I don’t think there has been any official word from Amazon on the demise of ClickRiver, but I spoke to the Amazon team at a large online retailer yesterday that stated “the ClickRiver program has been discontinued”. Then I came across this complaint from an Amazon ClickRiver user on the WebmasterWorld forum:

I logged into Clickriver today to see how many clicks i haven’t received (i’ve yet to receive one click from them), and i found all of our ads have been disabled! The reason they’ve given me is:

This campaign is not running because:

* This campaign has been disabled. With the launch of category targeting for select services, all keyword campaigns will no longer be supported. You can review this campaign’s historical data, but you will not be able to turn this campaign back on.

I never got any notification that this was happening, or that my ads were even disabled. Additionally, the changeover is going to hurt me more than benefit me because our market is so niche that keyword targeted campaigns are the best way to go, and category targeting would result in our ad being shown to people who are NOT looking for our product.

I wonder if Amazon has plans to support non-category keyword campaigns through Product Ads with a blended CPC rate?

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