Abstract
Online advertising has become an important part of marketing investment for firms around the globe. With the increasing use of these tools, concerns have arisen around their effectiveness. For that reason, recent research has focused on measuring online advertising effectiveness with different metrics and for different markets and categories, with a focus on the profitability of advertising. However, only a few intend to understand advertisement usefulness for consumers. Particularly, in Latin America, not many studies measure the usefulness or preferences of advertising. This chapter tries to close that gap. Using a survey applied to samples in Mexico and Colombia, authors analyse different online purchase behavior and advertising perceived usefulness and preferences. The results have implications for improving the firm´s online advertising strategy and for future research, which aims to conduct comparative studies in the field of advertising usefulness.
TopIntroduction
Advertising on the Internet allows segmentation of audiences in a way that was nearly impossible in the pre-Internet era. This is where the main advantages of online advertising reside. Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick (2014) identifies several digital media communication channels, and among them, there are three specially devoted to communicating the firm’s value proposition: (1) Search Marketing; (2) Interactive Ads, and (3) Opt-in E-mail.
Some studies (Hyejin & Huh, 2017; Rzemieniak, 2015; Wang & Sun, 2010) are trying to measure online advertising effectiveness, using the information of websites, mainly e-commerce platforms, that collects information of purchases, traffic sources such as banners, social media, e-mails and demographic profiles of buyers.
The effectiveness of advertising is measured as the percentage or ratio of success of each given advertising related to advertising investment, traffic generated or other similar metrics (De Haan, Wiesel & Pauwels, 2016). However, and mostly in Latin America, there are not so many studies that try to measure the usefulness or preferences of advertising for different markets or categories from the perspective of the consumer.
The aim of the chapter is trying to describe some of the existing relationships between the purchase process, the perceived usefulness and preferences for advertising in two Latin American countries, in order to understand if there is some advertising recognized as more useful, depending different aspects of the purchase decision. The study was conducted with 552 valid respondents at Bogotá (Colombia) and Puebla (México). This chapter starts with a background on the digital marketing and online advertising state of the art, including secondary sources information of both countries, in a following part are described the general results of the survey in terms of points of purchase, categories, frequency of purchase, influence of specific groups and advertising usage and preferences. Last part includes some conclusions and recommendations for future studies.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Digital Marketing: Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising,and any other digital medium. Digital marketing channels are systems based on the internet that can create, accelerate, and transmit product value from producer to the terminal consumer by digital networks.
Interactivity: Interactivity is the communication process that takes place between humans and computer software.
Social Media Marketing: Ad targeting refers to the selection of potential customer groups to which an advertisement will be displayed. This specification of the ad’s audience is done using targeting parameters including demographic and geographic information, interests, and device preferences.
E-Commerce: E-commerce is the activity of buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.
Point of Purchase: Ad targeting refers to the selection of potential customer groups to which an advertisement will be displayed. This specification of the ad’s audience is done using targeting parameters including demographic and geographic information, interests, and device preferences.
Omnichannel Commerce: Omnichannel commerce is a multichannel approach to sales that seeks to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience, whether they're shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone, or in a brick-and-mortar store.
Online Advertising: Ad targeting refers to the selection of potential customer groups to which an advertisement will be displayed. This specification of the ad’s audience is done using targeting parameters including demographic and geographic information, interests, and device preferences.