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Contents and Articles Below

1. Internet Marketing at BC Escapes - Vancouver

2. Marketing Prescription Drugs on the Internet - Vancouver

3. New Internet Marketing Revenue Stream for Portals - Calgary

4. Online Travel Marketing with Sears - Toronto

5. Internet Marketing with Travelocity

6. Online Marketing Cuts at AOL and New Products - New York

7. Internet Marketing and the Biggest Online Cities

8. Internet Use in Canada

9. Internet Driving Sales at Budget

10. Search Engine Optimization and Uniglobe Travel - Seattle

11. Google - Best Search Engine Alive 

12. Inktomi Battles Back with Web Search 9 

Internet Marketing at BC Escapes  - Vancouver
The BC Escapes Program launched an Internet marketing campaign targeting long-haul and short-haul travelers to British Columbia. Long-haul travelers live in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Short-haul travelers, in contrast, live in cities such as Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Seattle and Portland. Reaching 60 million households, the award winning BC Escapes Program used online banner ads on Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, other search engines, travel web sites and email marketing campaigns to generate $70 million in measurable tourism revenue. Promotional travel packages were also displayed on Tourism BC’s web site (www.hellobc.com). Tourism BC is an independent Crown corporation responsible for marketing Super Natural British Columbia to the world. 

Marketing Prescription Drugs On the Internet - Vancouver

Vancouver based RxCanada4less.com plans to sell discount prescription drugs to Americans. Advertising on KIRO radio in Seattle, RxCanada4less consequently received 23,499 hits, 31,618 hits the next day in November, up from only 327 hits received in October. (The term “hits” refers to touch points on a web site and not “unique visitors.”) Given this information, however, Internet marketers should consider traditional media such as radio as part of an Internet marketing strategy.

New Internet Marketing Revenue Stream for Portals - Calgary

Calgary based DealDispay.com has developed a new Internet marketing strategy enabling retail and service based businesses to list both local and online shopping deals. According to this strategy, news, magazine, radio stations, directories, search engines, and community based web sites will be able to generate advertising revenue by displaying merchant products and services on their web sites.   

To register for this service, portals outline the fees that they wish to charge merchants. Deal Display customizes the service to match the look and feel of a portal’s web site. Once linked to Deal Display, portals receive an immediate advertising revenue stream from merchants. Deal Display is a unique service since even merchants without web sites may use the service. Displaying product pictures, business descriptions, and web site links, Deal Display offers many advantages over pay-per-performance models such as Overture and Google.  

List Your Site with Overture and appear on the top of search results of leading sites like Yahoo!, Lycos and MSN

Online Travel Marketing with Sears - Toronto

The launch of Sears Canada’s new web site (www.searstravel.ca) comprises an aggressive entry into the Canadian online travel market. To encourage shoppers to book online this Christmas, Sears is offering monthly payments on vacations without interest. The Internet marketing strategy includes family friendly destinations such as Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic, Varadero in Cuba and Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. Similar to Expedia, the new web site features up-to-the-minute pricing, travel recommendations, and a 14,000 destination travel guide. All this may be money well spent as Canadians are expected to spend $1.1 billion online for gifts this holiday season. 

Internet Marketing with Travelocity 

Travelocity has adopted a new business strategy. The company will buy rooms from hotels in bulk, selling directly to travelers, instead of paying for rooms as they are booked online. Hotels benefit from this strategy since they get paid right away, instead of waiting for hotel reservation companies to remit payment.  

As part of its core Internet marketing strategy, Travelocity has also established links between its own web site and hotel web sites. Presumably, this tracking system will prevent the revenue losses that occur as individuals routinely visit discount travel web sites, then book directly through official hotel branded web sites. Travelocity will also partner with hotels to purchase rooms for peak and slow seasons to ensure that the company has more rooms available during peak travel periods than other companies.  

Online Marketing Cuts at AOL & New Products - New York

America Online has cut about 15%, or 90 jobs, from its Internet Marketing Group. This comprises the second round of cuts as AOL, cut 120 jobs from the division earlier this May. Veteran Robert Sherman, and Lisa Brown of USA Interactive have been hired to develop new flexible pricing products and services for AOL members. 

One newly developed product is the prepaid Internet card. Offered at Target Corp. department stores and Western Union outlets, Internet cards will provide users with up to 500 minutes of dial-up Internet access. The cost for this service will be US $14.99 to be used within 18 months of purchase. Once a card is activated, the user has 90 days from that moment to use the remaining minutes. While these rules may inhibit AOL’s Internet marketing strategy, AOL intends to use prepaid cards to reach potential subscribers needing affordable Internet access.

