Groundbreaking paper into e-commerce marketing a fit for tough times
IN rather depressing economical times, a unique doctoral thesis has shed light on how to spend money on marketing your products or services through search engines.
Wouter Kritzinger graduated with a DTech from CPUT on Tuesday, titled: “Development of a search engine marketing model using the application of a dual strategy”.
Kritzinger used various experiments to measure expenses and returns on a number of real-life websites, and produced a simple model which can be used by marketers to determine a budget split between digital marketing platforms.
He is employed as senior search engine optimisation (SEO) specialist at Takealot.com.
First, an empirical experiment was done, involving fat head and long tail key-phrase searches.
The top 10 websites of the sponsored section were recorded and investigated to see if they also had an SEO ranking within the top 100 results. It was found that website owners seldom invest in SEO as part of a SEM (search engine marketing) campaign.
Second, the digital marketing campaign of a small company was monitored.
The PPC (pay per click) system was running and produced results, but required regular monthly payments. It was decommissioned at a given point, and an SEO campaign was started. Traffic and expenses were recorded.
Results indicated the expenses on the two systems crossed over after about six months, with SEO becoming an increasingly better investment from that point onwards.
Finally, various successful e-commerce websites were evaluated on their CPA (cost per acquisition). SEO and PPC costs, as well as the CPA were calculated over a set period.
It was found that the CPA for SEO, for each of the websites, was significantly lower than that of the CPA for the PPC campaigns.
In conclusion, a model was produced to summarise this complex interplay of determinants, showing that prevailing conditions and requirements from owners prescribe whether only one or both SEO and PPC should be the focus of a marketing budget.
This kind of research is considered to be groundbreaking in the field of e-commerce marketing visibility.
Kritzinger has completed his National Diploma, then a B.Tech, followed by Master’s degree and D.Tech at CPUT. Both his M.Tech and DTech were done under my supervision as head of Warc (the Website Attributes Research Centre) at CPUT.
Warc is at the forefront of research done on internet information science, including website visibility, website usability, search engines and query construction. Research is also active on exposing academic publications to the search engine.
A system has been developed at Warc, where completed academic publications are hosted on various platforms to enhance exposure to internet searchers.
For more details, view: http:// www.cput.ac.za/academic/faculties/informaticsdesign/research/ warc or http://web-visibility.co.za/
Professor Weideman is the founder and leader of the Website Attributes Research Centre, CPUT.