IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hbs/wpaper/17-025.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Which Firms Gain from Digital Advertising? Evidence from a Field Experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Weijia Dai

    (Purdue University)

  • Hyunjin Kim

    (INSEAD)

  • Michael Luca

    (Harvard Business School, Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit)

Abstract

Measuring the returns of advertising opportunities continues to be a challenge for many businesses. We design and run a field experiment in collaboration with Yelp across 18,294 firms in the restaurant industry to understand which types of businesses gain more from digital advertising. We randomly assign 7,209 restaurants to freely receive Yelp’s standard ads package for three months. The scale of the experiment gives us a unique opportunity to assess the heterogeneity in advertising effectiveness across a variety of business attributes. We find that restaurants that receive advertising on Yelp observe on average a 7-19% increase in a wide range of purchase intention outcomes, as well as a 5% increase in customer reviews. We find that gains are heterogeneous across firms, with independent and higher-rated businesses observing larger gains, as well as those with more reviews and higher pre-experiment organic traffic.

Suggested Citation

  • Weijia Dai & Hyunjin Kim & Michael Luca, 2016. "Which Firms Gain from Digital Advertising? Evidence from a Field Experiment," Harvard Business School Working Papers 17-025, Harvard Business School, revised Jan 2023.
    • Handle: RePEc:hbs:wpaper:17-025
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/pages/download.aspx?name=17-025.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. John A. List & Azeem M. Shaikh & Yang Xu, 2019. "Multiple hypothesis testing in experimental economics," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 22(4), pages 773-793, December.
    2. Navdeep S Sahni & Harikesh S Nair, 2020. "Does Advertising Serve as a Signal? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Mobile Search," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 87(3), pages 1529-1564.
    3. Avi Goldfarb & Catherine Tucker, 2011. "Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 30(3), pages 389-404, 05-06.
    4. Soohyung Lee & Azeem M. Shaikh, 2014. "Multiple Testing And Heterogeneous Treatment Effects: Re‐Evaluating The Effect Of Progresa On School Enrollment," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(4), pages 612-626, June.
    5. Song Yao & Carl F. Mela, 2008. "A Dynamic Model of Sponsored Search Advertising," Working Papers 08-16, NET Institute, revised Sep 2008.
    6. Thomas Blake & Chris Nosko & Steven Tadelis, 2015. "Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large‐Scale Field Experiment," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 83, pages 155-174, January.
    7. Susan Athey & Guido Imbens, 2016. "The Econometrics of Randomized Experiments," Papers 1607.00698, arXiv.org.
    8. Avi Goldfarb & Catherine Tucker, 2011. "Rejoinder--Implications of "Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness"," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 30(3), pages 413-415, 05-06.
    9. Song Yao & Carl F. Mela, 2011. "A Dynamic Model of Sponsored Search Advertising," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 30(3), pages 447-468, 05-06.
    10. Ackerberg, Daniel A, 2001. "Empirically Distinguishing Informative and Prestige Effects of Advertising," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 32(2), pages 316-333, Summer.
    11. Imbens,Guido W. & Rubin,Donald B., 2015. "Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521885881.
    12. Tat Y. Chan & Chunhua Wu & Ying Xie, 2011. "Measuring the Lifetime Value of Customers Acquired from Google Search Advertising," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 30(5), pages 837-850, September.
    13. Sha Yang & Anindya Ghose, 2010. "Analyzing the Relationship Between Organic and Sponsored Search Advertising: Positive, Negative, or Zero Interdependence?," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 29(4), pages 602-623, 07-08.
    14. Bagwell, Kyle, 2007. "The Economic Analysis of Advertising," Handbook of Industrial Organization, in: Mark Armstrong & Robert Porter (ed.), Handbook of Industrial Organization, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 28, pages 1701-1844, Elsevier.
