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There are two distinct areas of online advertising: performance marketing, and brand advertising. I'm a performance marketer. I make a profit only when ads result in conversions - usually sales or signups for trial offers, but in some cases we do lead generation campaigns for clients as well. We spend high 5/low 6 figures per month, mostly on Facebook ads, with a monthly ROAS (return on ad spend) that beats Berkshire…
And without doing experimental setup (RCTs), how do you know you are not just paying for organic conversions? I had this presentation a few months ago: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/gregak/if-youre-not-measur... I would be interested to know what you think.
The importance of being able to figure out what actually led to conversions is not lost on me though. One unique technology I created allows us to do something that I have never seen anyone else in the online marketing world do: track conversions back to the initial click and ad campaign, even if someone just texts, emails, or uses an instant messenger to send the URL to a friend. So let's say someone visits the site, sees that the offer isn't for them but texts it to a friend. A month later, that friend finally gets around to looking at it, but decides it isn't for them either but knows someone else who might be interested, and they email it to someone else, who ultimately converts. We can track that conversion and all the steps in between back to the initial click and attribute it to the initial ad campaign, which gives us a much better sense of what each ad campaign is actually producing. The technology also lets us create custom Facebook audiences of anyone that has shared a link from the site - regardless of how they shared - text, email, Facebook - doesn't matter. We can then customize campaigns to encourage those people to share again.