Northern exposure: a field experiment measuring externalities between search advertisements
Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Evaluating online ad campaigns in a pipeline: causal models at scale
Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Display advertising impact: search lift and social influence
Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
How effective is targeted advertising?
Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
Impact of ad impressions on dynamic commercial actions: value attribution in marketing campaigns
Proceedings of the 21st international conference companion on World Wide Web
Marketing campaign evaluation in targeted display advertising
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Data Mining for Online Advertising and Internet Economy
Causally motivated attribution for online advertising
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Data Mining for Online Advertising and Internet Economy
Measuring dynamic effects of display advertising in the absence of user tracking information
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Data Mining for Online Advertising and Internet Economy
Impact of spam exposure on user engagement
Security'12 Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium
Dynamic effects of ad impressions on commercial actions in display advertising
Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
Down-to-the-minute effects of super bowl advertising on online search behavior
Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Dynamic evaluation of online display advertising with randomized experiments: an aggregated approach
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web companion
An efficient framework for online advertising effectiveness measurement and comparison
Proceedings of the 7th ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
Designing and deploying online field experiments
Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web
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Measuring the causal effects of online advertising (adfx) on user behavior is important to the health of the WWW publishing industry. In this paper, using three controlled experiments, we show that observational data frequently lead to incorrect estimates of adfx. The reason, which we label "activity bias," comes from the surprising amount of time-based correlation between the myriad activities that users undertake online. In Experiment 1, users who are exposed to an ad on a given day are much more likely to engage in brand-relevant search queries as compared to their recent history for reasons that had nothing do with the advertisement. In Experiment 2, we show that activity bias occurs for page views across diverse websites. In Experiment 3, we track account sign-ups at a competitor's (of the advertiser) website and find that many more people sign-up on the day they saw an advertisement than on other days, but that the true "competitive effect" was minimal. In all three experiments, exposure to a campaign signals doing "more of everything" in given period of time, making it difficult to find a suitable "matched control" using prior behavior. In such cases, the "match" is fundamentally different from the exposed group, and we show how and why observational methods lead to a massive overestimate of adfx in such circumstances.