The trick to using Amazon’s native shopping ads on your Amazon shopping site

By | April 14, 2019

Image of advertising

Native Shopping Ads for your Amazon Shop


You have an online Amazon shopping site and that is great because a perk of the Amazon associates program for people with Amazon affiliate websites is that most of the hard work involved in the creation of ad units to promote affiliate products is taken care of by Amazon itself.

Unlike other affiliate programs that 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.

You also may use Amazon’s Native Shopping Ads, which are meant to provide highly relevant and dynamic product recommendations that are designed as a stylish and responsive ad unit that can be placed at the end of content or within your blog content.  This helps to create a more compelling visitor experience and shopping opportunity.  For example, if I were to write a blog post about hiking and hiking boots for women and this was meant to be a Review of those boots,  I could use this type of ad unit.

Of note is that these ad units 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 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 several flexible placement options.

They are also responsive, so your visitors can have a seamless experience with these ads on mobile devices as well as desktops. Lastly, they are easy to implement. You just have to set the code once and forget about it!

Types of Native Shopping Ads

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. This is great for articles about products that are not necessarily reviews or comparisons leading to an affiliate link.

Sign in to your Amazon associates account and once inside, look under the menu item “Product Linking” and select and click on  “Native Shopping Ads.”

Using the different type of ad units

Image of where to find native shopping ads on Amazon Associate site

Scroll down to locate the tabs for the different ad units and click on the native shopping ad type unit you want to creat:  “Recommendation ads”, “search ads” or “custom ads”).

Let’s have a look at each, starting with “recommendation ads”.

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.

Image showing form for creating Amazon Recommendaton Ad unit

Search Ads

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.

Image showing form for creating Amazon Search Ad unit

Custom Ads

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.

Image showing form for creating an Amazon Custom Ad unit

After you set up each ad, you can preview how each will look on a desktop or mobile devices. Once you are satisfied with your ads, simply copy the generated code and insert it into your Amazon affiliate website!

Live Example of Custom Ad

Below, is the Custom native shopping ad I created with 4 products in a grid for women’s hiking boots.


 

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I love to get comments or questions from my site visitors, please leave yours below -Shirley

NOTE:  This page contains affiliate links, which, when clicked and a product purchased, I receive a small commission (with no extra cost to you).

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