel destination …
Bernd
I think it could be a “weighting” issue to some degree. Adsense manages to get round that to some degree with the section targetting options.
Michele
I’m not a fan – for example on this post, the first IWF link goes where you would expect, while the second goes to “Student furniture designs shine at IWF” on Amazon. If there was some way to tell the difference between ‘useful’ links and adverts (I’ve seen some sites where ads have a double-underline) I think I could live with them.
Stewart
I’ve changed the settings so that it uses double underlines. Is that any better?
I’m still not overly impressed with the targetting, though it tends to better here than on the other site I was testing it on
Michele