3 ms·

https://www.statista.com/statistics/225474/booking-holdings-operating-expenses/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/225474/booking-holdings-... Booking Holding

https://www.statista.com/statistics/225474/booking-holdings-operating-expenses/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/225474/booking-holdings-... Booking Holdings, for example, spent $4.1 billion dollars in 2017 on performance advertising. This would generally mean they had an ROI target (e.g., each dollar of spend should return $1.2 in revenue). The method of measuring this would generally come from an agreement between the marketing team and the finance team — it might require some assumptions on things like LTV or the value of certain actions, but the finance team would be major participants in determining this value. There's no way Booking or similar massive advertisers are spending billions of dollars without a very very clear POV on the return they're receiving. I think a lot of the "state of the art" that you're asking for won't be shared with the public by these companies.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, however, there is a big difference between performance marketing, where it's relatively easy to track conversion, vs brand marketing. In fact, a huge reason Booking is so successful is because their sites convert at a higher rate than their competitors (which they themselves attribute to an early and maniacal focus on A/B testing), and thus they are able to bid more for travel-related search terms on Google as each click is worth more to them. It's pretty easy for them to track what percentage of Google AdWords click-throughs result in a completed booking. Brand advertising, though, has much fuzzier metrics, and the incentives for brand advertisers is to show that they have a larger impact than they actually do.