Pages: 131-140Introduction. The past two decades have witnessed a profound transformation of digital marketing, both as a managerial practice and as a field of academic inquiry. This paper offers a narrative review of this transformation, organized around four overlapping eras: the web infrastructure era of the early 2010s, in which the operational foundations of digital marketing capabilities were established; the social analytics era of the mid-2010s, in which monitoring tools, search-based AI applications and the systematic study of online consumer influence emerged; the maturation era of the late 2010s and the pandemic shock of 2020-2022, in which algorithmic ad delivery…
Author: Anca Hotoi
Pages: 122-130Introduction. The integration of artificial intelligence into Google Ads bidding and delivery systems – through Smart Bidding strategies, the transition from Smart Shopping to Performance Max and the progressive generalization of fully automated campaign types – has coincided with a period of structural change in the broader digital advertising ecosystem, marked by privacy-related signal loss, the deprecation of third-party cookies and a substantial reshaping of consumer search behavior in the post-pandemic period. This paper analyzes the long-term evolution of search visibility and click-through performance in a Romanian e-commerce account over a 47-month observation window, using monthly aggregated Google Ads…
Pages: 44-52Introduction. Within the Meta advertising ecosystem (Facebook and Instagram), audience targeting decisions are increasingly delegated to machine-learning systems that determine, in real time, which users see an ad and at what frequency. This paper analyzes the demographic distribution of algorithmically delivered impressions in a remarketing campaign run by a Romanian private aesthetic medicine clinic, a real client from my digital marketing agency (Performance Target) over a 122-day observation window. Using ad-set-level data exported from Meta Ads Manager, with breakdowns by age and gender, the study examines how a single remarketing campaign – nominally addressed to the entire pool of…
Pages: 27-34 Introduction. Paid advertising platforms have changed a great deal once machine learning moved into the bidding stack, and Google Ads is now the obvious case in point. I look at how AI driven Smart Shopping campaigns compare with manually managed Search campaigns from a Romanian online wine retailer, and I ask, in particular, what last click attribution misses when the two types of campaigns run in parallel. The dataset combines three Google Analytics reports covering six concurrently running campaigns, plus an assisted conversion analysis on a 30 day lookback window. Four indicators carry most of the weight: CTR, CPC,…