Does Advertising Work? How to measure the impact of our marketing investments?

We are looking forward to the April edition of the Karachi R User Meetup, sponsored by Stat Devs and R Consortium

It’s the age-old question – does advertising really work? Do the billions of pounds spent on marketing each year drive people to buy products – or would they just buy them anyway? And even if it does work, what is the optimal mix of spend across online and offline platforms? At what level do we exhaust our consumer base and end up wasting money? What happens if we stop advertising? These are just some of the questions econometric studies look to answer.

In partnership with December 19 (an independent media agency), we built a model to unpick the impact of over £38M of media spend on over 300,000 digital accounting product sign-ups. It’s not just about the media though – we also used the model to assess the impact of factors outside of our control, for example advertising by our competitors, covid-19 lockdowns and Brexit – all of this through building our own econometric modeller in R.

During this talk, we’ll take you through our approach, including some of the more technical aspects within R – and how our insight is being used to spend the advertising budget more efficiently – whilst still increasing the number of sign-ups!