This could end up being both good and bad for Adsense publisher revenue. On one hand it is another way to make money, on the other hand it could end up having the same problems of many CPA programs, namely a merchant who has poor conversions which end up earning us less. That is the main different in my eyes between say CPC & CPA. With CPC the publisher get paid no matter how poorly the merchant’s website converts. With CPA the publisher only gets paid if the merchant’s website converts. So with CPA you’re really dependent on the merchant knowing what they’re doing (and they don’t always).

Dear Amazon Associate:

Are you looking for additional revenue streams to monetize your content? Are you interested in providing relevant information to your site visitors at the very instant they are looking for it? If so, you should participate in the exclusive Context Links beta program!

The Context Links tool automatically identifies and links contextually relevant phrases within your content to Amazon products. When a user hovers over a Context Link they will see a preview window that displays a summary of the product. We believe this product will unlock new ad inventory for you by identifying linking opportunities that you previously had not identified, while also allowing you to control the number of links on each page. In addition, Context Links can save you the time needed to manually create text links within your content.

Before we make Context Links available to the public, we would like to pilot this innovation with a small group of hand-selected Associates. We would like you to be part of that group. As a beta participant you have complete control on which pages you want to include Context Links. To participate you will be asked to:

1) Agree to the terms and conditions applicable to the Associates Context Links Beta Program
2) Obtain the required code snippet from Associates Central and deploy it on pages where you want Context Links to appear
3) Provide feedback via email
4) Complete an evaluation survey

Your referral fees from Context Links will be handled in the same way as in your current agreement. In addition, if you fully participate and provide us feedback, we will send you a $50 gift certificate to spend at Amazon.com at the end of the beta program as a show of our thanks for your participation.

Our beta is scheduled to begin now, and space is limited. So, if you’d like to participate please visit Associates Central, read the agreement, and sign up. After you sign up you will be able to view the Context Links configuration page, where you can choose simple options and obtain the code to add to your Web pages.

Thank you for your continued support of the Amazon Associates Program, and we look forward to your participation!

I haven’t decided yet if I will use this program. It is unclear, as usual, if it would be against Adsense TOS to run this on the same page as Adsense, and I certainly cannot stop using Adsense as it makes me too much money. All in all this sounds very similar to Kontera.com’s program, which I have never been much a fan of as it always linked unrelated words in my tests. Actually, it sounds most like this program is a hybrid of Chitika and Kontera.

Well Amazon recently launched a new link format for their associates program called “Omakase” which is apparently the Japanese word for “Entrust.”

These ads seem to be what Amazon was talking about, though I cannot know for sure since I was not in their beta. However as far as I can tell they are just Amazon product ads, no third party ads, yet. The ads also differ from the typical Adsense implementation in that they include an image for every link.

This program is still marked as being in beta but I believe that all associates should have access if they login to their account.

The most interesting thing for these ads that I can tell is that Amazon doesn’t just target them to your site, they also target them to your visitors. For instance I was recently shopping on Amazon for red Kitchenaid nonstick frying pans. Every Omakase ad I’ve so far viewed has been advertising those products.

Amazon.com has the worlds best customer database as far as product recommendations go, you go there and they let you know things you might be interested in and when you’ve bought so many things on Amazon like I have (hundreds easy), the recommendations get pretty good. So I’ll basically see such recommendations in these ads wherever I view them at and that has got to increase conversions.

It is so hard to target ads effectively. You can base ads on your content, but people aren’t always interested buying items related your content. With this Amazon program, assuming they’re an Amazon customer, they can be shown ads for products that they’ve shopped for before. That kind of desire targeting, from an ad network, is unheard of.

Maybe, maybe, Google could eventually compete with that if their Google Buy service takes off and they can obtain a large amount of customer data. However privacy advocates might not like all that tracking.

This is really a coup for Amazon.com, to know what someone is interested in, to know what type of products, specifically or in general, that someone buys. No other ad network can really do that.

I cannot speak for performance yet, on these ads, but I imagine they’ll perform excellently, and of course, if your visitors are not Amazon customers, they will see ads targeted to your content.

Of course, being in beta, this program does not have all the kinks worked out yet. Content based targeting is questionable, such as with YPN in the beginning. As well the format options for the links aren’t as flexible as Google or YPN. For instance most serious publishers know that to get the most effective CTR you want to blend in your ad by removing the border. Well Amazon keeps their large logo on the left for banners and the top for skyscrapers. You can turn this logo off, but instead of replacing with a simple “Ads by Amazon” text, they keep a long skinny border with that text in instead. So there is no way to effectively remove the border on anymore than 3 sides.

As far as I know, Amazon has not placed any limit on the number of units per page, so unlike Google’s 3 or Yahoo’s 4, you could conceivably use as many units as you want, which is good if you have very content rich pages with many ad locations.

I am also not entirely sure if it would be permissible to use these ads with Adsense or YPN ads. Amazon does not have any rules against it apparently, and as for YPN’s & Adsense’s rules, I’m not sure they apply since these are typical Amazon product links that in appearance look the same as those that have been used for years. If one day Amazon starts doing the third-party ads and ends up more like Adsense, then it’d be clear, but now I’m not entirely sure.

