Amazon And Google Ads (Don’t) DO Mix

Amazon And Google Ads (Don't) DO Mix

Jozzua 1:00 am on March 28, 2007 | 6 Permalink | Reply

Perhaps with the new Context Links System, people might actually get some income from Amazon Affiliates. Context Links is a tool to automatically identify and link contextually relevant phrases within your content to Amazon products. Links can be configured as conventional links or so that when a user hovers over any of these links, a small window appears showing a preview of the appropriate product from Amazon.

After you add the Context Links script to a Web page, our systems crawl your content and identify the contextually relevant phrases with the highest monetization value and closest match to Amazon products. When a visitor hovers over an automatically linked phrase for more than 400ms, a small window appears next to that link showing a preview with useful information about a relevant Amazon product. Visitors can click through the link or the window to learn more about the product and purchase it from Amazon.

Note that your site must allow our spider (Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AMZNKAssocBot/4.0)) to crawl your Web site. The crawl is needed in order to identify the content of your Web site and determine appropriate phrases to link. If you do not allow our spider to crawl your Web site(s), Context Links will not be able to link anything.

Basically, you add an html code in your footer, an amazon bot will look at your website and find related Amazon products, and links should how up. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t seem to allow it be displayed along with Adsense links. I pretty much can’t use it on this site. Perhaps I’ll experiment with other sites.

UPDATE: Thanks to Marghil, we found out that Jensense already asked the question and found her answer:

I followed up with Google on the situation, to find out of the removal of the clause would mean that competitor’s ads would be allowed on the same page as AdSense, provided they didn’t resemble or mimic AdSense ads, and that the AdSense terms would eventually be updated to reflect this policy change. And the answer is yes!

However…Amazon’s contextual links act very differently from traditional contextual advertisements methods. It is not the specific Ad network that Jensense asked about. I’ll have to ask Google (c/o Aileen) about this.

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marhgil 6:30 am on March 28, 2007 Permalink

It was not allowed during the time of that blog post. But changes has been made on the Google Adsense TOS last January and they now allow contextual advertisement alongside with Google Adsense, as long as the ads don’t mimic the look and feel of Google Adsense advertisement. See details here. Since Context Links doesn’t look like a Google advertisement, it is allowed with Google Adsense on the same page. Mas masaya yan, mas maraming kita :)
jozzua 6:43 am on March 28, 2007 Permalink

hey marhgil! Thanks for the update!
LiewCF 11:14 am on March 28, 2007 Permalink

yes, the AdSensense TOS has been updated to allow other contextual ads :)
I Prefer ContentLink Over ContextLink - Macuha.com 2:09 pm on March 28, 2007 Permalink

[...] Amazon recently activated their Contextlink feature on their affiliate program, which is almost identical to Kontera’s Contentlink. They are indeed identical on the way they display the advertisement, where they both create a link out of your content, and make a small pop-up description once the reader hovers their mouse over the link. The only difference is that Kontera is Pay Per Click while Amazon is Pay Per Action. My question is, can they both run on the same page? Now, if I have to choose between the two, I prefer Kontera for obvious reason, a click on Amazon link will not give me the money unless the clicker purchased the product while a click on Kontera gives me instant cash. I believe based on experience that you can only earn a decent amount on Amazon if your website is focused on product reviews. [...]
Fons Tuinstra 2:35 pm on March 28, 2007 Permalink

As far as I learned from the Amazon forums there seems to be a problem with the browser, rather than Google. IE6 and IE7 do not show the links, Firefox does, say some posts.
*Jozzua - On Entrepreneurship and Tech » Last Say On Adsense And Amazon Contextual Ads 8:38 am on April 2, 2007 Permalink

[...] I finally just emailed Google Adsense to make the Advertising issue official and they responded with the following: AdSense publishers may display third party advertisements on sites and pages showing Google ads as long as the formatting or color scheme of these ads is sufficiently different from the layout of the Google ads. In other words, if you choose to place non-Google ads on the same site or page as Google ads, it should always be clear to the user that the ads are served by different advertising networks and that the non-Google ads have no association with Google. If the formats are naturally similar, we’d ask that you use different color schemes for the competing ads. [...]