B2C Marketing

Learning Objectives

After completing this chapter, you will be able to:

• •

  Define customer relationship marketing and electronic customer relationship marketing;

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  Discuss key factors in the successful implementation of e-CRM;

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  Discuss online advertising processes;

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  Explore online advertising methods and techniques;

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  Understand search engine optimization techniques;

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  Define website analytics;

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  Discuss various types of website data analyses;

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  Understand the impacts of the Internet on marketing.

Yahoo! Vs. Google

Yahoo! and Google share a common background. Yahoo's co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang were doctoral candidates in electrical engineering at Stanford University in 1994 when they started to work on their first search engine. Two years later, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin also collaborated as Stanford doctoral candidates on a search engine called BackRub, a predecessor to Google. Page's dorm room was the company's first data center, and the two entrepreneurs even called on Filo for advice before starting Google in 1998.

Back in the mid-1990s, search engines were seen as a loss leader. Portals all but dismissed the potential value of a search engine. It was helpful to bring in users, but it was considered to be just one of the many services that users would use on a website. The case of Yahoo provides an interesting one on the importance of timing. From a technical perspective, Yahoo was easy to imitate. There were no substantive elements of the user interface that had intellectual property protection. Because of this, during its early years many found Yahoo difficult to distinguish from rivals such as Excite, Lycos, and Infoseek/Go. In an admittedly crowded market, Yahoo was the first to successfully execute a national branding campaign. Through advertising and PR campaigns, Yahoo grabbed media attention ahead of its rivals.

Beginning in 2000, Yahoo began paying Google for search, listing results through the subdomain google.yahoo.com. The tactic immediately doubled Google's visitors and helped reinforce Google as a search leader. By the time Yahoo elected not to renew its contract with Google, Google had already surpassed Yahoo in search traffic (Hansell 2002). Yahoo's failure to see Google as a threat is particularly critical because the firm continued to innovate with new features when compared to established portal rivals, yet had neglected to improve its search services. Since then, Yahoo and Google have been competing for the same web visitors and advertising money. Yahoo restructured one of its core businesses around web search and related advertising, making itself second only to Google in the search ad industry.

Google's value proposition to users was simple: more accurate search and rank (via the PageRank’s link analysis algorithm) and a stripped down user interface containing less than 20 words and no graphics beyond the firm's logo. PageRank was different from all other search engine optimization techniques because it graded each page based on the number and quality of the links that pointed to it. Both of these approaches could be duplicated, yet rivals ignored them. During Yahoo's period of innovation dormancy, Google was able to leverage its technical lead to create brand, grow market share and generate profit. Google was not the first entrant, but it was the first to craft unique strategic assets in its area. The firm's use of superior technology over time directly led to the creation of these assets. See Figure 1 for a visual look at search volume.

Figure 1.

Search volume around the world, visualized on the WebGL globe

After reading this chapter, you will be able to answer the following:

• 1.

  How can organizations utilize search engine for advertising?

• 2.

  What are different types of online advertising methods?

• 3.

  How can organizations utilize web analytics to better understand the interactions between their visitors and their websites?