A company moved endorsement money from lots of lesser-known teams to a few better-known teams and their sales stayed the same.
> How else to interpret no "activity beyond an impression?"
I'd argue the reverse.
Sites that generate a consistently high click rate are optimizing for people to leave. Sometimes the click target is obscured, so you'll end up with a high bounce rate. At the end of the day: If you don't prove the relationship between clicks and acquisitions you're going to just fund ad fraud.
Meanwhile, if the ad is in-view, and your marketing team isn't an idiot and managed to get 30 or so impressions on someone in a month (and enough someones in your market) then you'll be able to detect (by surveying) an increased brand awareness and preference.
This could be valuable because I suspect a lot of people who are considering another credit card will call in on the deal they remember, after talking about it with their spouse, than will click on an ad.
Of course, Chase doesn't ask people why they are signing up, so the only attribution data they have is clicks and post-click signups.
> I could print their ads on toilet paper and have the same result.
Yes you could, but that says more about the tools they're using to measure the result than the usefulness of toilet paper.
In this case, someone looked at their sources breakdown in mediaocean, it said the pay-per-click stuff was a winner. Well no kidding.
And when I say probably, I should say: I've worked with the ZO guys on the Chase account in my past life. This is probably what happened.
Even if the intern was paid, that's probably illegal.
Interns generally can't perform useful work for a business—they're actually supposed to cost the business money, time, etc. and cannot work on a project the business would normally pay someone to do.
> Of the 400,000 web addresses JPMorgan’s ads showed up on in a recent 30-day period, said Ms. Lemkau, only 12,000, or 3 percent, led to activity beyond an impression. An intern then manually clicked on each of those addresses to ensure that the websites were ones the company wanted to advertise on. About 7,000 of them were not, winnowing the group to 5,000.
They're pretty plainly saying that 388,000 sites were trash. How else to interpret no "activity beyond an impression?" I could print their ads on toilet paper and have the same result.
> Do you find it unbelievable that there might be 400,000 legitimate websites in the set of available placements for Chase's ads, without spam? Why?
Yes! I do find it unbelievable! The customer did! Everyone should! There just isn't that much valuable content on the Internet. There really isn't. Not valuable for you, not for me, not for Chase, not for anyone with a brain!