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Facebook now offers the ability to run rigorous controlled experiments on your advertising spending - you basically randomly divide your audience into treatment
by dbatten 9y ago
Facebook now offers the ability to run rigorous controlled experiments on your advertising spending - you basically randomly divide your audience into treatment and control, run an advertising campaign that only the treatment group can see, and compare purchasing behavior between the groups.
On the basis of several experiments with this, I can assure you that advertising does not always work, even if you track the treatment group for months after they were exposed to ads.
I think the author's bigger point is that a lot of the purpose of advertising basically boils down to increasing brand recognition. That's fair, but not anywhere near as novel of an observation as he thinks it is. His assertion that the majority of advertisers don't understand awareness and brand recognition is laughable - they understand it very well, and consistently run campaigns to achieve it.
- ssharp 9y agoAm I the only one that finds it insane this wasn't a feature earlier? They seemed to just rest on the idea that their optimization algorithms did everything right, even though they acted incredibly prematurely. They also seem slow in rolling it out since I've been hoping to see some of the known features actually show up in my account, requesting them, etc. and still nothing.
- dbatten 9y agoYes and no. It's not insane from Facebook's perspective. If you're wasting money on Facebook ads, why would they want to give you a tool that helps you figure it out? What mystifies me is that people haven't demanded more of this. People spend literally billions on online ads, with very little ability to validate whether it accomplishes anything. The fact that they haven't been screaming for rigorous experimental trials of ads for years blows me away.