Corporate website as a strategic resource: Comparative analysis of Russian and European companies

Abstract

The paper investigates the mechanisms through which companies can gain additional competitive advantages through using a corporate website. We identified statistically significant relationship between financial performance and aggregated metrics of the corporate website based on sample of 1240 European and 1056 Russian companies. The study is implemented in two stages: (1) applying the principal component analysis to conceptualize website metrics and (2) evaluating a regression model with a dummy variable to analyze the relationship between the characteristics of corporate websites and the financial performance of companies. Principal Component Analysis identified two components that reflect the visibility and authority of corporate websites. Regression analysis showed a statistically significant relationship between these characteristics and the company’s revenue. Moreover, for Russian companies we observe that visibility of the company’s website has the highest positive effect on the revenue. On contrary, for European companies’ website’s authority provides the highest increase in its revenue.