Q&A: How effective is Amazon's ClickRiver for marketing books?

QUESTION: What's your take on ClickRiver, Amazon's new pay-per-click advertising network? Will this be a viable method for advertising books?

ANSWER: I opened a ClickRiver beta account a couple of weeks ago and have been diddling with it. First, the good news:

• It's much easier to use than Google Adwords. The interface is clean and it reponds fast. If you ask for a keyword, you'll start getting impressions within a few minutes. It's also relatively cheap -- you can buy impressions on practically any keyword(s) for 10 cents per click. But that's probably because not many people are competing for the keywords, at least not yet.

• ClickRiver does a great job of suggesting additional keywords. For example, let's imagine you're advertising a book on "orchids." Once ClickRiver knows you're targeting orchids, it will suggest every book title and author name in the orchid space -- at least those that have good sales. It sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many good keywords will be suggested that you didn't think of. One thing I found odd, though: ClickRiver didn't suggest any titles newer than two years. I guess this is a glitch.

The bad news:

• Clickthroughs are very, very sparse. I have thousands of impressions so far, and not one single click. If this was an Adword ad, Google would have shut it off already for low clickthrough. So on the one hand, ClickRiver hasn't cost me a cent, but on the other hand it's been a complete waste of time.
  

I'm sure the reason for the low clickthrough is that ClickRiver ads just aren't that visible on Amazon's detail pages. For example, here are some ClickRiver ads that appear on the detail page for a Garfield book, they appear far down the page and are uncompelling by design:


Visibility will probably always be a tension for this program -- For Amazon to make serious money with this, they're going to have to raise the profile of the ads. But the more they do this, the more likely buyers will be distracted from buying the Amazon product they're looking at.

I've always suspected that pay-per-click is an ineffective way to market consumer books. There's simply not enough profit margin in the typical book to pay $10, $15 or more in advertising for each sale. PPC is supposedly a revolutionary way of targeting people, but I believe it gets the same crummy response as most direct mail 2 percent to 5 percent.

It's a different story if you have a high-margin book or a club or service where acquiring a customer is worth hundreds of dollars over the lifetime of the customer. But I think the main user of ClickRiver ads will turn out to be people who are selling high-priced, high-margin products and services outside Amazon.