Customer attraction through digital marketing techniques: Evolution and joint dynamics across firms
(A2020-63938)

AUTHORS

José Ponzoa, ESIC Business and Marketing School; Anett Erdmann, ESIC Business and Marketing School

KEYWORDS

Digital Marketing; Inbound Marketing; E-commerce

ABSTRACT

Web analytics tools allow companies to gather information on the results of the techniques used to generate website traffic to their respective e-commerce sites. This document uses these data sources to analyse for the US, the UK and France the three largest e-commerce supermarket chains in each market, as well as Amazon, considering a time horizon from 2017 to 2019. Two main objectives are set up: (1) Describe whether there is an evolution over time in the usage of these techniques in terms of customer acquisition, and (2) Identify if there is any type of interaction between e-commerce in the way of applying inbound marketing. A vector autoregression model is used to identify joint dynamics across companies. In the UK and France, we find positive effects of the SEO effort by the market leader on other retailers in terms of spillover or imitation, while we find negative effects of Amazon on the traffic generation by some retailers which are interpreted as business stealing through marketing.