FAQ for Native Shopping Ads: General

How many variants of Native Shopping Ads are available?
There are 3 different variants for Native Shopping Ads

• Recommendation Ads: Allows Amazon to automatically recommend the best matched products based on your webpage content and your visitors.
• Search Ads: Allows you to drive recommendations based on a search phrase determined by you or your visitor.
• Custom Ads: Allows you to specify the products from Amazon.com that you want to promote.

Which kind of Ad Formats are available?
There are now 2 ad formats available for all Native Shopping Ads' variants

• Grid Format: This is the ad format that we launched Native Shopping Ads with. It is a multi-product, responsive ad format with rich UI elements like image, price, ratings, etc. We generally recommend placing this ad format at the end or within the product article pages.
• List Format: This is essentially a list of links to related products. This would be suitable for you if you prefer a unit with a more subtle user experience.

What type of websites are most suitable for Native Shopping Ads?
Native Shopping Ads work best on websites/webpages that are product-focused; with product reviews, articles around products or articles with product mentions.

What sizes are available for Native Shopping Ads?
The ad unit is responsive and would adapt based on the size of the container it is placed in.
For the grid format, you can specify how many rows of product recommendations you would like to include, either one or two. In case of Custom Ads you can customize the ad unit size by specifying the width and height in pixels.
For the list format, you can specify the maximum number of products.

Do Native Shopping Ads display products based on the geographical location of your visitor?
The ad unit currently shows products only from Amazon.com and does not display a different set of products based on geography. If you would like to serve Native Shopping Ads for visitors only in the US then we suggest you use an ad server which can support this need.

Are Native Shopping Ads' links nofollow?
Yes.

Is it possible to customize the font/color in Native Shopping Ads?
Currently, there is no functionality to customize the font and color of the ad unit. However, we are continually adding new features and functionality in future versions and this capability may be considered.

I have a dark themed website, would the ad unit work for such a website?
Currently, the ad unit does not render optimally for such websites. We are considering this for future releases.

Where can I view the performance details of the ad unit?
You can view the performance report using the Link Type Report. To get to the link type report, visit the reports page, click on the fees tab and go to the "Link Type Performance" tab at the end of the page.

What is the payment structure for the ad unit?
The payment structure will remain the same as outlined in your Operating Agreement. You will continue to earn referral fees as per the existing agreement.

Can I track the performance of the ad unit by placement or slot?
Yes, you can track the performance of the ad unit by placement, or section of the website by using tracking ids. You have an option to select an existing tracking id or create a new one.

FAQ for Native Shopping Ads: Recommendation

Where should I place the Recommendation Ads?
We recommend that you place the ad unit within your editorial content or at the end of your articles to allow the visitors to engage with relevant product recommendations. In our early testing, we have seen this placement to be the most effective from a performance perspective

How do Recommendation Ads work?
The ad unit identifies key words in your content to match relevant products from the Amazon catalog. It combines page context with Amazon purchase data to recommend products that are relevant and popular for your visitors. If you selected interest-based ads, the ad unit might also show product recommendations based on what your visitors may be interested in. You also have the option to specify fallback products by choosing search key phrases. If ad unit is unable to provide enough relevant recommendations to display on your page, it will either reduce the shown products or not show the ad unit.

Does Amazon crawl my site?
Amazon uses a crawler, also known as a spider or a bot to process and index the content of webpages. The Amazon crawler visits your site to determine its content in order to provide relevant ads. The crawler will only attempt to access URLs where our ad tags are implemented. If you have installed Native Shopping Ads on a site, then those sites are subject to monitoring and crawling under the consent provisions of the Operating Agreement. The crawling is done automatically by our bots. If you make changes to a page, it may take some time before the changes are reflected in our index.

I am unable to see the ad unit after placing the ad code on my page. Why?
The ad unit generally takes a few minutes to start serving recommendations. It is also optimized to show only when there are enough relevant recommendations available unless you have explicitly specified fallback search phrases.
The ad unit is ideally suited for an in-content or an end-of-content placement and would automatically adapt to the size available but if placed in a very narrow container the ad unit won’t appear. You should start seeing relevant recommendations after a page has received at least three hits over a two minute period. If you still don’t see relevant recommendations on any of the pages, then please check that you are allowing Amazon to access the page content which is necessary to determine the contextual products. This usually means removing any authentication required to access the page and making sure it is accessible from public internet and not just from your company intranet. Also check whether you have enabled any ad blocking software as that would block Native Shopping Ads as well.

I see the ad unit showing up in some pages and not showing up in others. Why is that?
By default, the ad unit shows up only if it has relevant recommendations to display. If the ad unit is not displayed then it is likely that there are not enough recommendations for the page. It is also likely that the page has not been visited for quite some time and the recommendations are no longer in the cache. If you would like the recommendations to appear on all the pages then you can specify a fallback search phrase.

I want complete control over the set of product recommendations shown in Native Shopping Ads. How do I achieve that?
Select the custom version of Native Shopping Ads if you want to show specific products on your webpages.

