Amazon to offer its Clickriver contextual ads program to other sites
Amazon.com Inc.’s Clickriver Ads, its new program for running pay-per-click contextual ads on its e-commerce site, will be offered to other site publishers “in the coming months,” Amazon says. Luggage Online says Clickriver is producing a strong early ROI.
Clickriver, which launched in April 2006 and is still in a beta test version, is an advertising service that lets marketers buy pay-per-click ads that appear on Amazon.com pages. The contextual feature would enable, for instance, ads for a retailer of dog leashes to appear when someone searches Amazon for dog-training manuals. The service, available at Clickriver.com, also lets marketers choose the product or product category pages on which their ads will appear.
Amazon describes Clickriver as “the only direct way to create, track and optimize sponsored link ad campaigns on Amazon.com.” Clickriver lets advertisers “create targeted and relevant ads that reach over 44 million visitors every month on Amazon.com,” Amazon says.
Luggage Online, which has been using Clickriver for about six months, has found it produces a better return on investment than other search marketing programs. “Right off the bat, the ROI was surprisingly very good,” says Tim Jacobsen, vice president of e-commerce at Luggage Online, No. 354 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. “Clickriver isn’t giving us the volume of Google or Yahoo search marketing, but it’s been performing better in terms of cost per sales.” He notes, however, that the strong ROI for Clickriver may be due to the fact that it’s a new program with fewer competing advertisers.
Still, Jacobsen says he was surprised at the response from consumers because Luggage Online already makes its full product line directly available on Amazon.com. “We’re better off having as much exposure as possible,” he adds. “If a shopper doesn’t find us in the Amazon product listings, she may find us by clicking an ad, so we want to be in both the product listings and the ad listings.”
Amazon indicates on Clickriver.com that it will extend the program to other publishers soon in an effort to reach more of a critical mass of consumers. “Clickriver will be expanding its network to other high-quality publishers in the coming months — to increase the reach of our advertisers and to help them get their business in front of even more quality customers,” Amazon says on Clickriver.com. Amazon is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.
A spokesman says Amazon plans to make Clickriver available to sites other than Amazon.com within the Amazon family of sites, such as its foreign-market sites. But the company isn`t specifying when or if it will make Clickriver available to other retail branded sites including Bombay and Target that operate on the Amazon e-commerce technology platform.
Clickriver.com includes instructions on how advertisers can insert ad copy and choose keywords related to product and category pages for the ads to appear on Amazon.com. The process takes minutes, and ad placement is based on the amount advertisers bid on keywords compared to other bids, plus the level of relevancy of an ad to the page content, Amazon says.
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