

Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise.  - villageidiot
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/business/media/31ad.html?hp

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ryanwaggoner
I'm always amazed to read articles like this where some huge and successful
industry is just starting to take advantage of the super-obvious benefits that
technology has made available to them for years.

I mean, seriously...the advertising industry hasn't been paying attention to
the response rate of different variations on marketing campaigns until now?
Really? Isn't that, like, one of the key benefits of web advertising over
other mediums?

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dcnstrct
As someone who does this for a living it is not that it wasn't being taken
advantage of but that the technology to do it at scale easily was not there --
and still isn't really.

Think about this -- you run an online campaign, serving hundreds of millions
to billions of impressions, with different levels of users creating different
interactions with your ads, website, etc and a certain percent "converting" to
the action you want. How do you reliably process hundreds of millions to
billions of rows of data and tie it together? What factors are reliable
predictors of future actions? If you increase one aspect does it correlate
with other efforts increasing? If there is a flaw in the data collection, how
do you spot it?

What about offline behavior? Can you correlate interaction with a widget with
store purchase behavior? A lot of activity happens that can never be tracked
and it needs to be factored into the models.

So the point being when you dig deep it is not as simple as it seems and there
is still a long way to go for all of the technology to work well together and
provide the analysis needed to react in real time and change human behavior
for the desired result.

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reyu
AdWords brought this kind of statistical rigor to affiliate marketing quite a
while back. What you're describing sounds like the bread and butter of that
field. The fact that it is only now catching on in the advertising world seems
like an indication of just how behind the times the advertising industry
really is. They're a little late to the party if they're only now starting to
hire people with statistical expertise to help out with these problems. But
from what I know of the ad industry being an East Coast old boy's network,
this doesn't surprise me too much.

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ojbyrne
"It’s putting numbers to an industry that never had numbers before" ... yeah.
right... sure... umm, that's not actually true.

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mynameishere
That baffled me as well. The advertising industry has been crunching numbers
from day one.

