Amazon Launches Page Recommender Widget
Finally. This widget is something that makes a lot of sense and it one of the better contextual ad products I’ve seen in a while.
I like it because it works with each of the pages that is loaded, rather than just keywords within only the site itself.
While contextual advertising is nothing new online, it is something that Amazon has be struggling with for a while. Here’s what Amazon has to say about optimizing it’s performance:
“The Page Recommender Widget utilizes your web page titles as part of the display. The web page title can be found at the top of your browser window. If you are familiar with HTML, it can be found in the text between the <title></title> tags. If every page on your site contains the same title, then your visitors will be unable to easily differentiate the pages. In order to reduce this confusion, we will only show one recommended page with a given title. Have titles that are not empty, as pages without titles are never recommended. Have titles that are unique and reflect the content of the page. e.g. Blog entry web page titles should contain the blog entry’s title. Product web page titles should contain the name of the product feature”
There are lots of tools out there which do the same, or a very similar thing. For example, John Chow’s TTZ Media does a good job of aggregating not only Amazon products, but also others and shows their rating in the offer.
This is one area that I think Amazon missed in the development of this widget. The reason that I say this is because the web is all about the pre-sell. If people can see that others have rated a given product in a recommender-type widget, the research shows that they will be more likely to investigate and then subsequently convert and buy it.
Even better would be to show how many reviews have been posted to a particular product.
So in conclusion, I think that Amazon is late to a game that’s been going for a while, with an ad product that only goes halfway.
In fact Amazon has better ad products which include rating and review information by default. Amazon tends to have fairly low commissions compared with other programs out there. However, the value in having them around is that they tend to stock a lot of things that people want.
So it’s a volume play if you want to succeed with Amazon.
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