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.

Why are Recommendation Ads not loading for me? How can I troubleshoot this issue?

It’s possible that your website does not allow Amazon to crawl its pages, hence a problem in loading Recommendation Ads.

For Recommendation Ads to work effectively, our crawlers need to index your pages. The Amazon crawlers can be identified by the user agent string - “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;contxbot/1.0)”

To update your robots.txt file to grant our crawler access to your pages, remove the following two lines of text from your robots.txt file.

User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;contxbot/1.0)

Disallow: /

Alternately, just put this in these two lines of text:

User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;contxbot/1.0)

Disallow:

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.

How do I ensure that Recommendation Ads do not slow down page loading?
We encourage you to use the asynchronous version of the ad code for Recommendation Ads. With asynchronous ad code, the content on your pages will load independently of Native Shopping Ads and will likely improve the user experience for your visitors by never blocking the page content from loading. It is especially helpful if your page loads on slower network connections. Learn more about asynchronous ad code here.

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 commission income 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.

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.