That's incredibly difficult for large brands to do.

If Target's sales are up this holiday, was it the TV ads, the print ads, or the online ads? Or maybe it wasn't any of them and the economy is just up.

It's mostly a matter of disciplined tracking and a decent chunk of boring work getting all the systems integrated. You click on a Target ad, go to their website (which you are logged into and have cookies), and get some attribution flags set on your account. When you make a purchase online (easy) or in-store (less easy, likely needs a rewards account linked), you credit that ad/campaign/channel with the conversion value.

It's not a perfect measure of the lift, but it's pretty solid and underestimates things if anything, which makes it good enough for basing ad buying decisions off of. You could do fancier geographic segmenting + statistics, but why bother when the direct method works?

It's actually easier for large brands, since they can afford to put engineering effort into building bespoke tracking and analysis software. The trickiest would be smaller brands, especially those who advertise via agencies - they can't do anything that isn't commercial off-the-shelf, and as of now there isn't anything great in this space.

It’s even more difficult for small brands and local businesses who bleed money into FB ads with such a bad return it's painful to watch. We’ve seen it with a lot of services businesses that use our e-commerce platform.

To solve this and out of our own frustration of working with ad agencies for no ROI, we created a tool to run influencer campaigns that pay each influencer a commission of sale generated. Once a campaign is created, influencers join this campaign and start sharing. They earn commissions automatically each time followers buy from their unique affiliate link. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackbell-promote/id14241791... / https://www.blackbell.com/influencermarketing We recently started speaking with small ad agencies about it, most are afraid to start using our tool and philosophy for one reason: it can disrupt themselves, they are happy charging fees to manage FB / Google ads with bad and blind ROI, especially as most take % of ad spending…

For the huge marketing groups ( Omnicom, Publicis Groupe etc ) my personal meetings with top decision makers paints the same picture from yesterday Axios article: > Between the lines: Financial struggles and minimal oversight at some of the biggest global agencies have for years led to bad practices, like kickbacks and bid-rigging, that have led marketers to question whether their dollars are being wasted. https://www.axios.com/businesses-moving-media-advertising-in...

If Target can figure out you're pregnant before your dad can, they can prolly figure this out?

Target has teams with context and experience in how to properly use, measure and attribute those numbers. 99% of start-ups, even very well funded ones, don't.

What do youbmean by that? When I buy something at Target stores, they have absolutely no way to attribute whether I saw something on TV, a billboard, the aisle, their junk mail in my mailbox, or online.

I believe that Google can link in-store purchases to online ad exposure for most credit card users in the US. They've done this by doing a deal with MasterCard to integrate sales data cookie data. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an...

I’m aware, but that still doesn’t apply to what I said.

They do multivariate tests using geography, among other things.

Not where you specifically saw it, but in aggregate they can track things like purchase volume after a specific ad airs in a specific market or what was advertised in the circular, etc. They could vary things slightly by market as well to help pinpoint what's most impactful.

And companies that do not employ skilled statisticians to keep track of all of this is where I believe real money is being made in adtech. A few companies are competent enough to handle this complexity, the rest can be duped into the belief that their ad spending works.

And sue ad platforms who lie to you about metrics

No need. Just choose between them based on actual performance rather than the fake stats they report. If $1000 in ad spend drives 100 conversions, then at the end of the day who cares if the ad platform reports 10k clicks or 100k?