3rd party affiliate service

[alexey9]

I'm looking for company like cj.com or linkshare.com, but who have powerful useful tools for affiliates using XML and other technologies. Example of tool I need is product ad with 2-3 products, related to page content - contextual ad or keyword driven ad.

Are there such companies?

[markwelch]

If I understand your question, it seems like you want something like Amazon's Omakase or new "context" ads, where an affiliate can merely plug in a javascript which the merchant then fills with some products that seem to match the site or a keyword parameter.

I know that CJ and LS have both attempted these kinds of offerings and failed. Google is certainly trying to do this with its just-announced cost-per-action opportunity (now in beta test for limited numbers of advertisers and publishers).

My experience with these systems has been pretty bad; almost always, they end up showing only "marginally relevant" products because even the most complex systems (like Google) can't adequately identify the "real" page context and match the "right" ads for that page.

I know that the Amazon Omakase links were completely unsuccessful on my site, despite multiple tests. I haven't yet tried the new context links they introduced this month, in part because I don't expect them to perform any better.

One key problem with all of these systems is that each affiliate network typically has product data only for a small set of merchants (in each network, product info isn't available at all for a majority of merchants).

You certainly may want to look at GoldenCAN as one solution that might accomplish some of what you are looking for, across multiple merchants in multiple affiliate networks as well as some in-house affiliate programs.

Effective context-matching for advertisers has been the "holy grail" of advertising-technology for more than 10 years. Many folks have done a fair job; nobody does it well yet.

[alexey9]

Thanks for the asnwer.

So, there is no really working contextual ads service. Another type of ads I interested in is Amazon's Recommended Product Links. My affiliate could choose category and then enter keywords and get the code. Something like this:

<iframe src="http://myshop.com/script.php?affiliate=name&search=macbook"></iframe>

So, this ad script could search my shop's database and display most popular products related to "macbook". Do CJ or LinkShare or some other company offer that?

[Marcia]

I'm looking for company like cj.com or linkshare.com, but who have powerful useful tools for affiliates using XML and other technologies. Example of tool I need is product ad with 2-3 products, related to page content - contextual ad or keyword driven ad.

The most advanced toolset I've seen is from Avantlink (small network), with capability for pulling entire feeds or partial offerings by department or category, using JS, XML or PHP.

There's nothing contextual (that's a different beast altogether), but I imagine there could be a "department" set up in a feed with featured products that's updated and is pulled in automatically on affiliates' sites through remotely called includes.

[edited by: Marcia at 7:22 pm (utc) on Mar. 30, 2007]