Internet Marketing and the Biggest Online Cities

The recent ranking of top online shopping cities by AOL reveals that e-commerce remains a vital part of the retail world. Increasingly, online shopping has become mainstream and multi-channel as 86 percent of Internet shoppers surveyed report researching or purchasing products online at least once each month. This result is good news for Interent marketers interested in advertising online. (These results may reflect the habits of avid Internet shoppers, which are atypical from the norm.) Results for shopping behaviour among top 10 US cities were as follows:

Typically, Internet shoppers spend about US $200 per month. They purchase products for themselves about 57 percent of time and 43 percent for family and friends. Nearly all shoppers purchase products at home (95%) with very few purchasing at work (5%). This result suggests that Internet marketing and advertising campaigns targeting non-work related hours may generate strong revenue boosts, particularly in the area of pay-for-performance marketing campaigns.   

Internet Use in Canada

Canadians will spend CA $320 online this holiday season. Thirty percent of Canadians report feeling comfortable using their credit card information online. Another 25% of Canadians intend to use the Internet to avoid shopping in stores. These results comprise good news for Canadian Internet marketers who have been waiting for Canadians to realize the value of shopping online.

Internet Marketing Driving Sales at Budget 

More than 23 percent of car and truck reservations at Budget are booked online, up 12 percent from 2001. Currently, the company receives 51,200 unique visitors daily or 1.5 million unique visitors monthly. The company attributes this strong growth to marketing programs informing customers that the lowest rates for car and truck rentals are available online. Importantly, an Internet marketing campaign offering double the points for booking online resulted in fully one quarter of “Perfect Drive” car rentals being booked online.  

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Search Engine Optimization & Uniglobe Travel - Seattle

In an effort to increase return on investment (ROI) from Internet marketing, Seattle based Uniglobe has selected search engine optimization (SEO) as a new strategy to increase traffic from search engines. Search engine marketing has been shown to deliver a stronger ROI than pay-for-performance programs. Due to this optimization strategy, Uniglobe has realized significant increase in traffic from search engines, therefore, lowering costs to reach qualified buyers. At Uniglobe, search engine optimization strengthens the overall Internet marketing strategy, which remains to increase both customer visits and inbound phone calls. 

Google - Best Search Engine Alive

Everyone knows that Google is the best search engine online. Google remains unique due to an unflinching commitment to delivering high quality search results without paid search listings (as demonstrated on search engines such as Yahoo!, AltaVista, and MSN). Google, in contrast, separates paid listings or AdWords from search results.

Google offers a wealth of additional services as well. “Image Search” enables users to find thousands of photos and graphics online. “Groups” enable users to review and participate in discussions held by individuals from around the world. The Directory provides a complete list of sites related to specific search topics. “News” provides users with comprehensive information on current events from across the globe. Google even offers definitions of words. For example, the results for a search on the word “entropy” will appear as follows: “searched the web for entropy.” By clicking on the underlined or hyperlink-word, Google will display its definition.  

Google has specialized search engines focused on specific topics such as Apple, Macintosh, Microsoft, Linux; and even search engines geared to university colleges and campuses. Google offers a catalog search engine for users who want to compare prices. Google also provides a list of popular search terms. Parents may instruct Google to block pornographic content. Google is able to translate web sites into English from languages such as Italian, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese.  Google will also find keyword search terms both in Word (doc) and Adobe Acrobat (pdf) documents.   

Inktomi Battles Back with Web Search 9 

Inktomi, a leading provider of web search and enterprise information retrieval services, recently unveiled Web Search 9. In a bid to battle competitors such as Google, Web Search 9 combines algorithmic and editorial relevance techniques to provide users with accurate and comprehensive search results. Inktomi claims that Web Search 9 will match and exceed competitors in three fundamental ways: (1) freshness since the “content discovery system” refreshes the entire index every 10 to 14 days; (2) relevance by determining the “degree of fit” between user requests and web sites; and (3) index size will be expanded to match or exceed both Google and Fast. Featuring “Smart Summaries,” an industry first, Web Search 9 displays the most relevant page summaries for users, instead of their having to wade through web sites to find the correct content. Reaching over half of all Internet users worldwide, Inktomi is a strong tool for Internet marketers. 

List Your Site with Overture and appear on the top of search results of leading sites like Yahoo!, Lycos and MSN

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