Continente online

: the sale of online advertising

Abstract

Continente Online is one of the online grocery stores in Portugal. Founded in 2001, Continente’s Online store provides a convenience service to customers, offering more than 30,000 grocery and non-grocery products. Focus will be applied on this Portuguese case of E-commerce, with special attention being given to its monetization businesses, namely the sale of online advertising to third parties that was launched in 2010. This case study consists on a strategic reflection on the potentialities and challenges of this business. To do this, market research was conducted with the aim of understanding the reasons and objectives inherent to this business of online advertising and to indentify and analyze the main differences between Continente’s Online store and its advertisers’ and customers’ perceptions and also the online’s store advertising campaigns. The findings suggest that Continente’s Online store aims at monetizing its E-commerce platform investment, providing extra information to customers and increasing sales. In line with this, advertisers aspire to increase its visibility, communicate their brands and also increase their sales. Moreover, although the click intentions reveal to be low, the online advertising campaigns analyzed show a positive relationship between clicks and results, emphasizing the need of implementing better and more detailed performance monitoring. In order to continue with this monetization in the future, Continente’s Online store still showed some room for improvement. Applying customized and one-to-one advertising strategies, investing in standard banners and being more conversions and performance oriented would be some recommendations done by the author.

Date of Award	21 Feb 2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Pedro Celeste (Supervisor)