[sbenario]

The metrics are often broken. Think about how you measure it...

Ideally, you want to pay the ad platform for sending you a user who will buy your product. So you say something like: "I'll pay you X for every user you send me who buys something".

Great, right?

Except now the ad can simply optimize for users who were GOING to buy your product anyway. So now you've spent money getting users who would have been there anyway.

What you really want is to pay for users "Who buy my product, but would NOT have bought it without the presence of the ad". And that's a much harder thing to measure.

[ghshephard]

"Ideally, you want to pay the ad platform for sending you a user who will buy your product."

Brand advertising is built around the concept of "When a person is making a buying decision, I want them to buy my product."

We know it works, because when you stop doing brand advertising for things like Toilet Paper, Detergent, Toothpaste, Deoderant, etc... sales go down. And when you start the advertising again, sales go up.

[mjevans]

Don't people just sample the market to find out a brand that is to their tastes (performs as desired) and then keep buying it while the price is still of value?

[ghshephard]

There are a lot of theories, but, the one thing that has been consistent for at least the last 60 years, is that if you have a consumer Brand of something, say "Tide Detergent" - and you stop all your brand advertising in a certain region, sales go down in that region, and when you start advertising again, sales go back up.

Price, Value, Placement, and, obviously, competition are all conflating factors as well - but the underlying response to advertising has been pretty consistent.

[mkr-hn]

I've always wondered what the marketing campaigns look like for the 100 different brandings of the same product at the grocery store. Do Toothpaste A and Toothpaste Z340 target completely different demographics, or are they going for the same eyeballs with their ads?