Research On The Effect Of Multi-channel Online Ads For E-commerce

The rapid development of Internet,mobile and social media has brought a large number of new and potential online advertising marketing channels for e-commerce firms,including customer-initiated channels and firm-initiated channels.Customer-initiated channels refer to the advertising channels triggered by the users' active search behavior,such as the searching advertising channels brought by the search of brand keywords/generic keywords.This kind of advertising channels can more quickly respond to customers' demand faster and promote purchase conversion in a short time.While firm-initiated channels are those marketing channels pushed by enterprises actively and accepted by customers passively,including SMS,email,Wechat and refer link.The information provided by such channels can be viewed repeatedly over a period of time.Due to Different forms of online advertising channels have different characteristics,their impact on customer behavior may be different and the channel combination effects are also likely to occur when these channels are combined.Therefore,in order to help e-commerce firms to better understand the effect of multi-channel online ads and allocate resources and advertising budget more efficiently,this paper evaluates the overall effect of multi-channel online ads of e-commerce firms from the perspective of customers' online purchase journey,and solves problems of how to choose the more effective online advertising channels and in what order to conduct channel combination marketing is more effective.Firstly,this paper compared the effect differences of nine online advertising channels in time and purchase funnel stages.We constructed SVAR model based on the purchase funnel model,and then choose the advertising variables,website visit stage variables and purchase variables as the input of the model.After a series of tests and analysis,including granger causality test,stability test,model evaluation and impulse response analysis,we answered three questions: which online advertising channel is the most effective for purchasing,the duration of the advertising effect,and the difference of channel effect in different stages of purchase funnel.The results show that in the short term,the immediate effect of branded customer-initiated channels is the largest,followed by the generic customer-initiated ads channels,while the firm-initiated advertising channels have the weakest effect on promoting immediate consumption.In the long run,firm-initiated advertising channels have the strongest long-term cumulative effects,especially SMS.For the duration of advertising effect,the firm-initiated advertising channels have a longer duration.Besides,the research results also reveal the different advertising channels have different effect on different purchase stages,showing that the branded customer-initiated channels have a higher effect in the home page stage,the generic customer-initiated channels have a similar effect in the home page visiting stage and detail page visiting stage,while the firms-initiated advertising channels can more effectively attract customers to specific product pages.In order to further explore the combination effect of multi-channel online ads,this paper investigates the complete channel clicking path of individuals and role of specific channel click sequences in promoting users' purchase transition.We firstly proposed our conceptual model and constructed the Cox model based on the consideration set theory.And then we extracted relevant variables as the input of our model from a fine-grained channel click sequence data set.Finally,we estimated our model.The results show that the channel sequence of generic search channel to brand search channel will have a positive combination effect on purchase.The channel sequence of brand search channel to general search channel will have a negative combination effect on purchase.In addition,the channel sequence of the firms-initiated channel to the customer-initiated channel has a positive combination effect on the purchase.