[tonyedgecombe]

I'm fairly confident many advertisers don't have a clue about the effectiveness of their ad spend. This isn't helped by all the dark patterns in the Adwords control panel, every new option they introduce is defaulted in their favour.

[thehappypm]

Does this sound like a real scenario?

CMO: We spent $100,000 on AdWords.

CEO: What was the ROI?

CMO: No clue.

[karatestomp]

Considering how terrible almost everyone seems to be at measuring things generally, or at setting up the conditions for meaningful measurement, or getting buy-in for more effective measurements because they come at some cost and “what Jim’s been doing seems fine” (it absolutely is not) I’m skeptical that advertising folks are somehow much better at this than everyone else, and if they’re not a lot better then they’re still fairly bad.

[root_axis]

These things are pretty easy to measure, you literally just measure the amount of conversions when ad spend is on vs when it is off.

[tonyedgecombe]

Actually I always found it quite difficult to measure.

Mainly because selling B2B the person who clicked the ad is rarely the person who raises an order. I can use a proxy like instigating a download but that is far from perfect.

[caseyf7]

I was in the room when a conversation like this happened except it was a million dollars.

[sidlls]

Of course not, but that doesn't mean the "analysis" used to derive the numbers the CMO presents justifies the claims.

[viraptor]

Not $100,000, but if you browse through some forums/subreddits/... about online ads, you'll see a lot of people who want to improve their ads and have no idea if their campaign worked at all in the last months/years. They don't have tracking and don't know how to implement it. There are easily $1000s spent that way by lots of companies which adds up anyway.

And there are also those "I spent $1k in one day by accident with no return, help!" posts.

[ac29]

No, because no one who wants to keep their job would say that.

But take a large advertiser like a Coca-Cola or Procter Gamble - they might run many thousands of ad campaigns a week across all sorts of venues. Their revenue is largely at retail, so there is no way to track directly from an ad campaign to a purchase.

How do you prove the return on any given ad dollar? You cant.