CPC_Andrew - 4:35 pm on Jul 29, 2011 (gmt 0)

A little bit about Amazon Product Ads, it's a CPC program that drives quality traffic and conversions and a good deal of traffic. I'd highly recommend it, yes your ads show up I believe as text but mostly as actual product listings, if you look at "Product Ads from External Websites" those are examples of Amazon Product Ads.

In terms of the management involved, Amazon does not have their own reporting system or tracking pixel to track conversions, so you'll need to do that on your own and append your URLs with Google Analytics code or other 3rd party tracking so you can optimize your campaign.

Last quarter it was the largest driver of traffic for all comparison shopping engines so your management of the account will suck up some resources especially if you have a good number of products in a high-trafficked category.

Also, recently Amazon Product Ads came out with a traffic extension program where Amazon is going to leverage a 3rd party publishing network and a complex product recommendation algorithm to drive even more traffic to online retailers. Right now the program is free in beta version and does not drive much traffic, but I would not be surprised if it soon challenged Adwords as one of the largest ad networks out there.

Amazon, with so much rich customer data, will be able to construct highly targets ads on these 3rd party sites.

Hope this helps. Bottom line: Definitely give it a shot!