Advertising · Advertising measurement method demonstrated in a retailer campaign
Ghost Ads: Improving the Economics of Measuring Online Ad Effectiveness
Journal of Marketing Research · 2017
Summary
In the demonstration campaign, retargeting lifted website visits by 17.2% and purchases by 10.5%.
For your marketing
Possible founder application
A foundational reference for asking an ad platform or analytics team how holdouts can measure incremental impact at lower cost. Use current, independently validated implementation details for any live test.
Reported result
What the study found
In the demonstration campaign, retargeting lifted website visits by 17.2% and purchases by 10.5%. The method is presented as achieving comparable precision to intent-to-treat and public-service-announcement tests at substantially lower experimental cost.
Research question
What the authors investigated
Can online ad effectiveness be measured more economically while retaining the precision of conventional experiments?
Design
Introduces ghost-ad measurement and demonstrates it on a display-retargeting campaign for an online retailer.
Sample and setting
Retailer display-retargeting campaign; the publisher page reports recording over 100 million predicted ghost ads per day.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
The reported campaign is a single retailer retargeting case. Measurement implementation depends on ad delivery systems and campaign eligibility; the abstract does not supply a SaaS-specific performance benchmark.
Research sources
SAGE publisher abstract retrieved with Firecrawl; the profile reports the retailer example and stated method benefits.