First Look at Clickriver - Amazon's Pay Per Click(Sponsored Link) Advertising Program for Service Providers

Clickriver Ads, the sponsored links program from Amazon, lets service providers reach active shoppers on Amazon.com via pay per click advertising. For example, for a lawyer, he can advertise his service targeting users in his region that browses and searches for legal books on Amazon. Amazon has a good "How it works" page.

Here's my impression with Clickriver:

• Clickriver structures your ppc marketing with the hierarchy of campaigns and ads. * A campaign with a daily budget can hold multiple ads.
• Each ad is specific to a service category which has its own min. cpc. You specify the max cpc for each ad.
• Each ad can appear in at most one category.
• "Your ad will only be shown if your advertised service is consistent with the service category you select." so Amazon determines whether your ad is relevant or not.
• You can pause campaign or individual ads
• Campaign support geo-targeting options: all countries, US only, States in the US, metros in the US, cities in the US, zip codes in the US. so you can't just geo-target a country other than US if you are not interested in the US market. kind of weird
• It doesn't say if they'd optimize ad serving for ads in the same service category
• There's no bulk-edit functionality for ads. Bulk-editing is really handy when you need to change lots of ads' destination url/display urls to the same url
• provide Account, Campaigns, Ads, Keywords & Categories, Creatives reports. I wonder what the difference is between ads and creatives reports. They sound like the same thing. Also, what's the keywords & categories report? The keywords from products in a category where your ad appears?
• no conversion tracking support. so you need to use a 3rd-party to track the return on your ad spend
• There's nowhere mentioning what criteria Amazon uses to determine your bids. Is it an auction-based system like Google AdWords/Yahoo Panama/MSN ad center? Is it related to the click-through rates of my ads? Is there a concept of quality score of your ad similar to Google AdWords?

The Clickriver interface looks simplistic and minimal as compared to more mature and sophisticated Google adwords/Yahoo Panama/MSN ad center. It feels like the old day of Overture.

Clickriver is definitely worth checking out for service providers as they can market to targeted customers on Amazon which gets lots of shoppers' eyeballs

I'd love to hear your experience with Clickriver.

Tags: google yahoo amazon adwords ppc msn service clickriver panama adcenter advertising