Research Details

Abstract

Measuring the causal effects of digital advertising remains challenging despite the availability of granular data. Unobservable factors make exposure endogenous, and advertising's effect on outcomes tends to be small. In principle, these concerns could be addressed using randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In practice, few online ad campaigns rely on RCTs, and instead use observational methods to estimate ad effects. We assess empirically whether the variation in data typically available in the advertising industry enables observational methods to recover the causal effects of online advertising. This analysis is of particular interest because of recent, large improvements in observational methods for causal inference (Imbens & Rubin,2015). Using data from 15 US advertising experiments at Facebook comprising 500 million user-experiment observations and 1.6 billion ad impressions, we contrast the experimental results to those obtained from multiple observational models. The observational methods often fail to produce the same effects as the randomized experiments, even after conditioning on extensive demographic and behavioral variables. We also characterize the incremental explanatory power our data would require to enable observational methods to successfully measure advertising effects. Our findings suggest that commonly used observational approaches based on the data usually available in the industry often fail to accurately measure the true effect of advertising.

Type

Article

Author(s)

Brett Gordon, Florian Zettelmeyer, Dan Chapsky, Neha Bhargave

Date Published

2019

Citations

Gordon, Brett, Florian Zettelmeyer, Dan Chapsky, and Neha Bhargave. 2019. A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement: Evidence from Big Field Experiments at Facebook. Marketing Science.(2): 193-225.