A large percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as access to premium content on a website, but most electronic commerce involves the transportation of physical items in some way. Online retailers are sometimes known as e-tailers and online retail is sometimes known as e-tail. Almost all big retailers have electronic commerce presence on the World Wide Web.

Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses is referred to as business-to-business or B2B. B2B can be open to all interested parties (e.g. commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants (private electronic market). Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses and consumers, on the other hand, is referred to as business-to-consumer or B2C. This is the type of electronic commerce conducted by companies such as Amazon.com. Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce where the buyer is directly online to the seller’s computer usually via the internet. There is no intermediary service. The sale and purchase transaction is completed electronically and interactively in real-time such as Amazon.com for new books. If an intermediary is present, then the sale and purchase transaction is called electronic commerce such as eBay.com.

Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of the business transactions.

Overview

Some see mobile advertising as closely related to online or internet advertising, though its reach is far greater – currently, most mobile advertising is targeted at mobile phones, that came estimably to a global total of 3 billion as of 2007, and will reach 4 billion in 2008. Notably computers, including desktops and laptops, are currently estimated at 800 million globally.

It is probable that advertisers and media industry will increasingly take account of a bigger and fast-growing mobile market, though it remains at around 1% of global advertising spend. Mobile media is evolving rapidly and while mobile phone will continue to be the mainstay, it is not clear whether mobile phones based on cellular backhaul or smartphones based on WiFi hot spot or WiMAX hot zone will also strengthen. However, such is the emergence of this form of advertising, that there is now a dedicated global awards ceremony organised every year by Visiongain.

As mobile phones outnumber TV sets by over 2 to 1, and internet users by nearly 3 to 1, and the total laptop and desktop PC population by over 4 to 1, advertisers in many markets have recently rushed to this media. In Spain 75% of mobile phone owners receive ads, in France 62% and in Japan 54%. More remarkably as mobile advertising matures, like in the most advanced markets, the user involvement also matures. In Japan today, already 44% of mobile phone owners click on ads they receive on their phones.

Types of mobile ads

In some markets, this type of advertising is most commonly seen as a Mobile Web Banner (top of page) or Mobile Web Poster (bottom of page banner), while in others, it is dominated by SMS advertising (which has been estimated at over 90% of mobile marketing revenue worldwide). Other forms include MMS advertising, advertising within mobile games and mobile videos, during mobile TV receipt, full-screen interstices, which appear while a requested item of mobile content or mobile web page is loading up, and audio advertisements that can take the form of a jingle before a voicemail recording, or an audio recording played while interacting with a telephone-based service such as movie ticketing or directory assistance.

The Mobile Marketing Association has published mobile advertising guidelines, but it is difficult to keep such guidelines current in such a fast-developing area.

The effectiveness of a mobile ad campaign can be measured in a variety of ways. The main measurements are impressions (views) and click-through rates. Additional measurements include conversion rates, such as, click-to-call rates and other degrees of interactive measurement.

Handsets display and corresponding ad images

There are hundreds of handsets in the market and they differ by screen size and supported technologies (e.g. MMS, WAP 2.0). For color images, typically PNG, JPG, GIF and BMP, with WBMP being the most basic (and the most common). The following gives an overview of various handset screen sizes and a recommended image size for each type.^[1]

.

Mobile as media

This unobtrusive two-way communications caught the attention of media industry and advertisers as well as cellphone makers and telecom operators. Eventually, SMS became a new media – called the seventh mass media channel by several media and mobile experts – and even more, it is a two-way mobile media, as opposed to one-way immobile media like radios, newspapers and TV. Besides, the immediacy of responsiveness in this two-way media is a new territory found for media industry and advertisers, who are eager to measure up market response immediately. Additionally, the possibility of fast delivery of the messages and the ubiquity of the technology (it does not require any additional functionality from the mobile phone, all devices available today are capable of receiving SMS), make it ideal for time- and location-sensitive advertising, such as customer loyalty offers (ex. shopping centres, large brand stores), SMS promotions of events, etc. To leverage this strength of SMS advertising, timely and reliable delivery of messages is paramount, which is guaranteed by some SMS gateway providers.

