A Research Of The Effect On Traffic Of Large-scale Online Promotion Activities On E-commerce Websites

Over the past decade,electronic commerce has been developed rapidly in China.The online market is so huge that the fierce competition for the online shopping is spread among e-commerce enterprises.With the gradual maturity of online marketing theory and the accumulation of experience,more and more marketing resources are used to carry out various types of online promotional activities to attract consumers to visit,browse the website,and ultimately the purchase.Since 2009,the large-scale online promotion activities,such as the "double 11" promotion activity which is organized by Tmall.com,have gradually become the mainstream of online promotion activities.Nowadays,various themes of large-scale promotion activities emerge in an endless stream.Large-scale online promotion activities have some features that differ from the daily online promotion activities:a large scale of publicity,large discounts,a wide range of commodities,specific activity time and so on.Such activities are often able to bring a huge amount of traffic volume and trading volume to the site,while expanding the influence of the enterprise and promoting the development of enterprises greatly.However,high returns often correspond to high investment.The cost of large-scale promotion activities is quite huge and the traffic acquisition cost keeps rising.The problem placed in front of e-commerce managers need to solve are how to make more rational use of marketing budget,and how to improve the traffic-attracting effect of online promotions.It is much more convenient to access data on the Internet than the offline environment.We can easily collect website traffic data based on metrics we defined by Web Analytics and then analyze and summarize the traffic-atrracting effect of the promotion activities by using the data.This study selects multiple metrics of Web Analytics to measure the volume,quality and conversion of traffic,and collects the time series data of a certain brand's sales on JD.com from October 27,2014 to June 30,2015,using the Structural Time Series Model to analyze the effect of attracting traffic of five large-scale online promotion activities during this period.The results of our study show that:large-scale online promotion activities have a significant positive effect on total page traffic,but the difference is showed on the quality effect and conversion effect of the total page traffic;the impact on paid traffic is basically consistent with the impact on the total traffic;in addition to individual circumstances,these promotion activities has a positive effect on the volume of unpaid traffic,while effects on unpaid traffic quality and conversion are not significant.Moreover,the results also show that different festivals also have different effects on traffic.This analysis may benefit e-commerce sites to develop a better strategy to carry out similar promotion activities.