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Using Amazon Native Shopping Ads
One of the greatest selling points of the Amazon associates program for people with Amazon affiliate websites is that all the hard work involved in the creation of ad units to promote affiliate products is taken care of by Amazon itself.
Whereas other affiliate programs leave you to deal with how to create your own ad units, Amazon offers you banners, direct links to product pages in the form of images, enhanced images with text and simple text links.
The thing about these ad units is that they only work when you are using them to promote a product. For instance, you can only use an ad unit for a specific product on a page where you are reviewing said product. The good news is that the Amazon associates program also offers you contextual ads called “native shopping ads.” They work much in the same way that Google AdSense ads work.
You copy a “native shopping ads”, code it to your website, and your visitors will see the product ads according to context. For example, if you have a photography website, your visitors will see ads for photography equipment.
Native shopping ads will allow you to show the most relevant products to your visitors according to context, and they offer you flexible placement options.
They are also responsive, so your visitors can have a seamless experience with these ads on any device. Lastly, they are easy to implement. You just have to set the code once and forget about it!
There are three types of “native shopping ads”:
Recommendation ads: These types of native shopping ads will be displayed in product article pages to show product recommendations for your visitors. The recommendations shown by these ads will depend on the content of your pages and preferences of your visitors.
Search ads: These types of ads will show products to your visitors according to search results given to them by the Amazon marketplace.
Custom ads: Custom ads work in a similar fashion to product page links, because these are ads that will simply show product recommendations set by you. They are great for articles about products that are not necessarily reviews or comparisons leading to an affiliate link.
Sign in to your Amazon associates account. Once inside, look at the upper right corner and click on “native shopping ads”. Scroll down to locate the yellow “create ad unit” button and click on it. A display menu will be revealed with each native shopping ad type unit discussed before: “Recommendation ads”, “search ads” and “custom ads”.
Let’s have a look at each, starting with “recommendation ads”.
First, you’ll be required to enter a name for your ad. Then, you’ll have to choose between two ad formats: “grid” or “list”. Now you’ll need to choose which categories should be emphasized by your ads and choose a fallback keyword in case no product matches are found.
Let’s scroll up and click on “search ads”. Here, you’ll only have to pick an ad format to specify a category and to enter a default search term. Let’s scroll back up and click on “custom ads”. Again, simply select an ad format and category, then select a minimum of 4 products to show.
After you set up each ad, you can preview how each will look on desktop or mobile devices to your right. Once you are satisfied with your ads, simply copy the generated code and insert it into your Amazon affiliate website!
