Marketers Underuse Ad Experiments. That's a Big Mistake

Business experimentation is—rightfully—framed as a gold standard by scholars and leading practitioners, but the practice has yet to find its way into most firms’ day-to-day advertising strategy. That’s a big mistake. E-commerce companies that conduct ad experiments see two to three percent better performance per experiment run (as measured by purchases achieved per advertising dollar spent). In this study, an advertiser that ran 15 experiments (versus none) in a given year sees about a 30% higher ad performance that year; those that ran 15 experiments in the prior year see about a 45% increase in performance.