What Digital Advertising Gets Wrong

Nancy Parker
4 min readApr 27, 2022

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The digital market is something that we get to hear a lot about, nowadays. Even though it is being used around the world on a very large scale if we consider the facts, we get to see that these digital ads are actually quite overrated not only in the terms of popularity but also in the terms of prices. If we pay closer attention to the facts, we see that digital marketing does not seem to serve as much as it promises people by creating an expectation.

They appear to be more effective than they are in actuality, as they are only sold when someone clicks on the link of the ads. In this field of digital advertising via led screen, there are various questions that still remain unanswered. However, there are possible answers to these questions because of the fact that what is creating this hindrance is not the lack of information but it is the basic confusion between the causation and the correlation that exists.

The Conversion Fallacy

When various companies, businesses and market representatives make a claim that they are going to bring a change in the behaviour of the customers this phenomenon is generally known as the lift. Often these claims are backed based on the data of the people that had been collected based upon those who purchased products after seeing the advertisement. This is known as the rate of conversion. However, in order to judge its authenticity. it is very important to separate the data of the customers who would have bought the product even without the advertisement, hence, even when the rate of conversion is maximum the number of changes in the behavior that are observed remains to be zero. This is because of the fact that in order to measure the actual lift, we need to eliminate the purchases that would have happened even without viewing the advertisement.

Most of the time the companies invest great amounts of money into these digitals ads in order to target the audience that is most likely to buy. Whereas in order to create a rate of conversion it is very much important to create a target that reaches the people who are not already prepared to buy the product only then the conversion would be considered beneficial, in the terms of revenue and behavior changes.

Measuring Lift

In order to measure the actual lift, it is highly important to develop a connection between the lift and conversion n by eliminating all the other factors that can affect the results that are to be produced. It is performed by using a control group in a way that we would randomly assign some people in a group, who would not have purchased the product if the group that you assigned is large enough to equalize all the other factors that could have affected the buying behavior, only then it can be measured as all the other factors would be equalized and there would be no other factor that could add biasness to the results.

Certain times it is not possible to have such a controlled environment thus we look for the option of natural experiments and random variations that act similar to the random distribution. We see various examples of natural experiments around us in the form of lottery, weather patterns, numbers etc.

When it comes to the examination of data in order to verify the lift and the conversion, we are able to get the actual situation of the effectiveness of the advertisements. Another aspect that must be kept in mind Is that it might not be possible to get conversion done immediately through a single click and it might happen later at the retail outlet. Thus, the standard measurement of online digital advertisements might not be able to reflect the true picture of the lift.

Casual Marketing And Its Benefits

The hype that the digital advertising market creates compared to the efficiency that it brings, is the reason those various investors and businesses are spending a lot of time and money on some big digital advertisers s the big advertisers have worked over-improving themselves even though they have highly reduced the budget overall. Once we pay attention to the dynamics that are there between lift and conversion and understand it well only then we will be able to focus on the work of increasing the number of customers that are being reached. Even one can also approach the audience.

The audience is the first-time buyers in order to understand their determination and motivation n and also to understand the behavior of buying along with the understanding of the mindset of the customer s. however, a large amount of personal and individual data, that had been created by online advertising marketers, allows measuring of the outcomes of which ads work and which does not, even more accurately.

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Nancy Parker

A writer, thinker, and lifelong learner. With a passion for exploring the depths of the human experience, I uses writing as a tool to share insights.