Chapter 7 Internet Marketing News Analysis and Reflections

Internet Marketing News Analysis


Source:http://www.emarketer.com/Reports/All/Emarketer_2000398.aspx?src=report1_home


What I learned:
This article discusses the fact that marketing has changed not only for large companies and teenagers, but for moms as well. The article talks about how most marketing done to reach moms was done during soaps and on day time T.V. , this is no longer the case. Today more then 40 million woman who spend time on the internet have children at home who are under the age of 18. While a lot of time is spent on-line in parent related activities, it has been found that moms also use the net for shopping, entertainment and search reasons. Two-thirds of mothers research toys for their children on-line. This is a HUGE deal to on-line marketers. If they are to miss the fact that their internet client tel is also the biggest decision maker when it comes to purchasing toys for their children, they are missing out on fantastic opportunities to corner this target market. What this means to mothers is that there will probably be more and better information regarding these toys and where to get them for the lowest prices.





Reflections:
Chapter seven starts off by discussing search engines and their growing popularity. The book claims that in the recent survey 32% of respondents say they "couldn't live without a search engine" and that 84% of U.S. internet users have used them. To me, this number seems low as I think at some point everyone who has ever used the Internet has had to use a search engine for one thing or another. With $5.75 billion dollars spent on search marketing in the U.S. and Canada in 2005 alone, it is no wonder why companies are taking a much closer look and putting serious thought into how they are going to market themselves in the near feature. 60% of large companies report using the internet to increase product awareness while 62% of companies use the internet to sell product directly on-line. Thats not a big difference percentage wise. This says to me that companies find it just as important to get their message out there as they do to actually sell the product. No wonder why we are bombarded with so many ads.
Search engines are more complicated to me than I had thought. My assumption was you typed in a key word and anything relatively close just popped up. Truth be told, when search engine results pop up, not only is it just a small fragment of what the web has to offer, but results are also listed a a very organized and for lack of a better word, earned way. The book breaks it down when it says their are three basic components of a search engine. A crawler which searches the web, moving from one link to another, an index which organizes the content sent back to it, and a query processor that transmits the index and returns with the search engine results. The value of a search engine is based on the relevance of the results, with Google being the search results leader. While a lot of search results produce organic results, some of them are there because companies paid to have them displayed.
Paid placement is set up to be easy for the average marketer to be able to place an ad anywhere they choose. These ads are usually of short copy and do some type of bidding to acquire appropriate key words. It is recommended that at least twenty keywords are listed for each ad. Key words are an essential part of directing consumers to marketers pages, so they are usually well thought out and relevant to the product. The web increases in size by hundreds of web pages daily. Because of this, marketers are working harder then ever to get their messages across to us as consumers. If this means they are willing to research and analyze the web at a granular level, so be it. No wonder, when $166 billion is being spent annually and the rate is growing like a wild fire.