If you’re an Amazon associate, go check them out. Also check out any Amazon easy-links or Amazon Recommends links you already use, as I’ve noticed some of them now serving Omakase like content. If you’re not yet an Amazon associate you can check them out here.

This is not a new concept, one I remember first hearing in 2001. However it isn’t commonly discussed and so many of you might not have thought of this before. I used to give this advice to people who sought help starting affiliate programs on SitePoint, but those posts were few and far between and not everyone would remember them.

So, the thing is, if you can setup your affiliate program so that you use a referrer check to do the tracking rather than tracking in the URL you will receive a multitude of benefits from doing this.

Obviously, one benefit is that search engines will have no idea that that is an affiliate link and they will give you credit for it as an incoming link. Imagine if you got PageRank for all the sites linking to you as part of your affiliate program?

Another benefit is that the link does not look at all like an affiliate link, so your affiliates will be able to better hide the commerciality of their site and the link will not turn off users who, for whatever reason, dislike clicking on affiliate links.

Finally, if your affiliates run forums, or anything with user submitted content, then they do not need any special code to make sure that all links from their site to yours get credited in your affiliate program. This makes your program extremely attractive to many webmasters.

I rarely run into programs doing this though, I’m not sure why. Of course you still need to provide tracking links for emails or PPC advertising, and you cannot do this if you use a network like CJ or Linkshare, but still many places out there run in house programs and they do not do this.

One place that does do this is Best of the Web a web directory like DMOZ/Yahoo. I discovered that when signing up for their affiliate program. For them this is an excellent benefit because they do not have a search engine partnership as far as I know, so the main benefit in paying for submission to their directory is the value of the link you are getting, and so they really need high PageRank, which they get from all their affiliates. That link just above here doesn’t look at all like an affiliate link, but if you clicked it and bought a listing I would get credit.

Referral tracking is the ultimate invisible way to run an affiliate program, there are a few pieces of obtuse software that for some idiotic reason block referral information with the browser, but not nearly as many as block third party cookies or affiliate links. If I ran an in-house program this is exactly what I would do.

On June 23, 2006, JavaScript links will become Commission Junction’s default link type in the CJ Marketplace. However, we will continue to offer Legacy links through the beginning of 2007. The Legacy links will be available for all your advertiser relationships, including those joined to before and after June 23, 2006. At this time we have not scheduled a date for which the Legacy links will no longer be available or supported. We will notify you at least six months in advance of making this change and will not require the change during the 2006 holiday season.

This is a much better situation I think and gives publishers ample time to learn to use the new links while still being able to use the old links.

In my opinion this is a very bad thing.

Anything that takes away from the flexibility a publisher has is going to hinder that publisher’s ability to make sales.

I love javascript links, I love having non-standard sized graphical/text/mixed creatives that automatically update without me having to do any work. Amazon has used such creatives for years, many Linkshare merchants use them. CJ has some merchants that use them but very few.

Whether or not javascript links are good though isn’t the point, the point is that only having javascript links is a bad thing.

One of the things I most love about affiliate programs is that you can promote them with as little screen real estate as you want. If you want to monetize a single word on the screen you can turn that word into an affiliate link. With javascript based links, whose anchor text & display properties could change at the whim of an advertiser, you can’t do this.

This will also cause problems for price comparison or other similar systems that need a standard URL to feed into their system. They will not be able to do it anymore.

CJ’s stated motive, to combat ad blocking, is a good motive, but this is not the right method to do it. No ad blocker in the world could block out an HTML link if sent through a same-site redirect first, but any rudimentary ad blocker could be made to identify CJ’s javascript and stop it from loading, it is going to be so much easier for loser companies like Norton to block all CJ ads.

There has been a lot of uproar over this, many claiming affiliates are going to switch. I doubt it, affiliates go where the programs are. In reality I think sales are going to decline and the merchants will switch, then the affiliates will follow the merchants.

Targeting advertising & affiliate programs to your content can make you some money, after all if someone is on a site about gardening they probably are a gardener and they might just need gardening equipment. However for truly great conversions, and eCPMs (effective CPMs) measured in the $100s you need to target your ads to your visitor’s desires or needs. If the product or program you are promoting helps your visitor accomplish the immediate goal that drove them to visit your site in the first place, well then you’re going to get a lot of conversions.

So the trick is to know your audience, and know them well. This isn’t going to be applicable to all sites of course. Sometimes the only reason people visit a site is to read content. However you’d be surprised what you can figure out.

I like to use my literature site as an example. It is a literature archive, people go there to read and search through books. Now initially I put in a lot of “Buy this book from Amazon” kind of links, and many are still up. They perform okay, selling a handful of books a day.

What I didn’t realize is that most of my visitors aren’t there by choice. They’re students and are working on an assignment for school. They don’t want to read Shakespeare in their spare time. So I put up ads for essay and homework help websites, and they do very well. My essay links get clicked on around 1000 times a day. I don’t offer any essays on my site, so it’s not really related to my content, but it certainly helps my visitors reach their immediate goal (which is finishing their homework).

You can also build a site specifically around an affiliate program, so that the affiliate program matches the typical desire of a person visiting. This is the concept behind most review sites. More on this though can be found in my Affiliate Gold article.