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Introduction
A Study of the Saudi Market., Many online advertising campaigns in Saudi Arabia tend to rely on two kinds of internet marketing strategies to announce new services, products or to acquire new customers. These two kinds are Display Ads and Paid Search Ads. According to Ghannam (2011), display advertising refers to the promotion of using websites and can acquire various designs and formats like multimedia and text. Similarly, Paid Search Ads is a category of contextual advertising also called sponsored search. As part of this strategy, money is paid to the search engines for priority or prominent display.
Most of the marketing managers believe that combining both these types of ads as part of any campaign can increase its effectiveness (Ghannam, 2011; Kireyev, Pauwels& Gupta, 2013; Al-Maghrabi& Dennis, 2011; and May, 2011). However, it has not been tested if this claim is correct or not. Actually, there is no clear scientific evidence that supports this claim.
Before moving on to display and paid search ads, two important terminologies in the context of online advertising need elaboration i.e. the return on investment and the click through rate. The return on investment can be defined as the ratio between the amount of money invested on posting an ad and the amount of money earned from it, both from an advertiser’s perspective.
On the other hand, the click through rate is the percentage of internet surfers clicking an ad. It is an important instrument for measuring the effectiveness of an advertising campaign and can be measured by calculating the ratio between the total number of times an ad is clicked by a surfer and the total number of ad impressions (Krushevskaja&Muthukrishnan, 2013).
According to Azimi Et al. (2012) and Krushevskaja&Muthukrishnan (2013), the display ads or the display advertising is a graphical form of digital promotion of products and services. This is carried out on the internet and appears as graphical images along with the content on different web pages, email browsers, social media sites and instant messaging applications. These ads in the graphical form are mostly called banners and are displayed in standard configurations.
These can comprise of rich media, moving images, photos, logos, simple text or a combination of all or any of these. Rich media is a comparatively modern version of display ads and is another name given to the interactive multimedia. This type of multimedia employs the amalgamation of interactive content, video, animation, photographs, audio and plain text in order to enhance the interest and attract the attention of target recipients. In fact, these are normal published ads or those on the television but with the added capabilities of user interaction and audio-visual content.
Mulpuru, Harteveldt&Roberge(2011) and Navalpakkam& Churchill (2012) claim that the traditional advertisement methodologies are rapidly being replaced by the display ads owing to the refined targeting choices available with latter.
A Study of the Saudi Market includes both behavioural and demographic based choices in selection of the target audience. Similarly, the display advertisement is also being preferred owing to the possibility of monitoring the performance of the advertising campaign through the availability of instantaneous measuring systems like clicks and impressions. This monitoring can then be used to improve or modify the advertisement for enhanced effectiveness.
Balik (2015) highlights that traditionally marketers have shown mixed preferences towards the display advertising, while some of them have been seen completely rejecting this type of promotion. The main faults with the use of display ads strategy where employed, comprise of: copying other campaigns without any consideration towards specific requirements; and according this strategy only a cursory treatment. According to Balik (2015)
this is due to mainly the absence of understanding about the correct employment and advantages of the display advertising strategy or existence of some very wrong concepts. Some of these mistaken concepts include: expecting miraculous performance out of a single campaign; associating these ads solely with brand performance; and gradual loss of interest when no clicks are visible.
On the other hand, Rutz, Bucklin &Sonnier(2012) and Blake, Nosko&Tadelis (2014) explain that the paid search ads or the SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is the process through which advertisements are purchased on the search engines in order to increase the website traffic. Initially, the terminology SEM was used for both the paid search ads and the SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
However, with the refinement and progress in the information technology and internet, SEM now refers only to paid search ads. Overall, the paid search advertisement aspect of the SEM now includes: PPC (pay-per-click); PPC (pay-per-call); CPC (cost-per-click);and CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions). Some or all of these may be employed as part of the paid search strategy and A Study of the Saudi Market..
At present, the most commonly used paid search mechanisms by the marketers are the Google AdWords, Bing Ads and Yahoo Search Ads. Similarly, several paid search options are also available on various social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter…
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