Google Research Blog
The latest news from Research at Google
Measuring Ad Effectiveness Using Geo Experiments
Friday, December 09, 2011
Posted by Lizzy Van Alstine and Jon Vaver, Quantitative Analysis Team
Advertisers want to be able to measure the effectiveness of their advertising. Many methods have been used to address this need, but the most rigorous and trusted of these are randomized experiments, which involve randomly assigning experimental units to control and test conditions. At Google, we have found that randomized geo experiments are a powerful approach to measuring the effectiveness of advertising.
Many advertising platforms allow advertising to be targeted by geographical region. In these experiments, we first assign geographic regions to test or control conditions and employ AdWords’ geo-targeted advertising capabilities to increase or decrease the regional advertising spend accordingly. The use of randomized assignments guards against potential hidden test/control biases that could impact the measurements. Our approach also accounts for seasonal changes that impact the volume and cost of advertising across the length of the experiment.
In
this paper
, we describe the application of geo experiments for measuring the impact of advertising on consumer behavior (e.g. clicks, conversions, downloads, etc.). This description includes the results of a geo experiment that our research team ran for a Google advertiser.
Labels
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
Android
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Audio
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
Awards
Cantonese
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Exacycle
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Genomics
Gmail
Google+
Google Books
Google Drive
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Voice Search
Government
grants
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
KDD
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Translation
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
ML
MOOC
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
osdi
osdi10
patents
ph.d. fellowship
PiLab
Policy
Professional Development
publication
Publications
Public Data Explorer
Quantum Computing
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Software
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Systems
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
User Experience
video
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
YouTube
Archive
2015
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Follow @googleresearch
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
