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Comment by zerohp | Hacker News Reader

Sale attribution wasn’t critical before the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix_modeling got big in the 1980s. It's always been pretty important for marketers to know what channels work and what ones don't.

Mail order ads used to list different PO Boxes so they could track sales attribution.

Motor vehicles weren’t critical before the invention of the internal combustion engine

Right, but it's the reason on-line advertising is efficient.

I would correct that to "it’s the reason on-line advertising is believed to be efficient."

I’ve been seeing reporting over the last several years that suggests that a lot of the belief in sales attribution to ads or even specific interactions on-line are tenuous at best.

Pretty easy to prove this to be false with elementary A/B testing.

For big organizations that have the capacity and data, online advertising becomes a ROI optimization game, and one that they perform quite well at.

For a random business that wants to advertise online, without the infrastructure and data capability to back it, they will struggle to compete unless they exist in a segment full of similar peers. When the former happens, we see articles about how PPC doesn't actually work, etc.

Reality is that it takes engineering work and infrastructure, coupled with some data capabilities to unlock real value in the online advertising space.

As noted, online advertising brought all sorts of insight and visibility over traditional 'offline' marketing channels, but with that comes more savvy competitors that will do all the data things you're not.

Many platforms, such as Google, make A/B testing attribution (ie. incrementality measurements) really easy to perform.

Most people don’t know how to run or interpret A/B tests, or even understand what the confidence levels should be for their sample size.

By and large, people don’t understand statistics (I mostly include myself in that).

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