    15. Randall A. Lewis & Justin M. Rao, 2015. "The Unfavorable Economics of Measuring the Returns to Advertising," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 130(4), pages 1941-1973.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Joseph Golden & John Joseph Horton, 2021. "The Effects of Search Advertising on Competitors: An Experiment Before a Merger," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(1), pages 342-362, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Weijia Dai & Hyunjin Kim & Michael Luca, 2023. "Frontiers: Which Firms Gain from Digital Advertising? Evidence from a Field Experiment," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 42(3), pages 429-439, May.
    2. Thomas Blake & Chris Nosko & Steven Tadelis, 2015. "Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large‐Scale Field Experiment," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 83, pages 155-174, January.
    3. Randall Lewis & Dan Nguyen, 2015. "Display advertising’s competitive spillovers to consumer search," Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME), Springer, vol. 13(2), pages 93-115, June.
    4. Joseph Golden & John Joseph Horton, 2021. "The Effects of Search Advertising on Competitors: An Experiment Before a Merger," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(1), pages 342-362, January.
    5. Kannan, P.K. & Li, Hongshuang “Alice”, 2017. "Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 34(1), pages 22-45.
    6. Vilma Todri, 2022. "Frontiers: The Impact of Ad-Blockers on Online Consumer Behavior," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 41(1), pages 7-18, January.
    7. Chunhua Wu, 2015. "Matching Value and Market Design in Online Advertising Networks: An Empirical Analysis," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 34(6), pages 906-921, November.
    8. Haoyan Sun & Ming Fan & Yong Tan, 2020. "An Empirical Analysis of Seller Advertising Strategies in an Online Marketplace," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 31(1), pages 37-56, March.
    9. Wei Zhou & Zidong Wang, 2020. "Competing for Search Traffic in Query Markets: Entry Strategy, Platform Design, and Entrepreneurship," Working Papers 20-12, NET Institute.
    10. Xiang Hui & Meng Liu, 2022. "Quality Certificates Alleviate Consumer Aversion to Sponsored Search Advertising," CESifo Working Paper Series 9886, CESifo.
    11. Goh, Khim-Yong & Chu, Junhong & Wu, Jing, 2015. "Mobile Advertising: An Empirical Study of Temporal and Spatial Differences in Search Behavior and Advertising Response," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 34-45.
    12. Anindya Ghose & Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis & Beibei Li, 2014. "Examining the Impact of Ranking on Consumer Behavior and Search Engine Revenue," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 60(7), pages 1632-1654, July.
    13. Shengqi Ye & Goker Aydin & Shanshan Hu, 2015. "Sponsored Search Marketing: Dynamic Pricing and Advertising for an Online Retailer," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(6), pages 1255-1274, June.
    14. Andre Veiga & Tommaso Valletti, 2020. "Attention, recall and purchase: Experimental evidence on online news and advertising," Working Papers 20-15, NET Institute.
    15. Brett R. Gordon & Florian Zettelmeyer & Neha Bhargava & Dan Chapsky, 2019. "A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement: Evidence from Big Field Experiments at Facebook," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 38(2), pages 193-225, March.
    16. Kireyev, Pavel & Pauwels, Koen & Gupta, Sunil, 2016. "Do display ads influence search? Attribution and dynamics in online advertising," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 33(3), pages 475-490.
    17. Andrey Simonov & Shawndra Hill, 2021. "Competitive Advertising on Brand Search: Traffic Stealing and Click Quality," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 40(5), pages 923-945, September.
    18. Peitz, Martin & Reisinger, Markus, 2014. "The Economics of Internet Media," Working Papers 14-23, University of Mannheim, Department of Economics.
    19. Garrett A. Johnson & Randall A. Lewis & David H. Reiley, 2017. "When Less Is More: Data and Power in Advertising Experiments," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 36(1), pages 43-53, January.
    20. Daniel Zantedeschi & Eleanor McDonnell Feit & Eric T. Bradlow, 2017. "Measuring Multichannel Advertising Response," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(8), pages 2706-2728, August.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hbs:wpaper:17-025. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: HBS (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/harbsus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.