Clickriver by Amazon
I really meant to write my review of Clickriver, an ad service from Amazon that allows you to bid on keywords for Amazon searches, a few days ago. I was pretty blown away with how simple it was to create new campaign and push it live. I’m glad that I procrastinated waited, though, since I have been able to really see the ad network in action.
The Good
From a usability standpoint Clickriver will most likely be the easiest place you will ever advertise. Any beginner web marketer can easily setup ad ad without getting confused or wondering what’s going on.
So far, from what I’ve seen, the conversion rates are pretty good. People searching Amazon for products are usually in a shopping mode. If you have a webstore you would be crazy not to try Clickriver out.
Your ads go live immediately and your ad stats are real time - anybody using Google with its seemingly inconsistent reporting latency will appreciate this.
The Bad
Your ads go below the Amazon products that are returned on your search query. If you are in a very competitive industry you will probably have a lot of products in front of yours and will most likely have a very low CTR. If you are in a niche category this is less of a concern (on some ads we have shown up beneath 2-3 products, which results in a lot more click-thru’s).
Clickriver doesn’t have any type of conversion tracking so you better either have some good analytics on your end or be able to make great decisions based on gut feelings - but then again, if that’s you, you’re probably into offline marketing, right? 
The Confusing
Stepping back for a minute and forgetting how good Clickriver is for hardware companies like Sewell, why is Amazon doing this? I guess they really want to brand themselves as more of a technology company (internet retailers don’t trade for 123 times earnings).
I guess my bigger question is why don’t they just let more companies join the Amazon network? Every time I have applied to sell through Amazon (they use an extensive network of drop-shippers), they have told me that our category is full. Now they’re going to take lower margins to send users off their site to complete a transaction that they won’t have any upside on.
It seems to me that the best decision Amazon could make is to evaluate new applications based on the actual products the retailer sells as opposed to just the category they are in - we are getting way too much traffic for products that simply aren’t available through Amazon. But if they want to send the traffic my way, in post-bad-serve-Sewell-ping-pong lingo, “I’ll take it.”
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