[sokoloff]

It's quite easy to get a measurement on your screen. That doesn't necessarily translate to measuring the impact of ad spending.

If I have social media ads, paid search, and retargeting ads all live on multiple platforms, there is undoubtedly interaction among them and the quite-easy self-serve ad tool is likely to show me a simplistic "last click attribution" at best.

[shoguning]

Exactly. For really large companies with many channels, it's very difficult to disentangle this.

Here is a good discussion of the difficulty: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

[willcipriano]

Often on Google I see ads right above a organic link to the same site. I wonder if marketing teams count the ad click as a "win" when in fact I was looking for the company because I learned of it via word of mouth.

[sokoloff]

I’ve always seen that considered to be “paid search-branded”, which is tracked but is tracked and treated separately (for the reason you said).

[jjohansson]

Most analytics platforms will report on any straight direct line between spend and incremental revenue. The hard part is measuring the indirect part, as you mentioned, but it is possible.