Which Part of My Advertising is Wasted?

Yahoo! Labs test the effectiveness of online advertising
“Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half,” department store magnate John Wanamaker supposedly once said, but the joke today is not that it’s still funny but that so many people still believe it’s true.
Yahoo! researchers set out to test whether or not online ads can drive spending, and found out that they did, both online and off. In a presentation today at the Advertising Research Foundation, Yahoo! Labs scientists David Reily and Duncan Watts talked about mistakes people usually make in measuring ads, and how they got around them.
The problem with most advertising data is that it’s based on observations that tend to show correlation between advertising and sales. “All you really care about is whether ads are causing sales, not whether they’re correlating to sales,” Watts said. Search ads might cause […]

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