[mbesto]

> If this person genuinely thinks that there is no way to measure an ad's performance while it is running, they are either too ignorant to be in business, or they hired someone who lied to them.

Doing a blackout month is a legitimate technique.

I've deeply studied ad performance metrics and they are NOT as conclusive as people might think. If they were, you could just keep increasing the amount of $ spent and the conversions would go up. Ok, not exactly, there is usually a diminishing returns aspect, but you get the point.

A great example of why this requires more analysis is branded vs non-branded search terms on AdWords. Let's say you spend $10k/month on the brand "Mattel" (aka branded) and $10k/month on "toys" (aka non-branded). Mattel likely gets you like a 20x ROAS because people are probably searching for a specific Mattel toy. It's also potentially likely that if you completely turned off branded search you would net the same results.

Ad attribution is NOTORIOUSLY difficult: https://www.optimizesmart.com/what-is-attribution-problem-in... so to pretend like "this guy is an idiot, he doesn't know what he's doing" is disingenuous.