Factors Influencing Marketing Effectiveness on the Web

Despite the current development of Internet marketing, understanding the effective use of the Internet still poses problems for academic researchers and marketers (Kassaye, 1999). This research attempts to empirically explore some of the critical factors influencing commercial Internet and Web development. The key factors considered for company Internet and Web site development are aspects of technology capacity, the use of different Internet developers, the approaches used to evaluate on-line marketing effectiveness and the marketing executives’ knowledge of Internet technology. As a result of a cross-sectional comparative study of ’effective’ and ’ineffective’ companies, the findings indicate that companies with higher on-line marketing effectiveness tend to possess higher levels of technological capabilities for Internet-based marketing. The results also show that their marketing executives have a better knowledge of technical aspects of Web site development. They tend to be early Internet adopters using a multiple approach to evaluate their on-line marketing efforts. These exploratory results indicate how on-line strategies could be made to be more effective.