Does Your Online Advertising Work for Every Consumer? Measuring Age-Related Advertising Effectiveness in an Internet Company

Abstract

With the emergence of the internet and its growing importance as an advertising medium, online advertising effectiveness became a topic in academic research (Ha 2008, Jianan et al. 2005). A June 2008 worldwide McKinsey digital-advertising survey shows that 91 percent out of 340 companies are advertising online. Yet 80 percent of the companies allocate media budgets by simply making subjective judgments and have none or only inappropriate methods in place to track advertising effectiveness (Bughin et al. 2009). Accordingly, the need for accountability in praxis increased significantly. The current method of tracking online advertising effects in the marketplace is by using direct tracking techniques via cookies (Lavin 2006). However via direct tracking it is not possible to measure all advertising effects because 30 percent of internet users reject or delete cookies needed for tracking (Lipsman 2007).