Retargeting has been a hot topic among marketers in recent years- and today a new player announced their entrance in the market.  Amazon.com will be launching an ad network, where they will buy Web advertising inventory, and resell it to marketers.  The value-ad of working through the Amazon platform is that they’ll be using the behavioral and sales data collected from their own visitors and shoppers to target prospects.

What does this mean for marketers?  That the Amazon.com ad network has the possibility to open an entirely new door for retargeting.  Retargeting based on a buyer’s behavior patterns and trends will undoubtedly increase the demand for targeting through the Amazon.com platform, and marketers will begin to expect better results from their retargeting efforts.

To learn more about this change to the retargeting industry, check out this article from TechFlash.

While Facebook and Twitter are the main social media outlets for both B2C and B2B companies, LinkedIn, the professional social network, is quickly moving forward as a popular social network among B2B audiences.  Recently, LinkedIn has made updates to their platform, including an opportunity for companies to build out a profile separate from individual profiles.  In doing this, companies can promote their business, advertise specials and make announcements from one place.

What do these new profiles offer?  The opportunity to get information about your company out to the public.  For B2B companies, a LinkedIn profile is as important to keep updated as your website.  From this platform, everything is in one place: products and services, social media, news, employee contact information and more.

One of the most important new features is the ability to promote your company’s products and services.  These new pages give you the opportunity (in 2,000 characters or less) to describe your product or services.  Additionally, there is an area for a bulleted list of your key services, as well as a link to the related page on your website, making LinkedIn a true portal for business contact.

Want to help direct people to the appropriate point of contact for one of your products or services?  LinkedIn now helps you do that as well.  Any employee who is linked to your company page can be featured as a representative for your company.

Once products and services pages are developed, your customers can leave recommendations about your offerings.  These recommendations are similar to the recommendations on individual user profiles, and allow anyone who considers your company’s services to hear directly from your customers.

Have you already added product and services tabs on your company’s LinkedIn profile?  We would love to see how your B2B company is using this new feature.  Need some ideas to get you started?  Take a look at Spike’s services page.

For the fans of the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, you likely will not use it anymore.  In the habit of hitting the ‘enter’ button after you type a search query?  Break this one, because it is no longer necessary. After months of testing, and weeks of hype and speculation, Google has revealed Google Instant, the newest change to the way that we search: live updating search results.

Google Instant attempts to improve the user experience even more:  by saving time, providing smarter predictions and serving instant results.  Google estimates that Instant will save 11 hours of search time for every second spent searching.  With the combination of time savings, and more accurate search results, Google is certainly staking their claim as the most forward-thinking company in search.

Google’s announcement this morning began with some amazing statistics: over 1 Billion searches occur on Google each week.  In these 1 Billion searches, it takes more than 9 seconds to enter a search term, with many searches taking 30 to 90 seconds.  Google Instant promises to save 2-5 seconds per search, as well as decrease the time it takes a user to click on a search result as well.

How does it work?  As you type in your search query, the search results will adjust based on what you Google Instant searches for you as you type, predicting the most likely keywords that you will search.  Once you see results that match what you are looking for, simply stop typing.  Your results are already there.

Here, we began a search for ‘woodpecker’ to show the results that we got along the way:

How Will Google Instant Impact Paid Search?

One of the largest concerns about Google Instant for B2B Advertisers is how this new tool will impact paid search.  Specifically, the impact on ad impressions.  As users type in a query, the search results rapidly change, displaying different ads with every keystroke.    As shown in our search for ‘woodpecker’ we returned paid advertisements for MapQuest, the Pacific Science Center, the Woodland Park Zoo and more, before we finally got to information about woodpeckers.

According to Google, an ad impression is counted if a user takes an action to choose a query (for example, presses the Enter key or clicks the Search button), clicks a link on the results page, or stops typing for three or more seconds.

Ad Position

Google Instant will also change the layout of the Google search results pages.  Because the search suggestions box remains open, the organic results, as well as any top position ads, are pushed down the page.   In some cases, the organic results are pushed completely below the fold, and users will only see the search suggestions box, as well as paid advertisements.

Though this will initially increase impressions and clicks on paid search campaigns, the quality of the clicks received is not likely to improve.  With organic results beginning far below the fold, many users will confuse paid and organic searches- resulting in low quality clicks on top performing ads. Paid ads in position 1 and 2 will likely show above the organic search results, but below the search suggestions box. Ads in lower positions (particularly positions 3, 4 and 5) appear to have a higher rank because the paid search results on the right side begin at the top of the page.

Quality Score

With increased impressions due to the ever changing search results pages, paid search marketers can expect to see a decline in their click through rate (CTR)- simply due to this increase in impressions.  Because CTR is one of the main components of quality score, B2B Advertisers may see a change in the overall competitive landscape of paid search.  Will quality scores begin to decline because of Google Instant?  At this point, we can just wait and see.