il
Discount Bank is a universal bank that offers comprehensive banking services to its clients concerning all financial activities through direct banking and online banking.
have no intention of buying or using the offered services and are simply visiting the online store to gather information.
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http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/discountbank.net http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/discountbank.net
rather short and could indicate a problem that the website has in holding its traffickers on the website. In 2000, the website had 50,000 subscribed members and over 100,000 monthly pageviews3. Though current information on the exact effectiveness of Discounts online marketing campaigns could not be found, the general trend of increasing online marketing expenditure in Israel could suggest the worthiness of such media channel. In the beginning of 2011, Internet advertising constituted as much as 16% of Israels annual total advertising pie, estimated at ILS 630 million4 (See: appendix 1). Figures of banner and video advertisements on websites, as well as search engine advertising, reinforces what was clearly shown by the distribution of the advertising pie; the scope of internet advertising is growing and companies are increasing their online marketing efforts at a double digit rate5. Furthermore, about 60% of advertisers indicated they intend to increase online ad spending during 20116. In my opinion, this growth in online marketing expenditure could not be accidental and would not have accord/seen if it had no positive results to it. The reasons why so many companies divert marketing resources towards online advertising is that today, in Israel, over 4.7 million people surf the web, ages 13 and up7. 82.5% of households are connected to the Internet and about 82% of online surfers use the Internet on a daily basis8. Furthermore, 76% of surfers are members of social networks, on which they spend many hours daily. In addition, About 80% of web surfers indicate video viewing as one of their main activities online, of them, 25% watch online video content everyday, while the rate among
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teenagers rises to as much as 55%. Despite the potential reach of customers and regardless of the wide spread of online marketing efforts, many clients (at least 50%) are only partially active, if at all, in using online banking services offered by the bank9. All of this suggests that online banking organizations might need a layered and complex strategy for serving audiences and also for monetizing them. Advertising may help monetize some groups, while subscriptions will work for others. Currently the website is a joint marketing and online banking website which holds a large amount of space devoted to in-house advertising which seems overwhelming and mostly unnecessary for those who are already active members. Discount is right to build numerous mini sites or landing pages, which serve different segments but perhaps some distinction should be made between the general website as presented to prospects and the lightly active clientele and those who often use the website. Furthermore, the usage in rich media ads across the web should be increased, despite them being more expensive for advertisers, to target potential consumers, who consider them to be extremely exciting and fun, creating a higher level of involvement with the organizations. This could also improve the short time spam spent on the website indicated above. Though there is quite a wide spread on Youtube and blogs, no video content is currently presented on the marketing website, which, as stated above, is what the majority of people look for when surfing the web. Furthermore, in the case of video advertising, commercial television dictates an overly high coverage frequency, where the average frequency of a TV campaign is 11 times while the necessary effective frequency ranges between 3-4 times10. Online video submission from a unique user allows to determine in advance and control the
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An estimation of the general usage of Online Banking Services taken from Wikipedia. http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//1233740
number of times each viewer is exposed to that video and as such to reduce the amount of total exposures, becoming more cost effective.
respectively13. Only when Discount keyword is present the listings are related to the bank, displaying unique, brief but descriptive title tags for each page of service category. The use of such titles could indicate Discounts efforts to optimize their organic search using the different search engines. Since online advertising measurement tools enable websites to profile the user according to his class segment, consumer behavior, frequency, content consumed, this could very well serve the company to target their marketing efforts and use technics such as Re-Marketing and Sponsored Keyword Search to advertise more efficiently and effectively. Currently it seems that Discount operates only in general terms of targeting, as it does not use a more pinpointed approach in its online marketing campaigns, which could have aided in attracting the right kind of people to its different offerings rather than just raising awareness among general population.
11http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//1233740 12 13
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/discountbank.net http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/discountbank.net
Appendix
Appendix 1:
Appendix 2: