In e-commerce, where affinity marketing is playing an increasingly important role, the purpose is to increase site visibility, drive traffic and boost sales. One way that search engines take part in affinity marketing is by selling links to keyword searches. Yahoo, for example, sells banner ads for use with home business, business opportunities and many other keywords. If a company buys banner ad space for any of these keywords, its ads will come up whenever a user types in one of those words. As e-commerce sites continue to try to differentiate their online communities, tools for affinity marketing are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
Some specialized tools analyze individuals' online behavior in pursuit of personalization.
Analysis for analyzing issues that range from how long it takes visitors to view the home page to which sections of the site generate the most sales, says Michael Booth, Net. Genesis' director of business development. E-comm sites have been struggling to find ways to increase online purchasing. Though enabling technologies such as personalization tools and ad servers are plentiful and easy to install, an organization's information technology specialists should be brought into the loop early to make sure the company is selecting the tools best suited to the affinity marketing job at hand. Consultation with information technology is especially important in situations where a company needs to integrate back-end systems such as databases and transaction processing with those of affinity partners.