Mobile media has begun to draw more significant attention from media giants and advertising industry since the mid-2000s, based on a view that mobile media was to change the way advertisements were made, and that mobile devices can form a new media sector. Despite this, revenues are still a small fraction of the advertising industry as a whole. Informa reported that mobile advertising in 2007 was worth $2.2 billion. This is less than 0.5% of the approximately $450 billion global advertising industry.

Types of mobile advertising are expected to change rapidly. In other words, mobile technology will come up with a strong push for identifying newer and unheard-of mobile multimedia, with the result that subsequent media migration will greatly stimulate a consumer behavioral shift and establish a paradigm shift in mobile advertising. A major media migration is on, as desktop Internet evolves into mobile Internet. One typical case in point is Nielsen’s recent buyout of Telephia

However it should be kept in mind that the rapid change in the technology used by mobile advertisers can also have adverse effect to the number of consumers being reached by the mobile advertisements, due to technical limitations of their mobile devices. Because of that, campaigns that aim to achieve wide response or are targeting lower income groups might be better off relying on older, more widespread mobile advertising technologies, such as SMS.

Viral marketing

As mobile is an interactive mass media similar to the internet, advertisers are eager to utilize viral marketing methods, by which one recipient of an advertisement on mobile, will forward that to a friend. This allows users to become part of the advertising experience. At the bare minimum mobile ads with viral abilities can become powerful interactive campaigns. At the extreme, they can become engagement marketing experiences. A key element of mobile marketing campaigns is the most influential member of any target audience or community, which is called the Alpha User.

Data collection

Search analytics data can be collected in several ways. Search engines provide access to their own data with services such as Google Trends and Google Insights. Third party services must collect their data from ISP’s, phoning home software, or from scraping search engines. Getting traffic statistics from ISP’s and phone homes provides for broader reporting of web traffic in addition to search analytics. Services that perform keyword monitoring only scrape a limited set of search results depending on their clients needs. Services providing reverse search however, must scrape a large set of keywords from the search engines, usually in the millions, to find the keywords that everyone is using.

Since search results, especially advertisements, differ depending on where you are searching from, data collection methods have to account for geographic location. Keyword monitors do this more easily since they typically know what location their client is targeting. However, to get an exhaustive reverse search, several locations need to be scraped for the same keyword.

Accuracy

Search analytics accuracy depends on service being used, data collection method, and data freshness. Google releases its own data, but only in an aggregated way and often without assigning absolute values such as number of visitors to its graphs. ISP logs and phone home methods are accurate for the population they sample, so sample size and demographics must be adequate to accurately represent the larger population. Scraping results can be highly accurate, especially when looking at the non-paid, organic search results. Paid results, from Google Adwords for example, are often different for the same search depending on the time, geographic location, and history of searches from a particular computer. This means that scraping advertisers can be hit or miss. One experiment has shown that the accuracy increased with advertising budget with regards to the particular service, SpyFu. This was probably because advertisers with larger budgets pay to show up more often and thus are more easily seen by scrapers.

Market conditions

Taking a look at Google Insights to gauge the popularity of these services shows that compared to searches for the term Adwords (Google’s popular search ad system), use of search analytics services is still very low, around 1-25% as of Oct. 2009.^[ This could point to a large opportunity for the users and makers of search analytics given that services have existed since 2004 with several new services being started since.

The fee structure is both a filter against superfluous submissions and a revenue generator. Typically, the fee covers an annual subscription for one webpage, which will automatically be catalogued on a regular basis. A per-click fee may also apply. Each search engine is different. Some sites allow only paid inclusion, although these have had little success. More frequently, many search engines, like Yahoo, mix paid inclusion (per-page and per-click fee) with results from web crawling. Others, like Google (and as of 2006, Ask.com), do not let webmasters pay to be in their search engine listing (advertisements are shown separately and labeled as such).

Some detractors of paid inclusion allege that it causes searches to return results based more on the economic standing of the interests of a web site, and less on the relevancy of that site to end-users.

Often the line between pay per click advertising and paid inclusion is debatable. Some have lobbied for any paid listings to be labeled as an advertisement, while defenders insist they are not actually ads since the webmasters do not control the content of the listing, its ranking, or even whether it is shown to any users. Another advantage of paid inclusion is that it allows site owners to specify particular schedules for crawling pages. In the general case, one has no control as to when their page will be crawled or added to a search engine index. Paid inclusion proves to be particularly useful for cases where pages are dynamically generated and frequently modified.

