Find the latest and most impactful research on the measurement of marketing ROI and attribution here. All the research listed comes from the ARF or one of its subsidiaries: The Journal of Advertising Research (JAR), the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) or the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM). Feel free to bookmark this page, as it will be updated periodically.
Studies the effect of advertising on sales by pre-selecting 288 brands in Nielsen Scanner data (RMS) and in Nielsen advertising data (Ad Intel); estimates the causal impact of advertising on sales, adjusting for confounding factors using “baseline” and “border” identification strategies.
Read the working paper.
$48 billion was spent on digital display advertising in the US in 2018. That’s up 5 percent from just a few years ago. Unfortunately, most advertisers are unaware of the need to focus on audience quality. Without doing so, consumers can be overwhelmed with messages or encounter irrelevant ones. They become annoyed or frustrated, resulting in missed opportunities and wasted resources.
Member Only AccessOnline service providers increasingly use multiple channels for their advertising. Within that universe, an affiliate—usually a small, private company or individual maintaining a website or blog—informs others about a product or service sold by a partnering company (a merchant). This study found that the merchant’s simultaneous use of search-engine advertising, however, “cannibalizes clicks and sales in the click path.” As a result, “affiliates must use different text links to ensure positive impacts on clicks and sales in their affiliate-marketing campaign.” Read the JAR article.
In the age of ever more fragmented customer experiences across multiple screens, optimizing media investments increasingly relies on attribution models. A research trio at GroupM analyzed the drawbacks of existing models and examined some new modeling choices which they believe may provide useful results Read the JAR article.
How do different sales channels impact the consumer’s journey to purchase behavior? In this article, researchers compare and contrast four different attribution models: last-click, time-decay, uniformly distributed, and position-based. Given that different online channels are involved at different stages of the consumer’s purchase journey, they write, it is important to examine the ability of these models to properly attribute credits to the various channels that have an impact upon the final purchase. Read the JAR article.
Investigates whether brand attitudes can be reliable measures of advertising effectiveness; examines a unique dataset of 575 established brands from 37 industries over a five-year observation window, merging weekly brand attitude survey data with weekly advertising expenditure data. Read the working paper.
Are observational methods using good individual-level data “good enough” for ad measurement? Using data from 15 U.S. ad experiments at Facebook, this study showed that current matching and regression-based methods overestimated effectiveness relative to the randomized controlled trials. In half of studies, the estimated percentage increase in purchase outcomes was off by a factor of three across all methods. Read the working paper.
In a large-scale field experiment, “trajectory-based” targeting facilitated higher revenues for the focal store and the shopping mall. Read the working paper.
For TV advertisers who seek to maximize consumers’ online information gathering, post-ad search spikes offer a causal attribution measure that is responsive, reliable and readily available. Read the working paper.
Proposes a framework to understand the influence of channels in the online purchase funnel; develops a three-level measurement model of customers’ consideration of online channels/sources, their visits through these channels over time, and subsequent purchase at the website. [See his related Webinar 2020: Getting Attribution Right for Your Bottom Line] Read the working paper.