Web marketing and advertising - what is this?

The concept of Internet marketing and advertising is not new for the Bulgarian businessmen or for the the typical on-line consumer, who is constantly in touch with the result of these activities in the Web. The most common form of on-line advertisement is the banner, which can be text or animated. Sometimes interactive games are used to promote products or services. Also web site addresses are promoted with banners or text links. Very popular marketing technique is the distribution of company or news bulletins via email.

All above practices however are connected with some ideas that are not so popular among the wide audience in Bulgaria yet. These are the the concepts upon which and Internet advertising campaign is built or a web site is created. In most cases these are also the indicators used to evaluate the success of the advertising or marketing campaign.

A basic concept in this sphere, which has started to gain popularity, is impression, synonymous with ad view. It represents a single visualization of an ad (banner, link, etc.) on a web page when the page arrives at the viewer's display. The number of impressions is the most popular way of quoting cost of Internet advertisement campaigns in Bulgaria. In the USA and in other more developed on-line markets there are practices to calculate the price of Internet advertisement according to the number of clicks and in other ways.

The number of unique visitors is also taken into consideration. These are users who made a single visit of the site in a specific time period.

Other commonly used terms, connected to the visits to a web site or to a campaign, are hit and visit duration. A hit is a single file request in the access log of a web server. Hit is often confused with unique visit, impression, session or all of these. Visit duration is the length of time the visitor is exposed to a Web site during a specific time period. It is usually measured in minutes per month.

Two basic coefficients are calculated to evaluate the success of an advertising campaign in the Internet. The first is click-through rate (CTR). The click-through rate measures the number of visitors who clicked on an ad and followed to the advertised place as a percentage of the ad impressions. It does not include the clicks where the visitor did not manage to follow to the advertised place. The second coefficient is the conversion rate. This is the percentage of visitors, who arrived after a click on the ad and performed the action desired from marketing view point, i.e. bought a product, registered, subscribed, etc. The conversion rate is usually calculated for a specific time period, i.e. if 1000 users visit a site in a period of time, and 100 of them provide an email address to receive a bulletin, then the conversion rate for this time period is 10%.

Another technique, though not yet popular in Bulgaria, is the so called e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing stands for promoting products or services via e-mail. This type of advertising requires the availability of a big database of people, who gave their permission to receive promotional messages, which may be provided by a specialized agency. It is becoming common to use the methods of the so called rich media in order to attract the attention of email message receivers. This different from the ordinary formats method attracts the audience attention with animations, sounds and other interactive actions.

Messages, information and images may be sent to a target group of users, stimulated with rewards or simply encouraged by the nice creative of the message itself to forward it to their acquaintances and colleagues. Because of its distribution effect this method is called virus marketing.

Another approach to distribution of advertisement or informational messages requires obtaining the user's explicit agreement to receive constantly or from time to time advertisement messages via e-mail or specialized software. This practice is called marketing of agreement and it has not found its place yet in the on-line advertising in Bulgaria.

There is also an option for on-line marketing campaigns in which the income from the sales, carried out by the company, are split between the advertiser and the advertising media. This type of activity is called affiliate marketing. It has the advantage of automating the advertising process and payment only achievement of desired result - sales, clicks, registrations or combinations of these. This type of marketing has contributed to the success of many leading on-line companies, i.e. Amazon.com. In our country measuring the sales that came as a result of specific campaigns is much too complex and therefore this method of marketing is not popular.

Another service, the name of which does not have a good equivalent in Bulgarian, is lately gaining recognition - search engine marketing. Search engine marketing includes providing links to a web site in order to secure its better placement during web searches.Site optimization allows the search engines to read through the pages of the site not only by the use of keywords, but also with other techniques, used by the experts in this sphere. This type of marketing also includes the selection and purchase of appropriate paid keywords and phrases according to which a site appears in the search engines. Because it is difficult to choose a good phrase for a good price, this is usually done by an Internet advertising agency, which uses specialized software.