Amazon announced in late June 2011 that they will be jumping into the advertising industry, and you can be sure that other online retailers will follow. Amazon will expand from just selling targeted ads on their site to selling targeted ads on other websites too.

This is how the process works: Amazon mines through their data and creates buckets of potential marketing targets. With the help of the ad tech start up, Triggit, and the use of cookies, they then track where visitors to their site go after they leave. Amazon then purchases ad space those visitors are looking at, delivers a relevant ad, and then charges the advertiser for the impression.

So who wins in this system? It is actually a win for everyone because the consumer sees ads for products they want to buy, Amazon (or any other online retailer) makes money off of its own data, and the advertisers see their ad dollars become more effective. The numbers show that behaviorally targeted ads dramatically outperformed the entire display ad category in 2008 and 2009. These numbers attest to the opportunity this win-win-win scenario has for Amazon and anyone who follows them.
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In June, Google’s navigation bar got a new look as part of the release of their own social network called Google+, which is supposed to be an extension of Google. Hence, the plus sign and why the navigation bar appears in some of their other products.

Many articles have dubbed it as, “Google’s answer to Facebook” or even a “Facebook Killer.” According to comScore, Google+ already hit 20 million visitors, while Facebook and Twitter took 2 years to reach 10 million. The reason Google+ was able to reach this number rapidly was because of the credibility behind its name, the substantial amount of Gmail users they reached out to, and not to mention all the work Facebook and Twitter did to introduce social networking.

At this point, it’s too early to make any predictions of Google+ overtaking Facebook. However, it does have a lot of potential to be an alternative based on its features and plans for growth. Most importantly, Google has taken initiative to capitalize on the effect social has on search, which is a good reason to keep an eye on it as it improves.
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