PromotionStat

E-Commerce

In less than a decade, Internet-based electronic commerce, or E-Commerce, has emerged as the fastest growing factor in the creation of new wealth and overall economic activity in the United States. And beyond the national frontier, it seems clear that the E-Commerce phenomenon is well on its way to redefining how the rest of the world does business as well. The trend, say analysts, is not only being driven by the arrival of new consumer users, but also will be spurred by the increasing confidence shown by the business sector in Internet-based commerce. Indeed, so confident are hard-nosed business executives in the reliability, security and performance characteristics of E-Commerce, that a growing number of the biggest and most successful companies in the country are opting to run mission critical intra and inter-corporate transactions over the Net.

Companies in virtually every market sector and industry must now determine how to develop innovative business strategies to remain competitive in the digital marketplace. Although it is still early, one thing does seem certain: those who make the commitment to integrate E-Commerce as a mainstream element in their business practices within and between companies are the ones most likely to wind up on top. Supporting this aggressive outlook for E-Commerce, market researchers from International Data Corporation (IDC) predict that the amount of overall commerce including business-to-business transactions - conducted via the World Wide Web will top $2 trillion by 2009.

E-Commerce Dilemma

The advertising market as a whole is characterized by the fact that it is difficult to measure, evaluate or analyze the results of specific ads' effectiveness. With the advent of the Internet measuring the effectiveness of ads became somewhat simpler. A visitor may click on a banner or link of an advertiser and wind up on their web site. It is fairly simple at first glance to place a counter on the advertiser's web site to determine the amount of visitors to that site. However, when a site receives a visitor, a company has no way of knowing whether a visitor was accidentally routed there, found the site through a search engine or came because of an offer by the advertising company. The increased number of visitors to a site may be due to a variety of reasons besides advertising including the possibility that the numbers were inflated by technological means. Most importantly, if a company advertises in more than one location, it is difficult to determine which ad brought more visitors.

Consequently, a company may not be in a position to determine which advertising strategy is most effective in promoting its products or services. Because it is very difficult to measure and predict the effectiveness of a specific ad placement, a company may continue spending a great sum of money on advertising based on inaccurate data and assumptions.In essence, a company may be spending money on advertising that does not work, which creates a dilemma. How can a company figure out how to budget advertising dollars correctly and allocate money to advertising sources that will lead to profitability when there is no way to measure advertising effectiveness? Presently, there are two basic methods to address this issue on the Internet:

1. Server Log File Analysis: This type of analysis can be conducted either online or offline via a company's Internet Service Provider or by means of software that is installed on the server. However this information does not allow for a direct tracing or analysis of which advertising or promotional source brought the product request or sale. In other words there is NO filtering function that allows for the data collection to be linked to a particular advertising vehicle or a keyword. Additionally there is no way to track and analyze purchased banner/logo impressions placed on other web sites. Basically, this method does provide a means to determine how many unique visitors resulted and what these visitors did when they visited the web site.

2. Banner Impressions Analysis: Such analysis typically includes the amount of impressions, list of web pages showing this impression, date of the impression, CTR of a particular banner or logo, etc.

However, none of the companies offering this type of analysis follow the visitor after the click. Did the visitor leave the front page of the site (artificial traffic), or did the visitor stay on to look at other pages? Which product was of most interest to a particular visitor directed to a web site from a particular advertising source? If a company had access to such information it would be able to conduct a marketing research study for a particular group of visitors. A company would also be able to determine the efficiency of a particular advertising and promotional campaign in providing real traffic and interested consumers.

Clearly, existing methodology does not meet the challenge nor provide the information necessary to structure an effective advertising campaign. It was within this environment that ATG’s management turned its attention to developing a new approach aimed at assisting E-Businesses by helping them become more profitable. The resulting technology has been carefully structured to provide meaningful information to a company and foster the biggest "bang for the buck." The result was the development of the PromotionStat technology.

PromotionStat Solution

PromotionStat is the most advanced Internet Commerce Tracking and Tracing Systems in existence. It allows the web-based retailers to achieve rapid profitability by completely eliminating useless “clicks” as well as all kinds of artificially generated “traffic” to their web sites. By drastically improving users ROI (Return on Investment) while significantly reducing advertising costs per sale, PromotionStat platform represents a major breakthrough in E-Commerce profitability. The PromotionStat technology is a statistical and analytical traffic-monitoring tool designed to help marketing executives monitor the effectiveness of every dollar spent on advertising and promotions as well as utilize a free promotional tool at a favorable exchange ratio.

The PromotionStat system tracks visitors' pre and post click activities while identifying what visitors came from which advertisements or links. With PromotionStat's Internet Advertising Rating System, a web site will be able to identify and rate their advertising sources and find out which ads are successful. In essence PromotionStat is capable of reporting and separating visitors from different advertising vehicles and tracking their behavior once they get there. This type of analysis will allow companies to allocate their advertising budget appropriately and prevent them from spending money on ads that are costly and inefficient. The PromotionStat system is designed to analyze the effectiveness of advertising and promotional campaigns of web sites.

This system keeps track of visitors via a series of invisible data collectors placed within individual pages of the web site. An advertiser will be able to identify visitors by the various advertising companies that directed them to their site as well as keep track of both the amount of visitors and their level of interest in the advertiser's products or services. The system calculates the percentage of visitors who looked at the home page versus those who continued browsing other internal pages. In this way a company will be able to determine which advertising company is more effective and whether it is worthwhile to continue utilizing their services. In addition to finding visitors with high "targetability", the PromotionStat technology is able to record and analyze detailed information regarding visitors.

This innovative screening system allows web owners to track and identify the referring source of their visitors, calculate the amount of unique visitors on a daily basis, describe the nature and dynamics of visitor activity on a web site and much more. PromotionStat also has a built in mechanism that can detect artificially inflated traffic, which is unfortunately a common practice on the Internet as web sites are paying "per click". This will help web owners eliminate dishonest promoters that employ such tactics.