IMC 642

Amazon.com Amazon began back in 1994, in a converted garage, and in 25 years has become the world's leading e-commerce retailer. At its inception, Amazon sold books and took on more established book stores like Barnes and Noble as a challenger brand. Amazon faced many critics claiming that the brand would quickly be squashed by the current industry leaders. CEO Jeff Bezos, however, maintained that Amazon would focus on meeting the needs of consumers and the growth potential of the internet (Hall, 2019). We know now that Bezos' plan would ultimately be a success.  Amazon has revolutionized e-commerce. The brand is now the gold standard for customer service and personalized recommendations. " Through trial and error, booms and busts, Amazon has evolved a set of guiding principles and cultural practices to  keep its growth machine humming. These involve delighting customers, crushing  competitors one by one, hollowing out retail sectors, and disrupting industry...

Web Analytics Landscape There are many options for collecting and reviewing data regarding website traffic. Marketers and web developers use web analytics in an attempt to understand how users are interacting with their sites. The point is to collect actionable data and work towards improvements in user experience and conversion. Brands track this data through third party vendors that collect data, normally through JavaScript, and convert the data into manageable reports. Many companies have begun to offer web analytics services, but Google has continued to be the most prominent player in the industry.  Google Analytics Google Analytics (GA) is Google's free web analytics tool. GA offers extensive data reports regarding website traffic. " Simply put, Google Analytics puts several lines of tracking code into the code of your website. The code records various activities of your users when they visit your website, along with the attributes (such as age, gender, interests) o...

Google Analytics is a great, and free, resource for brands and marketers. The platform provides website analytics that allow users to review detailed metrics regarding their website. Google can help users understand when, where and how people are being referred to their site, bounce rate, conversion rate and user demographics, among many other options. These are useful tools when operating a website; having the information about how users interact with your site can allow you to make decisions about how best to optimize the site.  Recently I began collecting information about this blog site with Google Analytics. Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to collect much data. For the purpose of this discussion I will mainly be referencing Google's demo account.  One report that is very helpful when managing a website is the audience overview. This provides a quick glance into the number of users, their activity on the page and demographics.  This report provides a...

There are many social media platforms available for brands and marketers to utilize. Brands and marketers must now decide where, when and how to use these social media platforms to communicate with consumers. Which platforms are the best? How should brands determine the best to spend their marketing budgets. How brands market on social media depends on the brand, the product and the consumer demographics. These factors, among others, will help brands and marketers determine the most effective social media marketing strategies. Social media strategy, like all marketing communication, is not one size fits all. A brand must critically evaluate its goals and then align its strategy to meet them. Setting social media goals that align with the organizations overall goals is an important first step. Social media strategy should be informed by the organization’s social media goals. “Too many businesses go into social media marketing on an ad hoc basis. They know they should do something ...

The bounce rate tells you how many users visit your site and then leave without interacting with the site in any other way. When users "bounce" that may mean that the content was not relevant to whatever they were searching for. This metric could be used to help create more relevant ads that are attracting the right type of consumer. The assumption is that if your site has a high bounce rate that the content must not be relevant to the consumer, however this is not always true. Bounce rate can sometimes be indicative of a website issue, but not always. For example, content pages, such as blogs, may have a higher bounce rates due to the nature of the site. "The problem many content sites face is that they generate lots of organic search traffic to specific pages. Once the page is read, the user leaves the site. Without any measurable action, this is a bounce, and time on page is zero seconds" (K'nect, 2017). In these instances, bounce rate would not be the m...

Click through rate is a metric used to measure how many viewers clicked an advertisement and then viewed your site. The click through rate is used to measure the relevance of a paid advertisement. This is done by measuring the number of clicks upon an advertisement and measuring it against the total number of impressions, or total number of views. A high click through rate or CTR means that the paid ad is relevant to users whereas a low CTR means that the ad may not be relevant to users (Mackey, 2019). Click Through Rate is generally displayed as a percentage.  Click through rate helps marketers to understand which ads and what language is resonating the most with consumers. Beyond that, however, a higher CTR has other benefits to a brand's digital presence. "CTR is not just an indication of how relevant your ads are to searchers. CTR also contributes to your Ad Rank in the search engines...That’s right – PPC isn’t a pure auction. The top position doesn’t go to the highest b...