First look at Amazon Clickriver beta advertising features

Posted by Josh on Friday, November 10th, 2006.

We have just started out first campaign within Amazon’s Clickriver service. The program is still in beta, so you’ll need to apply for access.

Amazon’s Clickriver looks and feels a lot like AdWords. Campaigns contain ads (an unfortunate name for what is really an ad group) which contain keywords and creatives (ads). Clickriver creatives have the same general size constraints as ads in AdWords. Keyword matching options are the same as AdWords. You can run ads / creatives against each other as in AdWords. With the exception already noted, the Clickriver terminology for everything is virtually identical that of AdWords.

What about Clickriver is different? Most importantly, your ads will only show on Amazon.com. Also, you won’t find the incredibly rich feature set that makes AdWords so versatile and powerful: no dayparting, ad rotation options, budget allocation options, and so on. One annoyance is that negative keywords must be applied at a keyword level, not ads (think ad groups) or campaigns. This may sound insignificant if you don’t recognize the power of negative keywords and consider how this design decision can be a real maintenance headache.

Overall we are left with a good impression of the Clickriver beta, and we look forward to seeing how it performs in the weeks and months to come.