Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their...
by hammock on Sunday January 03, 2021 @07:21PM
(#25626642)
>No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. In the few cases of natural experiments, where ads got turned off for some people by accident, there was no change in buying behavior.
This may be true but it's a separate issue than the fraudulent clicks.
Brand advertisement (the kind you are talking about, as opposed to closed-loop direct advertising) is an investment in a brand, that doesn't get paid off in a day, or a week, or a month, or even a year. It adds fractions of a penny onto a customers value, every day from today into eternity. It's an investment in your mind, but the long time horizon makes it, as you point out, nigh impossible to measure ROI.
However, this is one of those cases where despite being immeasurable, it still works.
Imagine doing a study on low-fat or low-fat diets and trying to measure health outcomes like lifespan, or heart disease, or cancer after just one month. You can't do it. The best you can do is measure markers of these outcomes, like insulin resistance, blood triglycerides etc. Brand advertising is similar. You measure markers of long-term purchase intent. It's not perfect.
And just like actually doing a long-term study of diet for example is riddled with confounding variables and very hard (nigh impossible) to do well, so it is with advertising.
This may be true but it's a separate issue than the fraudulent clicks.
Brand advertisement (the kind you are talking about, as opposed to closed-loop direct advertising) is an investment in a brand, that doesn't get paid off in a day, or a week, or a month, or even a year. It adds fractions of a penny onto a customers value, every day from today into eternity. It's an investment in your mind, but the long time horizon makes it, as you point out, nigh impossible to measure ROI.
However, this is one of those cases where despite being immeasurable, it still works.
Imagine doing a study on low-fat or low-fat diets and trying to measure health outcomes like lifespan, or heart disease, or cancer after just one month. You can't do it. The best you can do is measure markers of these outcomes, like insulin resistance, blood triglycerides etc. Brand advertising is similar. You measure markers of long-term purchase intent. It's not perfect.
And just like actually doing a long-term study of diet for example is riddled with confounding variables and very hard (nigh impossible) to do well, so it is with advertising.