Abstract
The article focuses on how to integrate all the phases of Internet marketing process into a seamless pipeline. The current techniques used in three main phases: (1) customer targeting; (2) ads piece designing; and (3) marketing budget allocation, are described in detail to reveal the cohering inside of searching optimal marketing strategies.
TopBackground
Internet marketing technique consists of database marketing, information depository, statistical modeling, mathematical programming, and search and match techniques.
Database marketing started in 1990s. With the development of computer information science and internet, it is now a well developed technique that is used in all kind of marketing. (Jackson & Wang, 1994) The database marketing procedure starts with customer database, and then uses statistical method such as regression, clustering, tree, or neural networking to segment and profile customers according to their demographic, behavioral, and geographic attributes. As result, the targeted customers are identified. Since internet marketing is also data rich, customer targeting functionality of database marketing is adapted in the internet marketing procedure.
After the customers are segmented, next issue is how to communicate with them. On July 2, 2007 Yahoo launched its patent-pending tool, Yahoo! SmartAds (2007) to enhance its online advertising effectiveness. SmartAds takes advertisers’ creative campaign elements, automatically converts the elements and offerings into highly customized and relevant display ads by delivering banner ads according to the web surfer’s age, gender, location and online activities. Although the methodology behind SmartAds is not fully known by the public and the academic community, people believe that it uses behavioral, demographic and geographic segmentation capabilities for targeting (Story, 2007). SmartAds is currently in its pioneer stage where only Yahoo’s travel portal is using it. On other hand, Google’s Adsense is a tool to display relevant ads on a webpage. With this tool, the content of a webpage is analyzed to determine a list of one or more topics associated with that webpage. An advertisement, submitted by advertisers, is considered to be relevant to that webpage if it is associated with keywords belonging to the list of one or more topics. One or more of these relevant advertisements may be provided for rendering in conjunction with the webpage or related web pages. The dominant industrial perspective is how to take advantage of searching technologies employed by Search Engines (Langville and Meyer (2006)).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Internet Marketing Procedure: is used by marketing managers to control, organize, coordinate, and improve sales and marketing processes.
Internet Marketing Budget Allocation: refers to determining amount of investment on internet marketing as well as allocating the total amount to internet publishers.
Internet marketing: is the marketing of products or services over the Internet.
An Internet Marketing Strategy: is a process that can allow an organization to optimize its internet marketing objective within its limited resources and competitive internet market place.
Internet Advertisement Design: refers to identifying and combining ad elements to form an ad piece that generates internet browsers’ response
Customer Targeting: refers to going through the steps specifically and clearly profiling the types of customers who will likely to respond the marketing efforts.
Internet Advertisement Elements: are constituents of an internet advertisement piece. The examples of elements in an advertisement piece include, but not limited to: key words, position, imbedded URL, offer, launching time, duration of display, image, size, and color.
Internet Marketing Objective: is the achievement toward which marketing efforts are directed, it can be the sale of products or services, brand awareness, or return of investment. It can be measured as dollar amount made, number of items sold, number of clicks obtained per unit amount of impressions.
Internet Advertisement: is an announcement published in internet media. It may take form of email message, web page, web banner, web link, or web buttons.
Internet Marketing Process: is a series of actions that involves web and customer data collection and processing, customer segmentation and profiling, internet ads design, internet ads budgeting, and internet publisher selection.