SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Chris Beasley at Sitepoint reveals that Amazon, the world’s largest online bookstore, is interested in starting their own ad network similar to Adsense. It’s not what you think: contextual ads to serve up Amazon’s own products. They intend to “clone” Adsense. This test is only being offered to a few hand-picked sites by Amazon.

With two major players, Google and Yahoo, already in the game and MSN coming up with Adcenter, online contextual advertising could become crowded in the near future with many opportunities for web publishers to monetize their content.

Google Analytics experienced huge demand since its rebranding coupled with giving away the web analytics service for free. Since then, it had to stop accepting any new signups and data collection is taking several days while they upgrade their capacity.

For those running Adsense on their sites, they can now track clicks in Firefox and IE with this free adsense tracking code that works with Google Analytics courtesy of Aaron Wall. It accomplishes tracking via the definition of Goals.

Because testing is prohibited under Google’s guidelines as a publisher, you’ll just have to wait for results to come in to determine whether you have it correctly installed.

Google Adsense has enabled content publishers to monetize their sites whereas in the past, there was no capability to do so. While Google Adsense is also prone to abuse by spammers seeking to maximize their earnings by putting up scraper sites filled with Adsense ads, this is otherwise a great method to monetize a site’s content without having to sell a product via affiliate programs or otherwise.

On the heels of the recent Adsense heatmap made available by Google, you can also find an adsense heatmap for forums.

Adsense heatmaps illustrate ideal ad placements on a sample page layout. They are particularly useful to you if you put adsense on a site and need to know where to place the code and what kind of ad layout would be best for optimal results.