Company Should Decide How Much

¶ … company should decide how much they are willing to pay for online advertisement? Can you think of ways that they can measure the results from the advertising dollars spent?

Any company looking to advertise on the Internet needs to determine the price they are going to pay for an online advertisement by looking at key measures of performance for the website where the planned ad will run. There are many published statistics on websites, including even doing your own using Compete Inc.s (www.compete.com) browser add-in that will tell you what the approximate level of traffic a given website you are visiting is generating, and also define the levels of trust possible. In addition to Compete, you could also use research from Forrester Research to analyze the traffic to a site, or even consider using Google and it's many add-on applications to analyze a traffic's site. The best known of all Google AdWords, online advertisements any company can quickly create. Columbus (2006) defines the analytics applications available in Google for evaluating the effectiveness of AdWords in his article, Trekking Google AdWord's Last Mile.

Of all the approaches used for measuring how advertising dollars spent influence sales results, Google's use of analytics also provides the ability to track results of sales activity per sales channel. The best approach most companies use is to ask customers to "opt in" for additional information, and in doing this they can find out what advertising program delivered the greatest value.

2) Can you think of specific advantages or disadvantages for using either paper or online catalogs?

There are many advantages and disadvantages of using paper or online catalogs. The biggest advantage of having an online catalog is cost; you simply don't have to pay to have thousands printed and distributed. A second major advantage of online catalogs over their printed counterparts is speed of updating; with the web you can update a catalog literally overnight. There is also the advantage of being able to quickly change pricing with an online catalog, with a printed catalog this is simply not the case. The advantages of a printed catalog include greater depth to the products presented, more "shelf life" of the catalog itself, and more focus on how to make the catalog more magazine like, as Disney often drives towards with their catalog designs.

3) What, if any, are the dysfunctional aspects of the "New Economy" promoted by e-Business? Identify any legal, ethical, regulatory and social issues that might negatively impact people, organizations and/or society.