• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 13, 2015

Amazon has been running product ads it calls Amazon Text Ads in private beta, a new pay-per-click offering that enables advertisers to create and run text ads on Amazon.com, a company spokesperson confirmed to Search Marketing Daily, but declined to comment on how they would work or how many beta advertisers agreed to test the ads. Reports recently surfaced that the marketplace would stop running on-site ads that filter visitors to third-party sites.  

Chacka Marketing Manager David Grow gained access to Amazon Text Ads this week. He was surprised at the intuitive functions. "It has a function that lets advertisers take a file from Google AdWords editor and upload the entire campaign into Amazon's tool to create a new campaign, along with all the elements associated with it," he said.

An intuitive interface -- what a novelty. Unlike when a consumer gets a new mobile phone and ports the phone numbers from the old to the new, the Amazon Text Ads platform recognizes the elements, stores the data in the correct slots, and ignores the data it doesn't support.

"It's so early, but I realize there will be nuances between the two systems, some items that Amazon doesn't support, but it will be interesting to see how the platform evolves," Grow said. 

Janel Laravie, founder of search agency Chacka Marketing, seems pretty optimistic about Amazon Text Ads. She said it appears that Amazon offered the private beta to existing merchants. One in particular spends about $50,000 per month on search ads, suggesting this opportunity is not exclusive to advertisers with deep pockets.  

"We’re assisting Products Ads advertisers with other opportunities to reach Amazon customers, including Selling on Amazon, for businesses that aren’t already, and Sponsored Products," the spokesperson said. The marketplace will continue to review services it offer partners to help them reach customers and grow their businesses. Part of that process requires Amazon engineers to build out its own services.  

One of the more interesting patents granted to Amazon describes a mobile device security system, with techniques for providing "friction-free" transactions using geolocation and user identifiers. The technology determines the user's location based on the location of a mobile device. The technology allows a transaction to take place between the user and a merchant with zero or minimal input from the consumer based on the geolocation of the mobile device and the user identifiers in the phone.

Biometric identification and calculation from patterns of movement gathered by the phone act as a security feature. Advertisements are sent to the mobile device based on bids from merchants nearby. Promotions may be sent to the mobile device under certain circumstances. 

Earlier this year, the U.S. Patent & Trademark office granted patents to Amazon based on two methods. The first patent
is described as an "advertisement generator based on external traffic," where the system generates advertisement based on analysis of visits to a Web site referred by an external source. The advertisement system aggregates the referral information. The second patent describes a multi-level architecture for image display, where the system provides the dynamic display of content and related advertisements.