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by mr_crankypants 2535 days ago
That's about the only gimme, and it'll only cover a portion of the hypothetical payoff for the ad - some other, potentially larger, number of people never click, but do remember and come back later. Or if you're trying to sell things in meatspace, it's really hard to ever be able to say, "More people came to our store because we ran an ad."

If you do get enough profit from directly traceable conversions to cover the campaign, yeah, that's a gimme - you may not know your actual ROI, but you do know that its lowest possible value is still positive. That said, I don't work in adtech, so I don't really have any way of knowing how common that is.
2 comments
riku_iki 2535 days ago
> number of people never click, but do remember and come back later

For major brands they may remember. Otherwise I think it is reasonable to assume that clicking on ad is most established way for user to check product. Once user navigated to website, he can be reliably tracked by site owner.

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mr_crankypants 2535 days ago
Possibly. But, at the same time, "it is reasonable to assume" is the epitaph carved into the gravestone under which economics's credibility got buried alive.

I'd feel better assuming that question's answer is simply unknown until a few different people have performed a few different field experiments.

For my part, for example, I pretty much never click on ads, because they typically get shown to me at a time when I'm already busy doing something else. But, if I later perceive a need to buy a product of that kind, there's a decent chance I'll remember the name, and therefore be more likely to Google them or take a closer look when I see them mentioned on Wirecutter. I have no idea how typical I am on that front, but, tangentially, I do at least suspect that, if clicks were really the end-all-be-all of hawking product, then there wouldn't be quite so many billboards by the side of the highway.

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riku_iki 2534 days ago
> I'd feel better assuming that question's answer is simply unknown until a few different people have performed a few different field experiments.

there is whole industry of such people, and they vote by investing dollars into specific type of advertisement, which is reflected in Facebook and Google revenues growth.

> likely to Google

This is another channel of how dots can be connected.

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scarejunba 2534 days ago
> It's really hard to ever be able to say, "More people came to our store because we ran an ad."

Offline attribution and targeting based on offline intent is totally a thing that companies do today.

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