RL Digital

Without any announcement, a new widget called the ‘Page Recommender Widget’ has appeared in my Amazon Associates Central panel. Below is an actual widget in the 468×60 size.

According to Amazon, the new widget will “Help your visitors to discover relevant pages within your website, using Amazon’s own recommendations technology - for free! Drive page views, session lengths, and referral fees by placing this widget on the pages you’d like to be recommended to your users. Amazon’s unique understanding of your users lets us target related pages and products tailored to their individual tastes”.

So what going on here? Why are you seeing the same items in the widget that you last viewed on Amazon.com? A recent post on ReadWriteWeb gives us the answer: “The implementation uses a combination of JavaScript, Cookies and back-end code. When a user comes to Amazon the site stores a browser cookie. The cookie stays in the browsing cache and when the same user navigates to a different web site, say a blog, the JavaScript on the site is able to lookup the cookie and then invoke Amazon’s personalization engine and generate the recommendations widget.”

You can think of this as a new type of contextual advertising. It’s not relevant to a blogs content but to the visitors preferences. Will it convert? Ahh! Only time will tell. And, I am sure other forms of personalized advertising will be forthcoming from Amazon.

If you are an Amazon Associate, you can get your own Page Recommender Widget here.