The number of websites grew exponentially over the years, from 1 website in 1991 to 1 billion in 2014 and more than 3 billion active users of the web in 2015. Businesses have understood that their success eventually lies in digital, and not traditional marketing. The online revolution disrupted the advertising industry in an unprecedented way, reshaping traditional ways of advertising into digital ones. The most prevalent advertising methods so far have been search advertising and social network advertising.
Google, the current market leader in search advertising, introduced Google AdWords in the year 2000. The technology relies on cookies and predefined keywords by the advertisers. The adverts are displayed in an order based on multiple factors, such as the budget of the advertiser, the keyword relevance and many more. On one hand, the global and direct reach through the world’s most popular search engine is a great strength. On the other hand, the marketing medium can suffer from click fraud and is limited in the amount of characters used for ad description. The technology might benefit from opportunities such as growth in the number of Internet users and online shoppers, or the use of different platforms. These possibilities however, might be diminished due to changes in government policies on privacy and cookie usage. Other threats include the alliance of Bing and Yahoo! or the rising costs caused by fierce bidding competition.
Social media, which originally began as an entertainment tool, quickly evolved into means of powerful marketing. Platforms such as Facebook, YouTube or Twitter noticed the emerging opportunities and initiated the concept of social network advertising. Its largest benefit over other methods is the current audience and availability of targeting options, such as geo, socio-psychographic or behavioral targeting. This is by far the most outstanding feature that makes Facebook Adverts such a crucial and disruptive technology. The technology is servicing a wide range of industries, but the ads may receive a weak click-through-rate. It might become easier to target niche markets and audiences in the future, however these can be threatened by users with adblock extensions or aggressive campaigns run by competitors.
Evidence collected about the advertising industry points to the direction of more extensive usage of mobile devices against desktops. Mobile searches surpassed desktop searches for local businesses in the US in 2015. It is undeniable that mobile advertising can be best reached through social network applications which are checked multiple times during the day by mobile users. By 2018, over half of mobile phone owners globally will be using a smartphone. Social network adverts will receive improved conversion tracking. Ads which stimulate the user to take measurable actions, such as ordering a product or registering for an event, will be able to report how effective the ad actually was. All the above lead to the conclusion that in the coming years more focus is going to be placed on mobile advertising via social network apps than through desktop search engines.
Group 16:
Yifei Fan 384022yf
Ching-Yun Wu 434176cw
Krystian Palczewski 384439kp
John Grigoriadis 459881ig
Sources:
http://marketingland.com/social-media-advertising-set-explode-next-3-years-121691
https://thefutureorganization.com/using-swot-for-social-media-strategy/
