Improving Amazon Product Advertisements

Since I last blogged about mp3Salad getting traffic the number of page views it's received have steadily increased, each time amazing me when I check on my traffic stats. The site has received over 50k+ page views a month since February, with April toppling 80k. I realize that it's not a lot of traffic in relation to other more popular sites out there, but I felt that it was decent enough to try and see if I can earn a little bit of extra scrilla. With that focus in mind I went looking for affiliatepublisher programs out there that I thought would be relevant to mp3Salad's users and landed at Amazon's Affiliate Program.

Amazon offers it's affiliates several advertising options such as targeted links and product placements, I wasn't interested in more text links (I already have Google adwords) so I focused more on their product capabilities specifically music albums. The first thing I had to do was sign up for the program, submitting some information about my site. The process was painless and in several hours I received a confirmation that I was accepted into the program, onto the next step which was to start using their tools to create my ad. Amazon has several different options for displaying product ads, such as explicitly choosing the individual products or letting them 'intelligently' decide what to show using their Omakase links (Omakase - Leave it up to us!). The Omakase links seemed to produce items that were not necessarily relevant to the page but rather to user, for instance when I viewed the page it returned me a cordless phone, a book on programming and something else which I can't remember. I wanted items that were relevant to the page at hand, so this is what I did.

Using Amazon's E-Commerce Web service (ECS) I was able to search for and retrieve relevant music albums based on what the user originally searched for. I chose to use their REST/POX service instead of their SOAP service simply because it's light weight and fast (not saying their soap service isn't but I've been fond of RESTfull services of the late). The ECS service returned me a list of products in which I strip out all but the ASIN (product id). Using that list of product id's, I then produce the <iframe>s that in turn display the individual links. Take a look at the following search result page for Bob Marley.

This is my first go around with the service and there are some things that I haven't fully completed with it yet such as using a default search term if the one submitted doesn't return results. I'd like to also try and figure out a better way to build the HTML they use for product display so that I can bust it out of the frames giving me better control of how they are displayed. All in all I like the service and hope that it brings in a few extra duckets.

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