Amazon adds Keyword and Category Targeting for Omasake Ads

[tag]Amazon[/tag] Omasake Ads, also called Amazon [tag]Contextual[/tag] Ads, were launched last October. Omakase is a Japanese word that means for “leave it up to us”, “make the decision for me”, or “chef’s choice”. As with Google AdSense ads, you left it to Amazon to select the most appropriate ads based on your page content. Initial feedback from [tag]Amazon Associates[/tag] was mixed as Amazon often served ads drastically unrelated to page content.

Recently, an Advanced Setting Link with a dropdown box has appeared on the Omasake Set-up Panel. See the screen capture below. According to Amazon, “under the Advanced Settings link we offer limited features for adding keywords, stop-words and for restricting the categories of product shown”.

Amazon explains the new features as follows:

Enter keywords for your page that should be prioritized by Omakase.
This feature allows you to provide keyword feedback about your site to the Omakase system. Words and short phrases entered here will be prioritized by Omakase when looking for products related to your page.

You can enter up to 5 keywords or short phrases that Omakase will prioritize when searching for products to advertise. Enter separate keywords or phrases on separate lines. Use only alpha or numeric characters (A-Z a-z 0-9) – do not use punctuation characters.

Avoid selecting products that contain these keywords.
This feature allows you to provide feedback to the Omakase system if it is clearly using incorrect words from your site. Words and short phrases entered here will not be used by Omakase when looking for products related to your page.

You can enter up to 5 keywords or short phrases that Omakase will avoid using when searching for products to advertise. Enter separate keywords or phrases on separate lines. Use only alpha or numeric characters (A-Z a-z 0-9) – do not use punctuation characters.

For the selections that I made, the code appears as follows:

<script type="text/javascript"><!-- amazon_ad_tag = "your-assoc-id-20";  amazon_ad_width = "728";  amazon_ad_height = "90";  amazon_ad_exclude = "moveabletype";  amazon_ad_include = "wordpress";  amazon_ad_categories = "adefg";//--> </script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/s/ads.js"></script>

You can see that keywords and categories are now included in the code. How these new features while improve ad relevancy and conversions has yet to be determined.