The A/B Test Deception: Divergent Delivery, Ad Response Heterogeneity, and Erroneous Inferences in Online Advertising Field Experiments

Native Advertising in Online News: Trade-Offs Among Clicks, Brand Recognition, and Website Trustworthiness

Journal of Marketing Research ◽

10.1177/0022243719879711 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 57 (1) ◽

pp. 20-34 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Anocha Aribarg ◽

Eric M. Schwartz

Keyword(s):

Field Experiments ◽

Online Advertising ◽

Online News ◽

Editorial Content ◽

Form And Function ◽

Brand Recognition ◽

Trade Offs ◽

Conflicting Objectives ◽

And Function ◽

Click Through Rate

Native advertising is a type of online advertising that matches the form and function of the platform on which it appears. In practice, the choice between display and in-feed native advertising presents brand advertisers and online news publishers with conflicting objectives. Advertisers face a trade-off between ad clicks and brand recognition, whereas publishers need to strike a balance between ad clicks and the platform’s trustworthiness. For policy makers, concerns that native advertising confuses customers prompted the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to issue guidelines for disclosing native ads. This research aims to understand how consumers respond to native ads versus display ads and to different styles of native ad disclosures, using randomized online and field experiments combining behavioral clickstream, eye movement, and survey response data. The results show that when the position of an ad on a news page is controlled for, a native ad generates a higher click-through rate because it better resembles the surrounding editorial content. However, a display ad leads to more visual attention, brand recognition, and trustworthiness for the website than a native ad.

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Delaying Access to a Problem-Skipping Option Increases Effortful Practice: Application of an A/B Test in Large-Scale Online Learning

10.31235/osf.io/m6jqe ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Alexander Olof Savi ◽

Nienke Ruijs ◽

Gunter Maris ◽

Han van der Maas

Keyword(s):

Large Scale ◽

Field Experiments ◽

Primary School Children ◽

Learning Gains ◽

Double Blind ◽

Randomized Controlled ◽

B Test ◽

Minimal Effort ◽

Deliberate Effort ◽

Adaptive Practice

We report on an online double-blind randomized controlled field experiment (A/B test) in Math Garden, a computer adaptive practice system with over 150,000 active primary school children. The experiment was designed to eliminate an unforeseen opportunity to practice with minimal effort. Some children tend to skip problems that require deliberate effort, and only attempt problems that they can spontaneously answer. The intervention delayed the option to skip a problem, thereby promoting effortful practice. The results reveal an increase in the exerted effort, without being at the expense of engagement. Whether the additional effort positively affected the children's learning gains could not be concluded. Finally, in addition to these substantial results, the experiment demonstrates some of the advantages of A/B tests, such as the unique opportunity to apply truly blind randomized field experiments in educational science.

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Cold Start on Online Advertising Platforms: Data-Driven Algorithms and Field Experiments

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.3702786 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Zikun Ye ◽

Dennis Zhang ◽

Heng Zhang ◽

Renyu Zhang ◽

Xin Chen ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Field Experiments ◽

Online Advertising ◽

Cold Start ◽

Data Driven

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The Double-Edged Effects of E-Commerce Cart Retargeting: Does Retargeting Too Early Backfire?

Journal of Marketing ◽

10.1177/0022242920959043 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 002224292095904

Author(s):

Jing Li ◽

Xueming Luo ◽

Xianghua Lu ◽

Takeshi Moriguchi

Keyword(s):

Field Experiment ◽

Conceptual Framework ◽

Short Message Service ◽

Field Experiments ◽

Negative Impact ◽

Positive Impact ◽

Online Advertising ◽

Short Message ◽

Message Service ◽

Customer Purchases

Consumers often abandon e-commerce carts, so companies are shifting their online advertising budgets to immediate e-commerce cart retargeting (ECR). They presume that early reminder ads, relative to late ones, generate more click-throughs and web revisits. The authors develop a conceptual framework of the double-edged effects of ECR ads and empirically support it with a multistudy, multisetting design. Study 1 involves two field experiments on over 40,500 customers who are randomized to either receive an ECR ad via email and app channels (treatment) or not receive it (control) across different hourly blocks after cart abandonment. The authors find that customers who received an early ECR ad within 30 minutes to one hour after cart abandonment are less likely to make a purchase compared with the control. These findings reveal a causal negative incremental impact of immediate retargeting. In other words, delivering ECR ads too early can engender worse purchase rates than without delivering them, thus wasting online advertising budgets. By contrast, a late ECR ad received one to three days after cart abandonment has a positive incremental impact on customer purchases. In Study 2, another field experiment on 23,900 customers not only replicates the double-edged impact of ECR ads delivered by mobile short message service but also explores cart characteristics that amplify both the negative impact of early ECR ads and positive impact of late ECR ads. These findings offer novel insights into customer responses to online retargeted ads for researchers and managers alike.

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Youth Voter Mobilization Through Online Advertising: Evidence From Two GOTV Field Experiments

10.31219/osf.io/6c9na ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Joshua Kalla

Keyword(s):

Voter Turnout ◽

Large Scale ◽

Field Experiments ◽

Online Advertising ◽

Control Group ◽

Prior History ◽

Voter Mobilization ◽

Young Voters ◽

Growing Cell ◽

Experimental Findings

An increasingly fragmented media environment poses a challenge to campaigns and political organizations trying to persuade young voters, as young people increasingly eschew television for online video streaming and represent a growing cell-phone-only population, which is more costly to reach. As a result, each cycle campaigns are spending more on online advertising. However, the effectiveness of this outreach is an open question with disparate findings in the literature (Bond et al. 2012, Broockman and Green 2012). To test the effectiveness of this outreach for voter mobilization, we partnered with a national organization, Rock the Vote, to conduct a seven-state, 731,568-person GOTV experiment using advertising on Facebook during the 2012 presidential election, which involved nearly four million advertising impressions, and a 14-state, 93,053-person replication during the 2013 general election. Across both experiments, we find no evidence that voter turnout in the treatment group was greater than the control group. While exploratory analysis from the 2012 experiment suggested the ads were effective among those who had a demonstrated a prior history of clicking on online advertising, the follow-up 2013 experiment failed to confirm this finding. These results suggest that while online advertising can reach young voters, it may not be a panacea for encouraging them to vote. This research also underscores the importance of replications of even large-scale experimental findings.

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Electron Microscopy of the Shape of Small Metal Particles

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100079024 ◽

1977 ◽

Vol 35 ◽

pp. 300-301

Author(s):

M. Jose Yacaman

Keyword(s):

Electron Microscopy ◽

Metal Particle ◽

Field Experiments ◽

Size Range ◽

Dark Field ◽

Metal Particles ◽

Bragg Condition ◽

Crystal Particle ◽

Small Metal Particle ◽

Small Metal Particles

In the Study of small metal particles the shape is a very Important parameter. Using electron microscopy Ino and Owaga(l) have studied the shape of twinned particles of gold. In that work electron diffraction and contrast (dark field) experiments were used to produce models of a crystal particle. In this work we report a method which can give direct information about the shape of an small metal particle in the amstrong- size range with high resolution. The diffraction pattern of a sample containing small metal particles contains in general several systematic and non- systematic reflections and a two-beam condition can not be used in practice. However a N-beam condition produces a reduced extinction distance. On the other hand if a beam is out of the bragg condition the effective extinction distance is even more reduced.

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