Analysing the Effects of Pausing Online Advertisement on Sales Revenue -- What is the real effect of online advertising? - Google and Facebook adverts are important for driving sales revenue, especially if your business is mainly online. - But how important (is it worth it)? - We stopped the Facebook and Google adverts of a Finnish company (75% of their sales come from online and >50% are attributed to Google Ads and Facebook Ads) for 5 weeks. - Measured the loss of sales revenue using ARIMA modeling. - Compared the actual loss of revenue to predicted loss by the models. -- Practical problem - Google and Facebook: “keep increasing budgets” - Commercial bias: can we trust that their recommendations are good for the advertiser? -- Preliminary findings - Pausing ads didn’t significantly impact the company’s sales negatively in the short term - The loss in sales is not very dramatic when pausing the online ads (“the sky didn’t fall”) don’t overestimate the impact of online ads on total revenue - By stopping adverts, there might be an effect that traffic moves towards organic, and thus mitigates the loss of sales. - However, the company characteristics matter: strong search engine standing, customer loyalty… less need for advertising? - Google conversion values are more strongly correlated with total revenue than Facebook. This implies that customers find the company’s products more often from Google Ads than the Facebook ones.