Measuring Advertising Return on Investment

• Activity Number: 328
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Learning and Data Mining
• Author(s): Will Bullock*+ and Sean Bruich and Fred Leach
• Companies: Facebook and Facebook and Facebook
• Keywords: polling ; advertising ; ROI ; media ; marketing mix ; ad effectiveness

Abstract

As online marketers have begun to address a more diverse set of goals, traditional methods of assessing the success of online campaigns have come up short. The ultimate question for many marketers is less about how many people engaged with their marketing and more about whether their efforts persuaded people to do something outside of the online environment. While there are many tools today to assess this kind of impact, they are not scalable, and they often have issues of representativeness and privacy. Advertisers need a more general framework that allows for campaign-level measurement of the off-line impact of all of their campaigns, that assesses both in-home and out-of-home exposure, and that does so in a privacy-safe manner. In this paper we propose a general framework for linking campaign-based attitudinal change metrics with off-line outcomes that can be applied to virtually any advertising campaign without tracking individual-level behavior. We provide an example of how we have applied this framework to quantify how advertising for motion pictures impacts opening weekend box office.