Advertising · Large-scale randomized field experiment
Social Advertising Effectiveness Across Products: A Large-Scale Field Experiment
Marketing Science · 2020
Summary
The experiment finds meaningful differences across customers in social advertising lift across categories and user characteristics.
For your marketing
Possible founder application
When testing paid social, segment hypotheses by product and audience rather than assuming platform-wide average effectiveness. Use randomization and business outcomes to estimate your own incremental lift.
Reported result
What the study found
The experiment finds meaningful heterogeneity in social advertising lift across categories and user characteristics. The authors report that social cues increase effectiveness more for some product types and users than for others.
Research question
What the authors investigated
How does social advertising effectiveness vary across product categories and consumer characteristics?
Design
The researchers partnered with a large online social network to run a randomized field experiment measuring social advertising effectiveness across 71 product categories.
Sample and setting
A large online social network and advertising across 71 product categories; the paper reports variation by product and user status.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
The experiment was run on one social network with participating advertisers and products. Effects are platform-, category- and campaign-dependent and should not be generalized into one expected lift for a SaaS company.
Research sources
INFORMS publisher record and accessible author manuscript; study scope and randomized design checked against the paper record.