How do I prevent certain products being shown on my website?
The current release of Native Shopping Ads does not allow specific products or keywords to be blocked from being included in the recommendations. We are considering this enhancement for future releases.

Where do I get the ad code?
You can get the ad code here.

I have a WordPress blog. How do I insert the ad unit at the end of all my product posts?
Please refer to the detailed integration guide to insert the ad unit at the end of all the product posts.

What are interest based ads?
Interest-based ads, sometimes referred to as targeted or personalized ads, are based on information about your visitors, such as the products they view on Amazon.com, their purchases on Amazon.com, visits to websites where we provide ads or content, or use of payment services like Checkout by Amazon on other websites.

When would you be showing interest based ads?
Native Shopping Ads would always attempt to show the most relevant set of products. Interest-based ads or ads based on your page content would be shown to your visitors such that your advertising fees is maximized.

Do I need to do anything to start getting interest-based ads in the unit?
By default, Recommendation Ads have interest-based ads enabled. While creating the ad unit, you can choose not to show interest-based ads to your visitors. This may however lead to lower earnings.

How do I recognize an interest-based ad?
All interest-based ads would have the Ad Choices icon at the bottom right corner of the ad.

Why have you introduced the capability to save and update Recommendation Ads? Why have you not extended the same to Search Ads and Custom Ads?
Recommendation Ads tend to be mostly site-wide deployments. After deployment, you might want to update the ad code configuration. With this, you will be able to update the ad code configuration from the portal without having to make a code change in your website.
We have not extended this to Search and Custom Ads. The Search Ads and Custom Ads would typically have a different configuration for every page or placement. Once deployed, these are typically not updated after deployment. Also, you might want to change the parameters like search keywords programmatically at your end. For this you would need the configuration parameters in the ad code. Hence, we are not extending the ability to save and update to Search Ads and Custom Ads.

Can I track the performance of the ad unit by placement or slot?
Yes, you can track the performance of the ad unit by placement, or section of the website by using tracking ids. You can select an existing tracking id or create a new one.

FAQ for Native Shopping Ads: Search

How do Search ads work?
Native Shopping Ads - Search, allow you to specify search phrases and categories to drive product recommendations using Amazon search. Your visitors can either click on any of the displayed products or type in a different search phrase in the search box to land on Amazon search results page.

How do I programmatically drive the search results of the ad unit?
The ad code for Native Shopping Ads is a simple list of javascript variables and is highly programmable. To programmatically specify the search key phrase to be displayed: amzn_assoc_default_search_phrase = "your-search-phrase";
The search phrase could potentially be driven by any of the parameters available in your CMS or by the search term entered by the visitors to your site.

Where do I place this?
You can place this ad unit within product article pages and drive the recommendations using search phrases which are relevant to the page. This would allow you to do this in a simple way without having to go through the trouble of manually curating the specific ASINs. You can also place this in the search results page of your website and drive the recommendations using the search phrase entered by the user as an input.

What would the ad unit show if there are no product results for the default search phrase specified?
If there are no product results for the default search phrase then the ad unit would simply show a search bar to allow the users to search other products and jump to Amazon.com. We believe this to be a better experience than showing irrelevant products or providing a message that there are no results to display.

Where do I get the ad code?
You can get the ad code here.

FAQ for Native Shopping Ads: Custom

How do Custom Ads work?
Native Shopping Ads - Custom, allow you to specify 4-8 products from Amazon that you would like to promote within your webpages. The actual number of products displayed depends on the space available on your site. By default the ad unit is responsive. However, if you choose to specify a custom size the minimum width and height shall change depending on whether you want to display one or two rows of product recommendations.

Can I customize the ad unit title?
Yes, you can customize the ad unit title to one that is more suitable to the content of your page.

Can I remove the search box?
Yes, you have the option of removing the search box however we recommend that you keep the search box present to help improve monetization with this ad unit.

Where do I get the ad code?
You can get the ad code here.

Other FAQs

Can you provide the ability to customize ad unit size for Recommendation and Search Ads instead of just the ability to specify number of rows?
Native Shopping Ads are designed as a responsive and dynamic ad unit that take up optimal space based on the number of product recommendations and the amount of space available in the container where it is placed. The recommended placement is at the end of a product article or within a product article page and NOT the side rail. For these placements, the customization option that we would like to provide to you is the number of rows as that would make it very simple to configure without you having to worry about the number of pixels. It would also ensure that the ad unit continues to be responsive and works equally well on all mobile devices.

But I would like to place it in the side rail and hence I would need to customize the width and the height of the ad unit?
Native Shopping Ads are NOT designed for side rail placements. We do not endorse or recommend such placements as we have found them to be sub-optimal for this ad unit. It is only the Custom Ads variant where we provide you with some additional flexibility to specify the width and height in case you want to place it in a specific way. If you need standard IAB sized ad units then we would suggest that you choose from the wide variety of banners available from Amazon Associates.
Note: Native Shopping Ads are responsive unit. So, they would work even in the side rail but they are not designed for side rail.