Abstract
The Internet has spawned a host of online promotional tools such as email ad, banner ad, search ad, and shopping bot. Most website managers employ multiple online tools to attract prospective customers, yet there is little conceptual understanding of how those tools differ from one another. We present a theoretical model to compare the role of different online promotional tools in consumer behavior. The central thesis is that the online promotional tool used by a consumer to arrive at an online store reveals two characteristics of the consumer's search process. The first is the type of search being conducted by the consumer, that is, whether it is goal-directed or exploratory, and the second is the competing demands for the consumer’s attention. Based on prior research in consumer search, attention economics, and involvement, we develop a set of hypotheses linking the online promotional tool used by a consumer to arrive at an online store to the visit duration and purchase probability. We test the hypotheses on clickstream data obtained from a major e-Commerce firm. The results from the empirical analysis provide strong support to most of the hypotheses. The findings of our study have implications for effective allocation of online promotional tool dollars.
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