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What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

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Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#261

Post by Supermancho »

ngngngng wrote: post #8

> a Super Bowl ad cost three million dollars. Why? Because that’s how much it cost. What does it yield? Who knows. This article is awesome. In my free time I'm building an advertising platform that topic matches ads off the content of the web pages. No tracking of users. I'm hoping to allow people to host and run their own all inclusive self contained advertising platform for just a licensing fee. I also have a way t…

This is called "Contextualization". There are many DMPs for this kind of data. My favorite is Zvelo

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#262

Post by dredmorbius »

mobjack wrote: post #211
kposehn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliably someone comes along every few months to question digital ads. I always come back to analyses of incrementality as the real proof. Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences. The companies that know how to advertise at scale do this constantly and can gauge the real effect of their…

Acquiring an audiences to divide into a split test is the hard part. It is something that could work for retargeting existing users but doesn't work for acquiring new visitors.

The concept, principles, and methods, are taught in the context of marketing and advertising academic programmes.

See, e.g., ADVT5440 and ADVT5501 at Webster University, for example:

This course emphasizes the importance of critical thinking in the planning and development of message strategy for advertising and other marketing communications tools. Class discussions explore the decision making process and development of criteria for evaluation of alternative message strategies.

http://www.webster.edu/catalog/current/graduate-catalog/cour...

Or in related textbooks, e.g.,

https://www.worldcat.org/title/marketing/oclc/61458339

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#263

Post by zenyc »

JohnFen wrote: post #203
zenyc wrote: post #148

I’m skeptical about one of the main premises of the article: that brand keywords don’t have a positive ROI. Background: I took part in running millions of dollars of brand keywords for multiple companies. This is not what my business sells anymore. I’ll explain my counterargument in two different ways: with an analogy, and with data from a project that I was tasked with figuring out whether branding ads had an ROI. I…

Honest question here... I thought analogies were supposed to be simplified to ease understanding. This one is complex and hard to follow -- is that because the underlying idea is so complex that even the simplified form is complicated?

Maybe. It could also be because I did a terrible job at explaining it.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#264

Post by bigger_cheese »

buboard wrote: post #193
josephjrobison wrote: post #170

A very easy way to break this argument is to not look at huge known companies like eBay and Amazon, but brand new companies 1-2 years old that have grown almost entirely by online ads. Eventually word of mouth kicks in, but there are plenty of smart operators that built their entire brand and revenue off of ads. Works best in online direct to consumer brands.

the article isnt making the point that there is no value in advertising, but that it's highly overstated. One really needs ads - the 're a very effective way to reach users. But after that initial push, does spending more really return more?

One thing I've always thought about ads is the subconscious impact that they have of building brand recognition and awareness. Especially for something which would typically be purchased infrequently or irregularly.

I might be at a grocery store and I need to purchase something like dishwashing liquid. If I'm staring at two brands on the shelf priced identically (or near enough) I'm more likely to purchase the brand I recognize over a brand I've never heard of. How do I recognize the brand - from advertising.

That is not something you can measure with tracking metrics embedded into a banner ad. I'm sure there must be studies on impact this has.

The other thing I suspect online advertising works very well for is service based businesses, the kinds of things you used to look up in a phonebook. The last time I needed to find a plumber I typed my suburb name + plumber into search engine I imagine a lot of people do similar.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#265

Post by lapnitnelav »

braindeath wrote: post #173
jagged-chisel wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... advertisers ... can't possibly care what video it's showing ... I read this as 'advertisers don't care about the particular topic of the ad in general.' They don't care if you're watching a DIY home fixit video, or a coder streaming his working session, as long as you're a target for diapers and they're advertising diapers.

And it sounds like the person you’re responding to is countering this very premise. “They don't want their ad dollars to be spent paying publishers for content that's controversial because it makes them look bad.”

Yes, there's a whole subset of the industry dedicated to preventing such a thing, with players like IAS, DoubleVerify, MOAT, ...

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#266

Post by jsonne »

kposehn wrote: post #179
josephjrobison wrote: post #170

A very easy way to break this argument is to not look at huge known companies like eBay and Amazon, but brand new companies 1-2 years old that have grown almost entirely by online ads. Eventually word of mouth kicks in, but there are plenty of smart operators that built their entire brand and revenue off of ads. Works best in online direct to consumer brands.

Reliably someone comes along every few months to question digital ads. I always come back to analyses of incrementality as the real proof. Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences. The companies that know how to advertise at scale do this constantly and can gauge the real effect of their…

I'm running a campaign that spends about $10,000 a day for a brand on Facebook. In fact at that level they will run said brand lift study for you. So yes, despite this articles implication the data does exist and we do know the difference between advertising to an audience and not.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#267

Post by scarejunba »

perl4ever wrote: post #238
nostrademons wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using your digital marketing tools correctly you're already correcting for this. Instead of measuring how many people click on ads, measure how many people click on ads and then compare it to how many people click on organic results to the same query . Or run ablation experiments where you stop running the ads and see what that does to your clicks & conversions. If you were making $X + $Y with the ads and t…

Sure, so where the data showing that most people do this? When I was younger, I would read over and over "don't do X" when reading about how to repair a car or write a program. And I would think, if this advice is everywhere, how could anyone miss it? And then, over time, I learned that there is a whole culture of doing things wrong, in many areas.

How do you expect to get that data? It's buried in their Mediamath and Optimizely accounts.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#268

Post by jsonne »

viraptor wrote: post #222
MichaelBurjack wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertisers have many tools to measure "ghost ads" aka "people who haven't seen an ad but would otherwise have qualified for all your target criteria". See https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2620078 as an example.

That's of course possible to measure in theory. I meant it as a response to "Facebook, Google and others make these tests possible in their platforms" since I haven't seen it exposed as an explicit option on either.

For Facebook, Reach ads have a brand lift objective that will estimate for you. If you spend large amounts they have a measurement team that will run the actual study for you. Source: I'm running one right now for a CPG brand.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#269

Post by [deleted] »

mobjack wrote: post #211
kposehn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliably someone comes along every few months to question digital ads. I always come back to analyses of incrementality as the real proof. Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences. The companies that know how to advertise at scale do this constantly and can gauge the real effect of their…

Acquiring an audiences to divide into a split test is the hard part. It is something that could work for retargeting existing users but doesn't work for acquiring new visitors.

[deleted]
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