Paid inclusion is a search engine marketing method in itself, but also a tool of search engine optimization, since experts and firms can test out different approaches to improving ranking, and see the results often within a couple of days, instead of waiting weeks or months. Knowledge gained this way can be used to optimize other web pages, without paying the search engine company.

In business, revenue sharing refers to the sharing of profits and losses among different groups. One form shares between the general partner(s) and limited partners in a limited partnership. Another form shares with a company’s employees, and another between companies in a business alliance.

On the Internet, revenue sharing is also known as cost per sale, and accounts for about 80% of affiliate compensation programs. E-commerce web site operators using revenue sharing pay affiliates a certain percentage of sales revenues (usually excluding tax, shipping and other 3rd party cost that the customer pays) generated by customers whom the affiliate refer via various advertising methods. Another form of online revenue sharing consists in people working together and registering online in a way similar to that of a corporation, and sharing the proceeds.

To Know our offers kindly contact us

How contextual advertising works

A contextual advertising system scans the text of a website for keywords and returns advertisements to the webpage based on what the user is viewing. The advertisements may be displayed on the webpage or as pop-up ads. For example, if the user is viewing a website pertaining to sports and that website uses contextual advertising, the user may see advertisements for sports-related companies, such as memorabilia dealers or ticket sellers. Contextual advertising is also used by search engines to display advertisements on their search results pages based on the keywords in the user’s query.

Service providers

Google AdSense was the first major contextual advertising program. It works by providing webmasters with JavaScript code that, when inserted into webpages, displays relevant advertisements from the Google inventory of advertisers. The relevance is calculated by a separate Google bot, Mediabot, that indexes the content of a webpage. Recent technology/service providers have emerged with more sophisticated systems that use language-independent proximity pattern matching algorithm to increase matching accuracy.

Since the advent of AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Microsoft adCenter, Ad-in-Motion and others have been gearing up to make similar offerings.

Direct response advertisers consider CPA the optimal way to buy online advertising, as an advertiser only pays for the ad when the desired action has occurred. An action can be a product being purchased, a form being filled, etc. The desired action to be performed is determined by the advertiser.

The CPA can be determined by different factors, depending where the online advertising inventory is being purchased.

An online advertisement impression is a single appearance of an advertisement on a web page. Each time an advertisement loads onto a user’s screen, the ad server may count that loading as one impression. However, the ad server may be programmed to exclude from the count certain nonqualifying activity such as a reload, internal user actions, and other events that the advertiser and ad serving company agreed to not count. For online advertising, the numbers of views can be a lot more precise. When a user requests a web page, the originating server creates a log entry. Also, a third party tracker can be placed in the web page to verify how many accesses that page had. There are other advertising pricing structures, which are generally referred to as Cost Per Action (CPA) :

• CPC – Cost per click Through
• CPL – Cost per lead (lead usually meaning a free registration)
• CPS – Cost per sale

CPI and/or Flat rate advertising deals are sometimes preferred by the publisher/webmaster because they will receive a more consistent fee proportional to the amount of traffic.

Today, it is very common for large publishers to charge for most of their advertising inventory on a CPM or CPT basis. A related term, effective cost per mille (CPM), is used to measure the effectiveness of advertising inventory sold (by the publisher) via a CPC, CPA, or CPT basis.

This type of advertising arrangement closely resembles television and print advertising methods for speculating the cost of an advertisement. Often, industry agreed approximates are used. With television, the Nielsen Ratings are used; print is based on the circulation a publication has

Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis irrespective of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement of a website’s potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.

On-site web analytics measure a visitor’s journey once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign’s audience response.

Historically, web analytics has referred to on-site visitor measurement. However in recent years this has blurred, mainly because vendors are producing tools that span both categories.

In the inaugural issue of the Journal of Interactive Advertising, editors Li and Leckenby (2000) defined Interactive Advertising as the “paid and unpaid presentation and promotion of products, services and ideas by an identified sponsor through mediated means involving mutual action between consumers and producers.” This is most commonly performed through the Internet as a medium.