Case Analysis: Mednet.Com

CASE ANALYSIS: MEDNET.COM

1.  Condition specific website Cholestrol.com provides stiff competition to Mednet.com in terms of advertising revenue since it comprehensively addresses only one chronic condition and hence pharmaceutical companies believe that their advertisement on that website reaches their target audience more effectively. Since Cholestrol.com targets very specific audience, it’s site visitors would be considerably lesser than Mednet.com and therefore might end up selling lesser number of advertised products than Mednet.com does.  

     Non-profit and governmental websites have the potential to entice more site visitors than Mednet.com since they have more comprehensive content, but the complexity in browsing through those web pages could act as a deterrent for the same cause.

     Corporate health websites that operate on company intranets reduce the site visitors for Mednet.com. In order to compete in that space, Mednet.com would have to consider liaising with Corporations to provide Mednet.com content on their intranets.

     A major player in the online health information arena is the alternativehealth.com. In order to enter into direct competition with alternativehealth.com, Mednet.com could consider foraying into the alternative healing approaches space. This could boost Mednet.com’s site visits by attracting people endorsing alternative healing approaches. Mednet.com could also try to boost its advertisement revenue by wooing advertisers from the alternative healing approaches sector.

    The search engine Marvel competes closely with Mednet.com by garnering higher site visitor numbers and providing lower click-through rates for advertisers. However, Marvel is a general interest website and is a mere starting point of inquiry as against Mednet.com which is a trusted source of medical information. Also Mednet.com accounts for much better sale conversions through advertisements when compared to Marvel.

2. (i) (% of clicks on ads) * (% of purchases made subsequently) = Purchase rate

          (Purchase rate) * (Advertisement cost for the month) = Number of purchases made that month

Using the above metrics on data from Exhibits 2 & 3, we could calculate the sales figures generated by Mednet.com for each month

    (ii) Brand awareness can be measure by conducting a market survey / research to identify the brand’s reach with people. With the given statistics, brand awareness could be measured to a certain extent using the below metric where the impressions by unique visitors each month is calculated

(Number of impressions received through Mednet.com for 1 month)/ (Number of unique visitors for Mednet.com for 1 month)

    (iii) Sales leads can be measured through the coupons with barcode that the purchaser redeems while making purchase since the coupon barcodes reveal the source with which the customer made the product purchase decision

3. Since Marvel is a general interest search engine, a major number of click throughs would be made by people that are not really interested in making product purchases. Also, with the pay-per-click approach, there is always the possibility that click through rates could be driven up fraudulently by competitors in order to drive up the company’s advertising costs.